In conversation with Victor Lugger

Let’s go back to the beginning, you started Big Mamma in 2013. What made you want to open a restaurant? You had a successful career already.

Actually, the start point was my partner Tigrane Seydoux and I wanting to do something together. We hadn’t worked together before, but we thought we’d try to do something that I like and he likes. We’d look at thousands of ideas and around us there are all these guys, our generation, creating tech companies, creating a new need, giving a new answer to that need… and making shit-loads of money with great success. We couldn’t get that, and by the way we didn’t have a lot of money behind us.

We couldn’t find something where we were excited about. In the end we ended up in restaurants because that’s what we were both passionate about. We said, “Let’s make restaurants. Great. Let’s make restaurants. At least now we know what we’re going to do.”

Has your success been built on being the hot new thing?

I’ve never bought into that idea about it’s a tough industry or that one minute you’re fashionable and then you’re not. It’s absolute bullshit, I would say. If you cook good, cheap food, serve it with a smile, in a nice location, it works all the time everywhere – whatever food you’re serving, whatever bracket of price you’re in. Like the River Café – it’s been there 20 years. Look at Trullo – it’s consistently good and they could open a second one and a third one next to that, if they were consistent in quality, served with a smile at a proper price in a nice place, it would work. Period.

So you decided to open a restaurant. Then what?

We said, “Okay. What are we going to cook?” We looked at thousands of ideas and lots of kitchens. We needed experience. We didn’t know shit about operating a restaurant. I could cook for a dinner at home. I’m actually passionate about it, but I’m not a chef. When I say I’m not a chef, it means … I can create any of these [Circolo’s] dishes. I participate a lot in many things here, but a chef is about how you do it at this volume with consistency and … not how you do it, but how you empower people around you to do it with volume, consistency, energy, and passion over time. I don’t give a shit about food and the older I get, always less. It’s about the people. It’s about the conviviality. Food fuels a discussion and it’s a way to say I love you. And thank you. To express gratitude. That’s food.

I think a lot of people feel this way about restaurants: if the food is okay and the service is great, they’ll go back to that place time and time again. If the food is amazing, but the service and the atmosphere is … neutral to bad, they’ll never go back because it’s about much more.

I couldn’t agree more.

You’re young, this is your second career. Do you think you’ll always want to be in restaurants?

It’s a tough job. We realised this is really hard – it’s like tackling Everest from the north face. A friend of mine told me, “Being an entrepreneur is taking 100 decisions a day and you have no fucking clue about it.” And that’s where values, I think, are important because I don’t have the time to think it through. Anything you do, you have to be able to do it for 100 years.

And so we said, “Okay. What can we do that is sustainable?” Not something that is a good business or it’s a market opportunity. We have to be passionate about it. If not, it’s going to be too hard. That fuelled a second principle which is – everything we do, we try and do as much as possible out of passion. When I say it like that, it sounds like bullshit. Practically, I can give you a few examples that are not bullshit, and they’re proven to be drivers of great success – on the business side and the human side. For instance, internalizing the design studio. You’re a restaurateur and you’re saying, “Now I’m going to do my own design.” It’s the toughest thing I’ve done in two years. It’s a nightmare. It’s really hard. It’s complicated. It’s a totally different job. Here, we literally lowered the floor to make more of the space!

Looking at the future, our job is about creating experiences for people. That starts with food, but it goes beyond that, so it was the best decision we’ve ever done.

OK, let’s talk about the subject exercising the hospitality industry right now, Brexit

The other day I was with Tigrane and said, “Do you realize that when we decided we would go to England, Brexit had been voted already?” People are talking about it and everyone’s asking me if I’m shitting my pants – which I’m not, but maybe I should. Did I discuss that with my partner a year ago when we decided and I moved my family? No. We came here because we were excited to do that and I think it’s a good choice. Even if there is a bad Brexit at the end of the year, it’s going to be fine. I have two restaurants in the UK. They’re good and cheap and serve with a smile. Brexit or not, it’s going to be fine for them. Brexit might kill me a few points of profitability. Okay, that’s fine. We’re going to swallow it and we’re going to survive this.

