Adama Sadauki reveals the secrets of successfully opening a restaurant.
What’s My Line was a panel game that originated in the US in 1950 and then transferred to the UK where it ran for over 700 shows. In it, the four panellists would quiz a contestant in order to ascertain their occupation.
The show provided the first question for my lunch guest at Maison François in St James’s last Thursday. What, I wondered, would Adama Sadauki do to help the panel discover her profession? ‘I would just listen’, she responded after quite a long pause for thought. ‘That is, I suppose, my main preoccupation. In fact, I believe that that is what the restaurant industry most needs. Everybody knows, or thinks they do, what should happen but not enough people listen. Personally, I believe I am a very good listener.’
Whether the panel would guess her profession from this silent approach, I have no idea, but I can reveal that Sadauki is, and has been for the past 20 years, a professional restaurant opener. She, and a few others like her, are called upon when the restaurant begins to take shape, perhaps as much as six months before the planned opening. They will be responsible for the hiring and training of all the front-of-house staff, and many other things that can go wrong. They will be there on opening day and for at least the first couple of months of trading – invariably the roughest – and then, when things have settled down, they will move on. Or, as Sadauki was to do after our lunch, go back to the last restaurant she opened, Long Chim, to receive a leaving present from the team she had established.
Of the few of her profession I have met, Sadauki is probably the most unlikely representative, on paper and in person. She is 50, with the swiftest of smiles, and is Hausa, having been born in the north of Nigeria, a region and a language that her mother will not let her forget. She came to the UK at the age of six to attend boarding school in Yorkshire. ‘I have forgotten a lot but not the cold I felt – I will never forget that’, she told me with another enormous smile. Her plans, and those of her father, were for her to become a doctor.
Those plans were promptly derailed by the diagnosis of dyslexia, as were her subsequent dreams of becoming an actor. But it was attempting the latter that led her into part-time waitressing at a wine bar in Maida Vale, where she first learned the importance of hospitality. She followed this in the late 1990s working as a waitress at the Hard Rock Cafe at Hyde Park Corner. Then she was selected for the one-week course at Hard Rock 101 in Orlando, Florida where she was taught ‘everything I would need to know to run your own Hard Rock Cafe’ A love affair with hospitality ensued which Sadauki explained has been ‘fantastic and it has taken me round the world’.
Her travels began with a seven-year stint with Arjun Waney’s La Petite Maison group of restaurants which first brought her into professional contact with chef Raphael Duntoye. Sadauki went on to open Zuma in Istanbul. A three-year stint followed in Malta where she opened a series of restaurants and beach clubs before returning to London to work at the Arts Club. She also opened Marceline in Canary Wharf and Beaverbrook in Surrey. But it was while opening La Petite Maison in Beirut that she learned something that she would never forget.
‘There is an enormous amount of ritual in opening any restaurant. There are definite ways of doing things such as the correct way to lay up a table. The salt cellar goes here, the pepper pot goes there. But in Beirut they would have none of it. It must have been the notion that one day everything is in danger of disappearing but it taught me to relax more, to chill, that everything would be fine. It was a very important lesson’, Sadauki confided.
Sadauki invariably finds herself brought into an opening that is the culmination of a set of negotiations between two distinct groups, the landlord and the restaurateur, and this is often the beginning of a series of misunderstandings. ‘There is too often a divergence between the two, between what one thinks and what the other wants, as though they have not done enough due diligence. My job then is to listen to both sides and to steer them in the right direction. It’s hard work but it is fundamentally possible’, she added. ‘Although I do wish that I had developed a thick skin earlier. It can be brutal at times.’
This situation invariably resolves itself because as Sadauki concisely put it, ‘both groups tend to listen to me because I am the outsider. The hiring and training of the team gets under way. The restaurant opens and once it is trading properly, it is time for me to leave.’ With some sadness?, I enquired. ‘Sometimes, yes, but on the whole, no. It is a profession that suits me’, she added.
And it is a profession that would astound the young Sadauki if she could see herself today. ‘I was extremely shy as a young person. I would like nothing better than to spend the whole day on my own. But meeting customers, talking to strangers and being attentive to their needs has brought me out of myself and I am extremely grateful for that.’ She also explained that when COVID struck and there were no restaurants to open, she went off to work in a care home.
Her years in the restaurant business have left her with strong views on what a restaurant ought to be. First of all, it ought to be relatively small and privately owned. ‘Nobody opens a restaurant with a view to selling it.’ And she is critical of the extra funds that have poured into the business. ‘La Petite Maison was at its best when it was just the corner site in Mayfair’, she added.
And where, I wondered, did she stand on the question of staff dress – was she in favour of a uniform or more casual, more personal attire? ‘I like both but I think if it is a uniform, everything has to be ironed and fit properly. What I liked best was during my year at the River Café where you could wear your own T-shirt but it had to be bright.’ And she has a singular dislike of social media and influencers. She remembers one influencer asking for a discount before she even sat down.
And how, I wondered, would I contact her in the unlikely event of my opening another restaurant. I had Googled ‘restaurant opener’ but this only led me to a series on ‘can openers’. She smiled again before replying, ‘Today, we like to be referred to as restaurant consultants but there is no association, no group.’ So how will you find your next opening, then, I wondered. ‘My plan is to take January off and then start to look for my next opening. It is predominantly by word of mouth that I find out what is opening and who may employ me.’
Whoever takes her on next will not only have experienced, professional help in opening their restaurant, they will also get the benefit of a Nigerian cook. ‘I always insist on cooking a proper Nigerian meal for my team before we open. It is incredibly popular. Oxtail pepper soup and a goat-meat curry seems to do the trick’, Sadauki ended. With another smile, of course.
Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter.