The Cheerful Soul

For those whose only experience of the reality TV show The Restaurant is the series currently being aired on BBC 2, it may be hard to believe that the programme will produce a winner worthy of serious financial backing to open the restaurant of their dreams.

So far, in the programme – that sees nine couples compete, by way of tests in the practical running of a restaurant, for the chance to go into business with worldrenowned chef and restaurateur Raymond Blanc – viewers have watched uncomfortably as one of the couples set about cracking a coconut by holding a giant kitchen knife to it – by the blade – and whacking it with a rolling pin.

But such shows of utter naivety could go some way to explaining why these couples want to open a restaurant at one of the hospitality industry’s worst times in memory.

However, the winners of the 2008 series – Michele English and Russell Clement – who opened their restaurant, The Cheerful Soul, in Marlow, Buckinghamshire in July this year, took part when the hospitality industry – and the world, for that matter – was in a very different state. The UK hadn’t yet entered into recession and, unlike most of the current participants, they had already proved their commitment – not only to a career in the food industry but to one that involved working together – by setting up a catering business from their home two years earlier.

“We gave up everything to do it,” English tells EN. “We were running the catering business from home and we got to the stage with it where we would have had to think about expanding but we really wanted to open a restaurant so when the opportunity came along, we had to take it. But you don’t know you are getting through until the last minute so whilst we were applying we were running down our bookings with the catering business.

“If we had been kicked out we would have been in trouble because we would have come home to nothing. That put even more pressure on us during the competition and it probably made us even more determined.”

Winning the competition meant English and her partner Clement formed a joint venture with Blanc who provided the startup costs to get The Cheerful Soul up and running.

English says, “It’s very much our restaurant. Raymond organised the fi nance for us and we put in all the hard work and that is how the partnership works.

“It’s a real business and it’s up to us to make some money to pay the rent. It’s not a fantasy where we have an endless pot of money or anything like that.

“The biggest part of the prize is the people that he put us in touch with and the training and the tricks of the trade that we have learned along the way.”

Asked what part of the process she found most diffi cult, she says the running of the restaurant was the easy bit – “that part was brilliant and we really enjoyed it” – and it was the fi lming schedule that took the biggest toll.

“You live in a hotel room – the Ramada Watford was our home for 12 weeks – and everything is so alien to your normal life. You get to sleep very little and eat very little because you are working from 6am until 2am. Filming takes so much longer than you realise when you watch TV. Every time you walk through the door you have to go through it fi ve times to get to the other side and when you are under pressure to get a job done, it is frustrating.

“But after you have been through that you come away feeling like you could do anything.”

She says the experience prepared her well for the reality of running a restaurant and, what’s more, the extra responsibility of doing so successfully in the midst of a recession.

Fortunately, she says, the restaurant has been fully booked since the doors opened and customers have left happy. “But it’s obviously something that we have to think about,” she acknowledges. “We have been lucky enough to have the PR that most new restaurants don’t have but we did get nervous about whether we were making the right decision in the right area.

“And we’ve had to be very careful with our pricing because those people who do still have money to spend – with the situation as it is at the moment – have a big choice of what to spend it on and they want something that’s good quality and value for money.”

And has Raymond Blanc been on hand to help?

“We see him often,” she says. “Sometimes he just pops in to see how things are going and to show support and we have our board meetings every month when he comes along to see how we are doing. And he’s always there at the end of the phone.

“He can be a bit like a kid sometimes when he wants his own way and he’ll stamp his feet but overall he’s great to work with.”

Asked which, of the remaining contestants in the new series, will get on best with the “very French” chef, she’s no idea: “We’ve not got a television anymore so I haven’t seen it. We are, quite literally, in the restaurant all the time so I don’t get to watch TV – ever."

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