‘Restaurant prices are going through the roof – nobody’s going to buy a £25 panna cotta’

“Isn’t that terrifying?” Julian Metcalfe, who has spent a lifetime selling grub as founder of highstreet fixture Pret a Manger, is considering the morning’s headlines. Food prices are up almost 15 per cent.

This squeeze on perhaps the most fundamental cost of living – what we put in our mouths – has only just begun, he says. “Interest rate hikes haven’t hit yet, they’re just beginning to. For a lot of people it will be the most terrible shock.”

In his own business, the consequences will be immediate. “It’s terrible. The prices you’re seeing in restaurants are only just beginning to go up.” Already, “some have suddenly almost doubled”. He says that going out to the pub for Sunday lunch in Oxfordshire, where he lives at the weekend after spending the week in London, has become staggeringly expensive. It will be crunch time soon. “Restaurant prices are going through the roof. Who is going to buy a panna cotta for 25 quid? Nobody.”

What happens then? “It’s painful.” He mentions a friend in the business whose energy bills have gone up tenfold – “and food production uses huge amounts of energy. Everything is going to rocket in price”. Not that he expects much sympathy for potential mass closures. “All our energy bills are peaking, no one’s gonna feel sorry for a restaurant.”

Yet for Metcalfe, who has spent the last few years relentlessly paring costs at Itsu, the Asian-flavoured chain he founded in 1997, such trauma may be good news. Diners deserting pubs and restaurants “will come to Itsu,” he says. “Because the prices will be a third. Because we’re much more lean.” 

His sympathy for his peers is tempered by his own restless energy to improve things. Even in such tough times, he says, “I would find a way [to make it work]. I wouldn’t just sit there groaning and feeling sorry for myself.” He rhapsodises about a “warm, chocolate-filled bao” – a soft, steamed Chinese bun – “breathtakingly delicious, and we’ll sell you that for £1.49. So forget the panna cotta”. Metcalfe the man – who talks movingly of the “empathy” his tragic childhood instilled in him – knows the pain the current crisis will inflict. “It’s awful.” Metcalfe the serial entrepreneur, however, spies an opportunity – and it is an opportunity to advance an astonishingly ambitious masterplan.

‘Two-year visas would solve all the issues overnight’

It will begin in a few weeks time in Paris, when the first of 50 new Itsus will open. Metcalfe, 62, thinks there is ample scope to bewitch the world’s self-appointed gastronomic champions. France, he says, “is pretty confident it has the best food in the world”. Wrong. There is plenty of ghastly food in France. And when it’s bad, “it’s monstrous”, he laments. As for “really posh French food” – he scrunches his youthful features (right cheek bearing the scar of a youthful car crash) into a “yuck” expression.

Yet at least France gives food, and the hospitality industry in general, the status it deserves. By contrast, “we Brits have never really been drawn to the service industry, or cooking. It’s always been looked down on”. Hence the difficulty British restaurants are having in finding local staff. “Serving people has never really been on our agenda. We avoid it.” Whether young Britons will ever want to wait tables is, he says, “a huge, huge worry”.

Should the Government intervene to spare the hospitality industry? There are three obvious fixes, he suggests: VAT, business rates and immigration. “VAT,” he says, “bring it down to 10 per cent. That would help enormously.” On rates, controlled by local authorities, he accepts it is harder for the Government to intervene. But rate rebates for the first two years of a tenancy, say, would help reverse the decline on our high streets. “You have to make councils realise that if you have totally empty high streets, you’re just kidding yourself. We’ve got many places where the rates are £300,000 a year, for nothing. Literally for nothing.” He doesn’t expect to see any change, though, especially now the Government has moved into austerity mode. “That horse has bolted.”

Nor is he optimistic about loosening immigration to help recruitment, though we speak just before the departure of the home secretary Suella Braverman, who particularly opposed such a measure. “The easiest thing would be to allow all [foreign] kids back into this country for two years,” he says. “Two-year visas would solve all the issues overnight. Not just restaurants, but care homes, NHS, lots of things. I’d back that tomorrow.” Taken together, the three measures would have high streets “up and running again in six months, vibrant and exciting”.

He knows what he’s talking about. In 1986, then 27, he and university friend Sinclair Beecham founded Pret a Manger, fitting out a shop in Victoria Street, central London, with an oven paid for with an inheritance. The story goes that office workers were so astonished to discover take-away food that was actually edible, that long queues started to form – and the two founders had to pre-prepare sandwiches, in a formula that Pret continues to this day. The problem was that, as success bloomed, they couldn’t find staff, despite paying more than competitors. Then, with growing freedom of movement, “all these charming, well-skilled, really fantastic kids from Spain and France and Italy flooded over to this country. And they changed our food forever in this country, and so quickly. We went from shocking, I mean really appalling [food], to amazing.”

