Fulham Palace was built in 1495 as a bishop’s manor and was used as such until
1975. The palace is an early Tudor and Georgian monument, and it is
breathtaking — something you would struggle to say about many London
restaurants. But here, on the terrace, is an alfresco idyll called The Lawn.
Yes, you can eat here: looking out over listed gardens, rare shrubs and
ancient oaks, hearing the near-distant sound of children gambolling and
birds tweeting.
The custodian of this precious place is the Comme des Garçons-wearing
fortysomething Irishman Oliver Peyton, who is sitting on a fine-looking teak
garden chair, echoing my excitement. “I know, wonderful, isn’t it? I’d never
been here, either, and the point of doing these things is to bring more
exposure to these places. Most restaurateurs don’t want to do anything
outside because it's so seasonal. But I like doing things others don’t.”
Peyton does do things differently. In fact, he has been constantly reinventing
how we party, eat and drink for well over 20 years, and has been part of “a
good time” for the entire duration I’ve lived in London. “I just try to do
things that are good,” he says. He opened his first nightclub with Fatboy
Slim (then Quentin Cook) in Brighton in 1981; then, barely in his twenties,
he moved to London and opened Raw in the basement of the YMCA off Tottenham
Court Road in 1983. It was one of those clubs people still remember today.
“New York was far more interesting than London then, and I was influenced by
those big, changing spaces such as the Limelight, rather than dingy
basements in the West End.”
Peyton’s life was hectic and nocturnal, his appetite for fun as notorious as
the venue he ran, but he worked hard, too. He tells me about the time he
bought 10,000 live bait, vacuum-packed each one and sent them out as
promotional flyers. Another time, he personally stuffed flyers into the
shells of 10,000 capsules used for getting medicine into large mammals. “The
night I shut down Raw, I went back to a friend’s house for a drink. I had
about £70,000 in cash on me, and my friend said, ‘You’re going to regret
this.’ I was sure I wouldn’t — I was tired of going to bed at 8am.
Nightclubs were always a way to make money to do other things. But sure
enough, two months later I missed it.”
After Raw, he brought Japanese Sapporo beer and Swedish Absolut vodka to
Britain, single-handedly inventing the concept of premium vodka (that is,
the perhaps mannered conceit of asking for your spirit by brand name), and
he championed the brand’s collaborations with great artists. Then there was
the Atlantic Bar & Grill. This vast, magnificent, art-deco basement, an
ocean liner of a venue, had a velvet rope that was, for a time, one of the
hardest to pass in London. “One night I was out with Alexander McQueen, and
I asked him why he never went to the Atlantic,” says Peyton — a fair
question given that everyone else did. “He replied, ‘I can never get in.’
So, later on we went to the Atlantic and, of course, the doorman wouldn’t
let me in.”
For the post-rave generation, the Atlantic was a godsend: it was cool,
beautiful, wild; it had the best cocktails in town and the food was reliably
good for much of its 14 years. And it was full of great art. You could go
down in your jeans and drink a Cheval Blanc ’82. Its vibe was as elegant as
it was louche. It was also democratic — you bumped into all sorts down
there. Unlike some of the other hubs of Cool Britannia, such as the Groucho,
you didn’t have to pay or be special — if your face fitted, you were in.
And, once in, “you could do what you wanted to do”. Even better, it stayed
open until three in the morning, a rarity in 1990s London, unless you wanted
to bash your head against gigantic speakers all night.
There were other restaurants: Coast, Isola, Mash and Mash & Air (the
latter in Manchester). Often Peyton employed designers and artists whose
names — Marc Newson, Damien Hirst — are now household. It’s this rare skill
at mixing design, art and food in an unselfconscious, cool package that
makes him such a distinctive character. As Style’s restaurant critic, AA
Gill, says: “His sense of design is fantastic, a proper wow. He made
destination restaurants when there weren’t that many of them. He also made
them chic.”
Lately, Peyton’s touch has been applied to a little chain of bakeries, Peyton &
Byrne, and, more notably, restaurants and cafes in art galleries and public
spaces: the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, the Wellcome Trust,
the ICA, St James’s Park and now here at Fulham Palace. Two hotels are in
the pipeline. So who is he catering to now? Everyone, he says, “from the
grannies coming in for a cup of tea and a chelsea bun to the guy trying to
impress his date with a romantic dinner and a bottle of Dom Pérignon”.
Peyton’s movement through London’s destination haunts has mirrored his own
moves in life. Around the time he started working in parks and museums, he
also went teetotal. A nightlife contemporary of his in the 1980s describes
him as wild; actually, an awful lot of people remember him that way. Gill
says of Peyton’s Cool Britannia profile: “He was the third Gallagher brother
— he did seem to be a figure unlike other restaurateurs of the time, when
they were generally like Terence Conran. He was much hipper — and still is
much hipper. He is one of the people you think is interested in the whole
idea of a night out, as well as just the food.”
I remember when he gave up everything: people talked about it — it was
grapevine news. “I had a very excessive youth,” says Peyton, downplaying a
rackety couple of decades. That experience now translates into an earnest
concern for the wellbeing of his staff, for whom drugs are a serious
occupational hazard, given the topsy-turvy hours of the restaurant industry.
“I give staff a talk. I can spot it straightaway — the mood swings and
bullshit go up 2,000%. There’s no point trying to stop people having a good
time, but people don’t understand how dangerous drugs and alcohol are. I
hate seeing people with potential going to waste. You can ruin your life.”
Although he then adds: “In the end, smart people will drag themselves out of
it.”
He is an important figure in his world, but he isn’t rolling in it like Gordon
Ramsay or Soho House’s Nick Jones. He lives in a big house, but it is in
Acton. He married Charlotte Polizzi, the daughter of the hotelier Olga
Polizzi and granddaughter of Lord Forte, 10 years ago. They have three kids,
Finn, Molly and a newborn, Connor. And even though Peyton hasn’t worn much
other than Comme des Garçons or Vivienne Westwood since 1982, he’s a
hands-on dad — he knows how to change a nappy.
Peyton ran with a cool crowd long before he married the big time or became
successful. “The Face magazine was the defining tool of our lives,” he says
of his circle, which includes the YBA gallerist Sadie Coles, who is married
to the fashion photographer Juergen Teller, and his longtime best friend,
Dylan Jones, the editor of GQ. Jones’s book of interviews with David Cameron
is due out tomorrow, and you might think that Peyton would be nudging the No
10-hungry Conservative fold, too, with his circle of powerful friends,
moving and shaking his way into the new Establishment. “I’m a left-leaning
Irish Catholic,” he says, putting paid to that idea. Later he launches into
an impassioned rant: “I would consider my life a failure if my kids worked
in the City. It is soul-destroying work, and our society has been ruined by
this concept that you’re a success if you go into the City, with the rape
and pillage it entails. Our society is buggered for it.”
You still hear mutterings about Peyton’s nonstop money problems and can
imagine their root cause: he is a passionate ideas person, not a
bean-counter. On the subject, he says: “I have a vision for a restaurant,
and I follow it through. It’s what I do every time I embark on a new
project. I try not to make the same mistakes. Look, it’s difficult to talk
about restaurants and money, because restaurants are about so much more than
that.”
And one of the reasons restaurants have become so much more and so many
different things to all kinds of people is, in no small way, down to
Peyton’s singular attempts to make them so.
The Lawn, Fulham Palace, Bishop’s Avenue, London SW6; 020 7610 7160, thelawnrestaurant.co.uk
