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According to Russell Norman, there was no “best” table at Brutto, his wildly popular trattoria in London’s Farringdon. The best seat for couples was at the corner edge of the upper deck, a table that jutted out over the restaurant like an opera box. He’d seat those doing business at a roomy face-to-face table near the back. But those in the know would often ask for what was objectively the worst seat in the house: a tiny, flip-down table by the door with a sign above it that read “the boss eats here” in Italian.
Norman, who died last week at the age of 57, was involved in the opening and operation of several dozen restaurants in his lifetime, most notably Polpo and the mini-empire of buzzy, mid-market venues that spun out from it. He was a first order tastemaker, someone who trusted that if he took pleasure in something then others would too. In 2011, explaining why he’d opened the Jewish deli-inspired Mishkin’s, Norman said: “I was standing on a corner in Soho at about 12.30pm and thinking, ‘what do I want to eat? I really want a big salt-beef sandwich.’ So I built a restaurant where I could get one.”
Norman was born in Perivale, west London, in 1965 and grew up one of six brothers in Hounslow. After school, he moved to Sunderland to study English at the polytechnic, choosing the city because it was a long way from home. He worked briefly in arts administration in Durham then as head of drama at a school in Stanmore, before realising that central London was the best escape of all. Norman became maître d’ at the theatre restaurant Joe Allen, then moved up through the London restaurant scene to eventually become operations director of Caprice Holdings, whose portfolio of high-profile restaurants includes The Ivy.
Norman was greatly influenced by Italy, and the specificity of its regional cuisine. He first visited Venice in the late 1980s to stay with his friend Richard Beatty, arriving from Paris on the Orient Express with “half a filled baguette, a bottle of water and a packet of Gitanes”, as he later wrote. He returned frequently, seduced not by the city’s tourist-packed restaurants but by the bàcari, where locals gathered — “a luminous orange drink in one hand and a small snack in the other”.
In 2008, as the financial crisis swung into gear, Norman quit the world of suit-and-tie dining. He got a tattoo of an octopus (polpo) on his back and opened the bàcaro-inspired Venetian restaurant Polpo with Beatty as his business partner, predicting that noisy, informal restaurants would appeal to recession customers. The fashion for small plates, negronis and no-reservation dining can all trace a history through Polpo.
Over the next 12 years, the Polpo group went on to open 17 restaurants including regional branches of Polpo, spin-offs Da Polpo and Polpetto, and the diner-style Spuntino. Norman, who had designed the first restaurant out of financial necessity, continued to do so. He introduced a (then) distinctive style of stripped-back interiors and distressed walls, inspired by the work of New York firm Avroko. Writing in the FT in 2019, Tim Hayward used “comprehensively ‘Polpo-ed’” as shorthand to describe the interior of a restaurant not run by Norman. Styled the “new king of Soho dining” by The Guardian in 2012, Norman was a more public figure than most restaurateurs. In 2014 he presented BBC series The Restaurant Man in which he mentored inexperienced hopefuls.
At one point, it seemed that Polpo might become a high-street chain (and Spuntino an airport one — it still operates a Heathrow outpost) but the group struggled around the time of the casual dining crunch that also affected larger chains such as Jamie’s Italian and Byron. Restaurants began to close rather than open. In 2019, it was reported that the Polpo group owed £550,000 in unpaid taxes. Norman resigned as a director in 2020.
Brutto, Norman’s first post-Polpo restaurant, opened on a dead-end alleyway near Smithfield market in Autumn 2021. In the accompanying cookbook published earlier this year (his fourth), he explained that his design for the restaurant sprung from a single image: a hanging glass lamp with red lettering that would lure customers down the dark alleyway “like an angler fish attracts prey in the depths of the ocean”. If Polpo was a recession restaurant, Brutto felt like a refuge for when the hard times had bedded in. It served simple food — brutto ma buono (ugly but good) — this time inspired by Florence.
Norman was well-known and admired within the industry — a restaurateur with the charisma of a chef, a stylish flâneur in a city where they were in increasingly short supply. I interviewed him earlier this month, sat on bar stools at the far end of Brutto’s L-shaped bar (this was, he said, his personal “best table”). I asked him about his favourite indulgences in London, high and low.
The list included the following: the black cod at Zuma, a top-end Japanese restaurant in Knightsbridge where he worked for a few years; the steak and kidney pudding at Rules, the oldest restaurant in London and the only one worth putting on a suit and tie for; oysters eaten off a paper plate at Richard Haward’s in Borough Market, which reminded him of visits to Southend-on-Sea as a child. Finally, a bacon sandwich at Bar Bruno on Wardour Street. “White bread, brown sauce, never anything else.” Over the 20 years he worked in Soho, Norman said, he’d seen the area change beyond recognition, but that one working men’s caff remained.
And, he said, he was as happy there with a mug of mahogany brown tea as he was eating black cod in Knightsbridge.
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