What do you think is the secret of your appeal?

We do things very much organically and we try to be aware of what we like and what we’re going to like tomorrow and that’s what we offer to people. So far we’ve been lucky because we are, I think, connecting with the people in what we offer. It’s a 360 experience that starts with food, but the playlist is important, the soap is important, the design, of course, is important, the smile is important, the way people are dressed is important, et cetera, et cetera. And we try to do that in a price range that is affordable to most people. By most people, I mean 90% of the people.

In my restaurants I see everyone from workers that are on the building site next door and I see billionaires. I see single mothers with five kids and I see grandparents and grand, grandparents with their youngest. I see people on Instagram and I see people who don’t have a phone on the table.

In a way, we haven’t invented anything. A traditional restaurant is a 360 experience: the table is great, the service is great, the menu is great, the soap is great. It’s just that it costs you 500 euros per person or 400 euros per person. How can we do that for 30 euros per person or 25, actually? Doing that at this price, this is what we’re interested in.

Okay. Let me turn it around. In the time since you opened, have you seen people imitating you? Oh, I’ve seen many people doing similar things as we do. Are they imitating us or are we imitating them? I wouldn’t be that arrogant. But I do see people doing more grand design and stronger décor. We see a lot of them of course. Or people giving more care to the cutlery. I often see people turning plates over to look at base. This makes me crazy.

Now sometimes I look at Instagram and I say, “Oh, I didn’t know we did this dish. Oh, it’s because it’s not my restaurant. It’s just exactly the same light, the same angle, the cutlery, the same thing.” Well, it’s the game. It’s fine. And actually, even though I’m saying the plate thing drives me crazy, actually, truly, it doesn’t. If I’m honest, it fuels and boosts my ego. It definitely boosts the chef ’s.

And it also fuels a will that we had that before. Which is … I get bored very, very easily. We always try to do new things. There is very, very few things that you will find here and at Gloria, not to mention in Paris. Always innovating has always been an attitude for us. That’s why every restaurant is different. That’s why every menu is different. That’s why every team is different. That’s why every artwork is different. The fact that some people are being inspired by us, it’s fine and I’ll be frank, we’re inspired by so many people.

But one of the words which is attached so much to your restaurants is ‘extra’. The lemon meringue pie is super tall and the lasagne has vast layers and so on. Was that something that you set out to do?

No, no. This is deep rooted in my partner and I – in my childhood, in my education. It’s “If it’s not too big, it’s not big enough. If it’s not too much, it’s not enough”. When I was a child and I came home with an 18 out of 20, my father would say, “Why not 20?” Well, yes, he’s German. I try to be ‘less in more’ in many aspects of my life, but not in food! More is more feels good sometimes, like in a dessert.

In our social media age, when everyone wants to go to ‘the new place’, photograph it and move on, do you worry that people are going to move on from you? We are in a city which is saturated for restaurants.

Of course I worry. It’s my first worry. It’s my very first worry. I think we can succeed. The first reason why is because we’ve been in business for more than five years in Paris and I’ve got more clients today than at any other time and my first restaurant, East Mamma, is more packed than ever before. So I know we can do it.

It’s a very legitimate question that I ask myself every morning with my partner and the team. Every time I go to Paris, which is every week, I visit my restaurants and I say, “I don’t want to get bored with these restaurants.” As I said, I get bored very fast. Faster than anyone I know and I just make sure I don’t get bored with my restaurants. If I don’t get bored with my restaurants, probably no one’s going to get bored with them. For instance, we’re removing the carbonara … which by the way is the best-selling dish. I thought, “Okay. Let’s change it.”

That’s ballsy. Changing the subject, who do you rate in London?

