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From deals to meals
By Sudi Piggott
Published: May 6 2005 13:35 | Last updated: May 6 2005 13:35

It is 6.30am and Ben Wright, former corporate lawyer at Allen & Overy, is weaving through the City in his white van delivering top-of-the-range oysters to the kitchen doors of the restaurants he once frequented to woo clients and celebrate takeovers.

These days, he brokers up to 15 varieties of oysters and relishes his stints as "white van man", handling a tonne of shellfish a morning. "There's nothing like handling your own produce," he says. Wright is a striking example of a growing breed of City "pro-tirers" questioning their corporate careers and opting to embrace new ventures, driven by their passion for good food and desire to make it central to their work life.

Anecdotal evidence from career consultants Career Energy suggests that lawyers, bankers and brokers are fulfilling their food fantasies and turning deli-owners, artisan producers, farmers, importers of gastro-finds and restaurateurs.

Such a decision takes courage, motivation and a readiness to incur risk. However, it was the compelling taste of freedom and the incomparable, delicate, mineral, almost nutty flavour of the oysters that fired Wright to exchange the City for shellfish trading as Wright Brothers (together with his brother-in-law, Rob Hancock, formerly a music producer).

Ben met Marenne oyster farmer Jerome Miet more than 10 years ago. "Zipping off on a chalton [flat-bottomed boat] early one morning and being surrounded by miles of oyster beds and eating the freshest, plumpest oysters straight out of the ocean was a life-changing experience. There was no going back," recalls Ben.

Spending two years at Allen & Overy's Paris office allowed plenty of opportunity to indulge his growing passion for oysters. Then, back in the City, he couldn't understand why they remained relatively under-appreciated in Britain.

"Not only in Paris but in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, oysters are bought without undue ceremony and appear on menus everywhere," he says

The start-up challenge of importing Miet's oysters to London was irresistible. The two men started by cold-

calling chefs from a restaurant guide. "Seeing a chef eat one of our oysters and pronounce it the best they've ever eaten is more intensely rewarding than signing any contract or completing any merger or acquisition," says Ben.

Wright Brothers now supplies a roll-call of top restaurants, from The Wolseley to J. Sheekey, with British and French oysters.

While it is easy to romanticise such a business plan, Wright, in common with other pro-tirer foodies, emphasises how transferable his corporate skills have proven. Instead of buying and selling blue-chip companies, he's finalising the lease for the Wright Brothers' Oyster House in Borough Market, which is due to open soon.

"Once a market trader always a market trader," roars former investment banker Jan McCourt, one of the first to risk a pitch at Borough, as he trades impressively marbled Dexter and White Park traditionally reared, rare-breed beef. After a decade, he considers himself a veteran foodie pro-tirer and still enjoys the "buzz and joyful camaraderie" of the market.

He explains that he bought Northfield Farm in Lincolnshire with a view to early retirement. However, redundancy put paid to such forward planning. With a rudimentary farm shop approved by planners and a crash course in butchering bolstered with a potent mix of naïve conviction and greedy passion, he met BSE at its height full on.

"My timing was a textbook disaster," he says. "Yet, people did starting paying attention to what they were eating, which galvanised interest in rare breeds. What's more, customers took umbrage over being dictated to with the beef on the bone ban - dogs were bought an awful lot of T-bone steaks!"

Cattle farming was very much in the family genes of BP mergers and acquisitions broker Andrew Loftus, who felt inexorably drawn back to his roots but wanted to bring farming more directly to the urban public with a sophisticated, contemporary city farm shop.

At Wooton's, shortly to open in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, traceability will be the watchword: products will be labelled with food provenance and food miles: hence locally produced beetroot and radish soup, ginger ice-cream made from Yorkshire goat's milk, pies with locally reared pheasant, even sushi with Whitby crab. "I want to offer food that you can't get anywhere else, sourced as locally and seasonally as possible with real taste and wow factor," promises Loftus.

New York-born Patricia Hamzahee relinquished investment banking to open smart gastronomia La Bottega del Sole in Fulham, west London, which sells its own impeccably made soups, risottos, salads and dinner party-fit dishes, besides offering high-end delicatessen products. "I'm catering for the kind of customer I used to be - never having time to shop, let alone cook, despite being passionate about food," she explains.

