As though on cue, at 2.25 pm on a wet Tuesday, half a dozen young Asians walked into the Kingly Street branch of Wright Brothers, the oyster and seafood restaurant, and were happily seated at a round table.
This bore out precisely what Robin Hancock, one half of this company’s founders alongside his brother in law Ben Wright, had explained to me an hour earlier.
They had opened this branch as the second of their four London sites (the others are in South Kensington and Spitalfields) five years after the success of their initial branch in Borough Market, having been sought out by their landlords, Shaftesbury Estates, as an upmarket, but still accessible, dining option.
But a simple transfer of the dishes on the menu that had performed so well in the Dickensian setting of London Bridge, dishes such as soft herring roes on toast or a fish pie, proved unsuccessful for two reasons. Firstly and most importantly because so many of those their second restaurant attracted were of Asian origin, often shoppers off Regent Street, and secondly most of these new customers do not book. ‘We are finding that as much as 65% of our customers are walk-ins here', Hancock added with obvious pleasure.
As a result, the menu in London’s prime shopping district is very different from the other three. The section headed Dressed and Cooked Oysters in the most important location on any menu – that is, top right – includes a ceviche with coriander and chilli, tempura with sweet miso and bonito flakes and a hotter treatment of oysters with the addition of panang curry, coriander and ginger. On the Large Plates section there is a panang curry sauce accompanying a bowl of Cornish St Austell mussels; a buckwheat noodle salad and daikon, Japanese radish, with a Cornish lemon sole; while a large helping of chilli jam was a strong, but not overpowering, addition to a grilled Devon skate wing. All these are there to tempt the Asian palate along with their usual order, in Hancock’s experience, ‘of a large platter of fruits de mer and a bottle of mineral water’.
If this ultimately fortuitous matching of customers and menu has worked so well for Hancock, his choice of a design for the basement of their South Kensington outpost must also have looked like a winner. 'With the French Lycée just around the corner and so many French people in London being attracted to this particular area, the notion of giving this room the feel of a French brasserie seemed obvious. But it hasn’t worked as well as we had hoped and it is due for a redesign', Hancock explained.
This willingness to adapt is one reason for this particular restaurant group’s success. Another is its strong connection to the raw product, in particular to the oysters, shellfish and wet fish that form the bulk of their menu. In what had been a rather simple delineation of responsibilities, the management of the Cornish oyster business (as well as their 16th-century pub, The Ferryboat Inn in Helford pictured below) was for 10 years Wright’s primary concern, but he has recently moved to London, where he has joined Hancock in looking after the restaurants.
This proved to be an attractive ideal but one shattered by Nature. In 2010 he woke one morning to find the beginnings of what is referred to as a ‘red tide’ along the coast. This is a phenomenon by which algal blooms become so concentrated that they change the colour of the water as the blooms deprive the water of the oxygen that the oyster beds need. This affects not only the current crop of oysters but also those of the next two years, like the vine that takes three years at least to bear fruit. This was followed by an infection that affected their crab population. But things are back to normal now.
Wright Brothers’ holding of four upmarket and independently owned restaurants makes them an interesting prospect for the numerous property companies currently looking for tenants, but the restaurant business is partly a convenient shopfront for their rapidly expanding wholesale business. Their seven vans deliver to over 180 restaurants, principally oysters (the current list offers the famous Gillardeau from Oléron, France, to those from Walney Island in Morecambe Bay to Dungarvan oysters from Waterford, Ireland) and an increasing amount of wet fish from Portugal and Scotland. The wholesale side is the responsibility of Gary Hooberman while the Wright Brothers’ oysters can also be enjoyed at Barrafina, Bibendum, Sexy Fish as well as Scott’s and J Sheekey restaurants.
This growth in sales does not seem to have satisfied Hancock, who, no sooner had I sat down, began to quiz me on what I felt could be done to get more people enjoying seafood and oysters. There are, in his opinion and this is confirmed by High Street figures, fewer fish shops than ever and within the supermarkets the fish counters seem to be getting less and less space. And yet no one doubts the healthy eating aspects of enjoying more fish. (A report in February 2016 noted that the offices of estate agents across London now outnumber all the independent butchers, fishmongers and fruit and vegetable shops put together.)
Hancock is not one to take this lying down and has a two-fold plan of attack. The first comes via an ‘oyster happy hour’ when between 3 pm and 6 pm, oysters at his four branches cost £1 each. These have proved so popular that between them the four restaurants can serve 1,000 oysters during these hours in a week.
The second is to find more homes for his Shuck pop up outlets such as his first one close to his London Bridge restaurant that prospered for four months last year. 'I remember receiving a phone call from our agent telling me that this arch on Stoney Street was going to be available and could we think of anything short term to offer from there. So we took it on and served our oysters "naked, dressed or blown". This last was a reference to their having to use a blow torch to cook oysters since the arch did not have any cooking facilities. There was a Shuck Shuck with a classic Thai som tam dressing and a Moor shuck topped with pomegranate, sumac and chilli.'
The end of 2016 or early 2017 should see the opening of more permanent Shucks with up to nine planned. Oyster lovers take note. Oysters beware!
Wright Brothers www.thewrightbrothers.co.uk, from which these images have been taken