‘You get out of life what you put into it’

He speaks with evident enthusiasm about Pret’s early years, as though it were a gap-year adventure – except with the foreign friends imported to Britain. That sense of fun and respect and camaraderie helped foster, he insists, “better service than at Tiffany”. It also made his fortune. In 2008 he and Beecham sold Pret to private equity firm Bridgepoint for £364 million.

These days, though, he makes it plain he is not enthused by what has happened to his baby. I ask if he keeps a paternal eye on Pret. “I try not to.” Still, Pret’s current CEO, Pano Christou, reportedly sought his advice during the pandemic. The foundations he put in place, he says, means “it’ll take years before it’s…” He starts again. “If they ever damage it completely, it’ll still run for some time.” When I suggest that the glorious staff spirit of yore is not so in evidence today, he has to look away and literally bite his lip.

But if he mourns Pret, there is comfort in that he has come to realise its limitations. “That type of food? Chilled sandwich in a box?” he says with astonishing derision for a man who made his name on the back of it. “They don’t even eat it in most countries. They really don’t. You can’t really do much with that.” It’s a bold statement for a chain with 400 outlets in Britain, which was sold in 2018 for £1.5 billion. Itsu, which now appears to occupy Metcalfe’s unceasing attention night and day, has a mere 74. But the point is that, unlike Pret, he reckons Itsu’s Asian-inflected fast food has global appeal, and with relentless automation, menu refinement and cost-control, it can deliver quality meals at a price to rival chains like McDonald’s – which has about 40,000 outlets and is worth $184 billion.

Perhaps that goal is why there may be truth in his claim that the fortune he made after selling Pret didn’t change him. “It’s so irritating when people say that,” he acknowledges. “But I was at work the next day.” Turns out he had bigger fish to fry.

What about his children? Surely all that cash has affected them. Ranging from 19 years old to 34, he has, all told, seven: three of his own, and four step-children through Brooke de Ocampo, an American writer whom he married in 2008, three years after divorcing his first wife Melanie. At the time of that divorce, Metcalfe to his knowledge only had two children. But then it turned out that a fling 19 years previously with Camilla Ravenshear, a society beauty married to the actor Oliver Tobias, had led to a daughter, Celeste. “She’s coped brilliantly,” says Metcalfe of Celeste. “I think it was probably very difficult for her. For me it’s a complete privilege and delight. Though I’ll never be able to repair what’s missing.” That makes it sound as though the two are estranged. But the truth is very different. Celeste, now with children of her own (“being around them is amazing”) is on Itsu’s board. Metcalfe’s son Misha is also part of the company, working on branding for Itsu’s grocery business. He is full of admiration for them both. “To work in the same place as your father is tough, and then when your father started the business even worse, and then when your father’s rich and he’s going to die one day – it’s remarkable they bother to show up at all.”

In a rather self-deprecating way, he suggests that they have “realised that you get out of life what you put into it”. Perhaps you’re a better father than you give yourself credit for, I suggest. “I don’t know. I’m f-----g lucky.” However it happened, his children are now happy to go toe-to-toe with him. “They are very liberal with their opinions, I can assure you.”

‘If you’re lonely, if you’re not nurtured, you die’

It sounds like a noisy, happy household, with Metcalfe aiming to establish a long-term familial, marital stability the idea of which, he says, he “reveres”. The reason is clear. “I didn’t have that. I had quite the opposite.”

His father, David, was a pillar of the establishment – Eton, Irish Guards, and himself son of Edward “Fruity” Metcalfe, best man at Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson’s wedding and the grandson of Viscount Curzon, viceroy of India. In 1957, David married Alexa Korda, the widow of the film producer Alexander Korda, living together in Chelsea. Julian was born two years later, but his parents split in 1964 and Alexa died a couple of years later. It was only a few years afterwards that Julian learned she had taken her own life on Christmas Day. “All the suffering” that he, his brother and his sister endured as a consequence “made us much more empathetic”.

And it is because he links this childhood experience so explicitly to the collaborative culture at Pret a Manger (“I was determined to create a sense of believing and belonging for the people who worked there, which I perhaps didn’t have”) that it seems more than the usual HR-speak trotted out by every CEO.

