Carluccio’s, the restaurant group founded by roly-poly Antonio Carluccio, is considering a £50m stock exchange floatation

The wiley-smiley Italian, whose flagship Neal Street Restaurant has declined badly in the past few years, has rarely got his timing wrong.

Hugely popular in the UK, despite ruining mushroom-picking for thousands of hobbyists, Carluccio has a secret weapon. And its not his genial charm or his huge hospitality towards journalists.

His wife Priscilla is sister of Sir Terence Conran, and the two have run an alliance in London for decades. Click more for rest of story.
The Complete Mushroom Book: The Quiet Hunt – buy it from Amazon UK

The Complete Mushroom Book : Savory Recipes for Wild and Cultivated Varieties – US edition – buy it from Amazon

Carluccio’s Complete Italian Food

Carluccio’s Caffés was actually Priscilla’s brainchild. The duo had opened an outrageously expensive delicatessen next to their Neal Street restaurant in 1991, and she spotted the market potential for a group of casual deli-restaurants. By 1998 she had assembled a team of managers to help launch the business – including Simon Kossoff, formerly My Kinda Town’s managing director – and Carluccio’s Caffés was born. Initial growth was slow, but by 2001 there were five sites and, by this August, 20.

The idea for the restaurants may have been Priscilla’s – “She’s a Conran, she understands what business is about and I leave that to her,” says Antonio, happily – but without Carluccio himself they wouldn’t exist. It’s around his food philosophy that the restaurants are built. “Classic Italian cuisine is about fantastic ingredients that aren’t messed around with,” he says, succinctly. “The flavours of the produce are foremost.” It’s something he doesn’t compromise on, insisting that all Carluccio’s Caffé chefs cook from quality, fresh ingredients on site to give each restaurant’s food “real personality”.

However, being part of a branded group means the caffés have to have a centralised menu, with the dishes rubber-stamped by Carluccio after he and group executive chef Jennifer McLoughlin have tested them. The menu changes every six months, but seasons are reflected in daily specials which each site’s head chef can choose personally, drawing on a databank of about 100 dishes also rubber-stamped by Carluccio.

Carluccio is strict about maintaining regional integrity in the food on the menu: his knowledge of his native cuisine is second to none and, although the menu crosses Italy’s provinces, it never fuses regional ingredients or techniques in dishes. Well, almost never – there’s always an exception to the rule.

“I had to come up with a vegetarian dish,” explains Carluccio, “so went into the kitchen and threw a few things together – really chunky penne with a sauce of grated courgettes, chilli, a little bit of garlic – and put it with some mini-spinach balls. And now it’s one of the biggest sellers in the restaurants – but I have to admit it’s a bit of fusion.”

His relish when describing the food is infectious. I have no trouble understanding why he is successful at injecting a bit of his own passion into the Carluccio’s chefs. He’s just got the knack. The chefs, incidentally, are an international bunch (chefs from Albania, Italy and all over the UK were on the Asti course when I visited), many of them fully trained within the group, as the Carluccios are keen to home-grow their talent.

“It’s a person’s attitude to food which counts for me – to food, generally, and to interpreting real Italian food,” stresses Carluccio. “They have also to understand that this is a hard job – full of joys, but hard. If you have somebody who is wanting to do something and learn – and we have had KPs like this – you can teach them business, you can teach them cooking.”

Classic dishes

His own love affair with food began in his childhood in Piedmont, although he was hardly aware of it at the time. Growing up in a family of six children meant that everybody helped out at some time in the kitchen. Quite what he’d taken for granted and absorbed as a boy only crystallised when he moved to Vienna to study. “I found that I wanted to eat the food that my mother used to cook, so had to start making it myself,” he recalls.

The call for good food wasn’t strong enough to make him want to be a chef, although he did increasingly get hooked on delving into his country’s cuisine and teaching himself its classic dishes in the comfort of his own home. Instead, he ended up becoming a wine merchant, based for 15 years in Germany. As a purveyor of wine, he was able to eat in the best restaurants across Europe, which served him well when he eventually became a restaurateur. You can’t help but form opinions about what makes a good restaurant when you frequent them regularly. “You need to make people feel free in a restaurant, rather than have to worship food gods,” he reckons.

It was the wine business that eventually led Carluccio to London in the middle 1970s. That’s when he met the Conrans, and the rest, as they say, is history. Over his 30 years in Britain, the food scene in London has changed beyond all recognition. But the nation’s collective attitude to food has a long way to go, he believes.

“It’s very sad that, generally, people in Britain don’t really know about ingredients and what goes naturally together, because Britain has got fantastic produce. Nourishment of the body doesn’t seem to be one of the most important things in life here – it comes after clubbing and drinking for most young people, and I’m afraid that Britain is not a country where people want to spend a lot of money on food,” he says, regretfully.

They many not be spending enough to satisfy Carluccio, but hey, £50 million is enough formost people.