Hamzahee typifies the pro-tirer: hard-driven individuals with a strong work ethic and appetite for culinary risk-taking. Their "culinary cross-sizing" means re-evaluating the high-flying City job for another, often equally demanding, vocation driven by a passion for good ingredients and eating.

Formerly a Wall Street and Lehman Brothers investment banker, Hamazahee thrives on "immediate feedback from customers. It's very different from my former life, where I felt quite removed from the end product. I'm elated if customers praise a new dish. Food is convivial currency: strangers start chatting about what they enjoy eating at the deli's shared table."

The lure of bringing Rome's stone-baked pizza bianco Romano, little known beyond the city's Campo dei Fiori, to the City of London proved irresistible to Stefano Nicolai and Spanish business partner Saturnio Machancoses, who abandoned their internments at Morgan Stanley after a mere two years. They identified a gap in the City lunch market for a more sophisticated alternative to the ubiquitious sandwich chain. After convincing a respected Roman baker to "fast-track" them in baking techniques, they gained hands-on experience in city sandwich bars, and convinced erstwhile colleagues to invest in their start-up: Spianata, in the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral.

"Talking optimum crust texture, where to source the finest mozzarella and how to enjoy a Mediterranean lunch culture, however speedy, has given us the opportunity to be involved in a business driven by our palates rather than our promotion prospects," says Stefano, who plans to open a further two Spianata outlets this year.

"Good food had always figured very large in my life, not just as an enthusiastic consumer but also as a keen cook inspired by my grandmother's insistence on using only the best market ingredients," recalls former Equity analyst Christian Oddono, originally from Verona. "After all, I'd been assessing others' investment plans for long enough and applied similar feasability strategies to introducing Londoners to real Italian gelato."

The success of his ultra-contemporary café-gelaterie, Oddono's in South Kensington - local restaurants report with disquiet that diners are forsaking dessert for a post-prandial gelato - has exceeded Oddono's projections. Wholesale business is booming and further outlets are imminent.

Tony Dodd, once a corporate broker with Credit Suisse First Boston, says of his move away from the world of big business: "I didn't have a Damascene culinary revelation. It was more a gradual realisation that I was no longer in tune with City ethics."

His interest in how food is produced and marketed and the importance of being more environmentally responsible developed from a sabbatical year taking a masters in Environmental

Policy at the London School of Economics. Two years ago, he and his fanatically foodie partner Angie (whose background was in film marketing) moved to Cornwall with their young son. They set about finding the most committed local producers and set up mail-order food business Seriously Good.

"Forging relationships with producers such as Nick Michell of Barwick Farm - whose organic golden Jersey butter is hand churned from milk from his own herd - is a revelation and re-affirms my vision that working and eating more sustainably is not incompatible with economic success. Michell's passionate commitment to traditional methods is humbling."

Light years ahead of the international corporate cross-sizing zeitgeist, Tim and Nina Zagat, former Wall Street lawyers, instigated Zagat guides to steer diners of their ilk to the right kind of places to do business. In London, fledgling fund managers Mark de Wesselow and Simon White identified a similiar gap and launched the Square Meal restaurant guide 10 years ago.

"Extraordinarily there was no bespoke guide to the 250 plus restaurants and bars in the Square Mile. It turned out our idea had greater legs than we first gave it credit for," explains de Wesselow. With the UK restaurant scene on a roll, the increasingly influential Square Meal Guide now encompasses the whole of the capital's dining spectrum.

Inevitably, the ranks of City pro-tirer foodies have been swelled by self-styled gastronauts, used to dining at the swankiest tables, who are increasingly dabbling in restaurant investment. Yet, back in 1993, when Sorren Jessen, an executive director of Goldman Sachs, backed his friend Oliver Peyton's Atlantic Bar & Restaurant "no-one in their right mind considered restaurants sound investment vehicles".

Jessen was smitten. "Tasting wine in France or talking mutton in the Lake District beats boardroom pension fund meetings any day. It's dealing with raw, real values." He took the then staggering risk of converting a former banking hall to a dining room. "Effectively, I'd done nine years of wining and dining research in the City and knew what the market needed." He has since added Noble Rot and Graze to his portfolio. Significantly, One Lombard Street is the City's only Michelin-starred restaurant.

Gustatory passion, it seems, is a precious thing.

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