“If you’re lonely, if you’re not nurtured, you die,” he says, baring his soul perhaps a little more than either of us expect. “Humans need nurturing and loving. If you can give back to humans and build their competence, and build their skills, and build a sense of belonging, you can do this [business] much better. I always did that with Pret. That’s why I was successful, I think. I take it incredibly seriously.”

Who nurtures him, I wonder?

“Brooke’s very supportive. I’m very lucky.”

“Are you quite hard to live with?”

“Probably.”

Almost all of his friends, he confides, are recovering addicts. “I admire their courage,” he says, trying to explain why. It’s hard not to wonder if, after his upbringing, his businesses have been a form of recovery for him too. Certainly, he says, it takes a certain “madness to kick-start” a business. “There’s definitely an artistic quality” to entrepreneurialism, he says. It’s a creativity blended from “unreasonableness” and “seeing opportunity everywhere”.

‘If you give children just excess salt and sugar, they’ll become addicted to it’

If he is convinced the opportunity with Itsu is global, Covid has not helped. He thinks office life, on which he has founded his brands, has changed forever. In sales, Itsu is now about where it was before the pandemic – but 15 per cent busier from Tuesday to Thursday and 20 per cent down on Mondays and Fridays. Supply chain costs have settled a little too. A container of supplies from the Far East which went from £2,000 to £18,000 is now at £9,000.

A dedicated office man himself who believes in face-to-face teamwork, it would be easy to lament the “work from home” mentality. But he doesn’t. The cost and conditions of commutes can be intolerable. “Our infrastructure hasn’t kept up. Many people can work really well at home, or close to home. It doesn’t bother me at all.”

Indeed Itsu, once a resolutely London brand, is now following such distanced workers to smaller towns – to Woking, Staines, Milton Keynes – serving meals for which the average price should be no more than £7. Gone are the endless boxes of sushi. In its place has come more noodles, brown rice and vegetables. Itsu, Metcalfe insists, is no longer just for office lunches al desko. It is for cheap meals out. A value place to take the kids for tea, as many families do to McDonalds.

His aim is to provide fast-food that won’t worsen obesity, a problem he calls “just unbelievable”. Jamie Oliver has demanded more children receive free school meals, but Metcalfe wants them to be healthier first. “Some of the worst food in this country is in schools. If you give children just excess salt and sugar, they’ll become addicted to it.”

Eventually, he says, Itsu will match Pret’s ubiquity. “We will get to 400 [stores in Britain].” He wants to float the company in “four-and-a-half years”, which conveys the precision of his plan. With the cheap, healthy fast-food model established here, the plan is for that financial injection to take Itsu around the world. “If we crack it [the potential] is unlimited. We’re nearly there with something that can trade next to the American giants.”

Expansion will be rocket-fuelled by a decline in home cooking – despite Britain’s addiction to glossy cookbooks (“mostly gifts” he reckons). “I don’t think many people can be bothered to cook. Those skills for a lot of people are just gone.” He talks of flats in New York being sold without kitchens. “It’s rather sad,” he concedes. But food prep after a long day’s work “is exhausting”. Itsu’s grocery range in supermarkets is designed to simplify the process. He shows me a pack of noodles and broth currently in development, to which customers can add “c--p lying around in the fridge” and whip something delicious up quickly and cheaply. Even so, such products will not reverse the decline in cooking at home. “We’re going to be doing less and less of it. I love cooking but I don’t have the temperament to cook that often.”

To the business of food, by contrast, he is evidently inclined to devote every waking hour. He talks with passion about tiny details – “toasted pumpkin seeds” – on which he’s sure Itsu will stand or fall. After our meeting he’s off to his favourite part of the week, new product development. “We’re on our fourth iteration of veg meatballs…” He says he’s even found a way to make much-maligned tofu (“cardboard, I thought I would never eat it”) “delicious”. “The entire [vegetarian] movement has been lazy,” he adds, concentrating on moral superiority rather than making tasty food. Metcalfe wants to attack the same problems as that movement, but with a businessman’s realism and drive. Stopping the sale of tuna was “ethical and economical”. Making more of the menu plant-based may make sense environmentally, but a “great many young people” are also turning away from meat. “I want to get to 50 per cent plant based” – from 40 per cent today.

As I leave, his entrepreneur’s mind, sensing another opportunity, starts whirring again. “Maybe we can get to 60 per cent. It’s just a question of pushing the team.” He’s certainly not going to stop pushing himself.