No fat profits at Fat Duck

HE is a celebrated chef who charges upwards of £85 a head for a meal. His restaurant has just been awarded three Michelin stars, making it one of an elite 47 in the world.

And his experiments with bizarre combinations of flavours - snail porridge is just one - have made him the darling of the foodies.

But despite customers clamouring to get into The Fat Duck at Bray, Berkshire, chef and owner Heston Blumenthal, 37, has proved how tough it is in the restaurant world. Accounts recently filed at Companies House show he has gone heavily into debt to reach the top.

Blumenthal's company, Fat Duck, showed a profit of less than £19,000 on turnover of £1.2 million in the year to March 2003. Blumenthal also took a pay cut. Directors' salaries were £129,000 compared with £143,000 the year before, when the restaurant made an £18,000 loss.

'A reviewer recently wrote that I had made a fat profit,' says Blumenthal. 'I just thought: This person has no idea. It has taken us nine years to get to this point and as you can see, we are not raking it in.'

David Harrold, director of the Restaurant Association, says there is a fine line between being successful and struggling.

'People go into a restaurant and are amazed that Dover sole costs over £20,' he says. 'But the restaurant may have paid £8 for the fish. Then there is the cooking, the service, the staff costs, increasing rents and VAT.'

Jamie Oliver's restaurant Fifteen was the subject of a TV series and is booked months in advance. But it still made a loss of £679,000 in its first year. However, Fifteen is forecast to go into profit next year.

Others have been less lucky. Jean-Christophe Novelli ran into terrible financial trouble when he launched a chain of restaurants in the UK, France and South Africa. Despite rave reviews, he lost money and the bailiffs were called in.

Novelli went bankrupt and only the backing of his friend Marco Pierre White meant he could keep his original Maison Novelli, in Clerkenwell Green, in the City of London, and to concentrate on cooking, rather than accounting.

Last year, TV's Two Fat Ladies star Clarissa Dickson-Wright closed her Cook's Bookshop in Edinburgh and filed for bankruptcy, having gone £90,000 into the red.

Novelli's old boss, television chef Keith Floyd, has also had his share of financial traumas. His pub, the Maltsters Arms at Tuckenhay in Devon, ran up £500,000 debts and went into receivership before it was sold in 1996.

Floyd later said: 'Thank God it's over.'

Marco Pierre White's company, MPW Criterion, ran up a pre-tax loss of £4.3 million last year. However, the latest accounts show his company made a healthy £6.4 million profit.

And Gordon Ramsay, another holder of three Michelin stars at his

restaurant at Claridge's Hotel, Mayfair, is also feeling the pinch. Due to lease complications, he closed his London restaurant Fleur, which only opened last year. And Ramsay also had to shut his Glasgow restaurant, Amaryllis, after three years.

Amaryllis is a perfect example of how the odds are stacked against quality ventures; it was booked up on Friday and Saturday nights for six weeks ahead but was virtually empty for the rest of the week.

'I don't know any chef who can run a business on two days a week,' said Ramsay ruefully.

'It was haemorrhaging money. There comes a point where you have to put aside your own reputation and your personal feelings and think of business.'