I used to go to Trullo very often before I opened a restaurant. Now I spend my life in Italian restaurants so I’m afraid I don’t go that much. A place where I like to take people is Spring; that’s where I go with my wife. When we have friends over for the weekend, we take them to Trishna. One of the reasons why I moved to London is because I wanted to eat Indian food. Actually, it’s the real reason why we moved to London.

Do comments such as restaurant reviews or posts on Instagram – good or bad – affect you?

Of course I do react. My work is to listen to … in French we would say, “Weak signals.” Text messages giving me praise, messages just saying they came in. Every time I say, “Oh, what can we improve?” And of course I read the reviews. We follow every review on the internet too, very closely, and look at the average rates on website. There are 1,000 people who say shit on TripAdvisor, of course, but there are so many comments I’ve aggregated across the board and it’s very, very, useful information.

I would say the difference between the English customers and the French customers is probably … the guy complaining here, making a point about not being happy, raises a stronger voice. I get two emails a week saying, “Oh, I paid the bill but I didn’t see that there was a pound for charity. Can you reimburse me for a pound.” I have people saying “the pasta for two, it’s £16 per person, but you charged me twice.” Yes, it’s a dish for two and you were two. “But I didn’t get that. Can you reimburse me?” People will not do that in France. They just don’t send emails.

The collapse of the mid-market restaurant is well documented. For instance, the downfall of Jamie Oliver. He’s recently said the reason why Jamie’s Italians failed was because it wasn’t at the right level. It would have been easier to open posh restaurants. The middle market is difficult. People don’t appreciate or understand it. What do you feel about that?

To be honest, I don’t know. I’m a small restaurateur. I have two restaurants. What the fuck do I know? Honestly, I don’t know. He had 14 or 16. Some people have 400. I have two restaurants and I’m not going to do 14 in four years, I can tell you that. Because I wouldn’t know how to do it. At least not in a way that I’m going to be happy with in 20 or 100 years. The question I ask myself is, How do I use my time? Am I focusing on something and taking the time to do it right? Having time to do charity. Having time to do team building. Having time to do events. Having time to do fun things. Having time for my family. Am I working 80 hours a day to just copycat things because I need to do more restaurants? No.

One of the biggest challenges must be hiring and keeping a good team. You seem very proud of yours.

It’s really easy. When you come and work in a restaurant every day, you get better at it. This is my team’s talent. Every day … my talent grows. This is the reason why we exist. The reason for this company to exist is to change people’s lives and I’m talking about the people in the team, because I’m not changing my clients’ life. If they don’t eat here, they’re not going to starve. The only lives we change are those in the team and the baseline of our company is: change people’s life with pizza. Actually, you can reinterpret with peperoni, with coffee, with whatever, but the reason why we do that is because we want to change our lives.

The talent grows organically like this, which is actually exponential. Growth comes as the talent grows. I try and open restaurants at this pace. If I go faster, I’m going to open shitty restaurants because I’m not going to have enough talent.

So you’re not planning on moving on to a third career?

The reason why you go to work every morning probably changes by the time you’re 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 and changes depending on the success you have. When you reach a certain level of financial and professional (or ego and media) success, you realise how vain that is. Well… some people never realise and want always more. If you realise how vain that is, at first you’re facing some emptiness. Okay, so why am I getting up again tomorrow? And then you realise that you’re doing it because the first thing that got you excited is the people you’re doing it with and that, actually, it’s as good as it gets. And it’s great. I hope I would be proud to tell my grandchildren about these people in 20 years. I will definitely not be telling my grandchildren that I did a restaurant in London that some paper, I can’t even recall which, said it was the hottest place in town and that there were 30,000 bottles. Yeah, okay. Who cares? I have a fucking great team and I give people pleasure every day. How fulfilling is that job? I don’t want to do anything else.

This article was first published in the CODE Quarterly magazine. To subscribe, please click here