Exclusive: Richard Caring's restaurant empire

Richard Caring at his office in Conway Street, London

10 April 2012

Do you like going to the Fat Duck to eat hedgehog soufflé?' asks Richard Caring, an expression of genuine puzzlement on his face. 'I don't understand it. It's rated the second best restaurant in the world, but I'd rather have shepherd's pie at The Ivy.' Over the roar of traffi c on the Euston Road below, I fancy I can hear the shrieks of gastro-purists, horrified at such lèse-majesté.

We are sitting at a mahogany dining table in Caring's immense office, which is adorned with a Matisse, a couple of Degas drawings, a giant Henry Moore bronze that was lowered in by crane, and a full-size wooden bar. He celebrated his 60th the night before, which is why, he says, he's sticking to fizzy water today. If he does have a hangover, he's hiding it well. The man is immaculate, from his sweep of silver hair to the tips of his polished shoes. His eyes sparkle, his tanned forehead is barely lined, his perfect teeth are as dazzlingly white as his tailor-made shirt. He is rather sexy, how you would imagine Dominic Cooper's dad.

Tatler magazine once caricatured him, rather less flatteringly, as Bond arch-villain Blofeld, complete with fluffy white cat, which reportedly cut him to the quick (apart from anything else, he's a dedicated dog person). Though his motives are undoubtedly more benevolent, it's true that Caring is something of a mysterious figure. Until four years ago, he made his money from the rag trade - his company, ICD, still supplies the likes of Topshop - and kept himself carefully out of the limelight.

So it was a shock to everyone when he suddenly emerged in the summer of 2005 with an apparently insatiable appetite for London's most iconic eateries. The Ivy, J Sheekey, Le Caprice, Scott's, Daphne's, Bam-Bou, Rivington Grill Bar, Annabel's, Mark's Club, Harry's Bar, Bath & Racquets Club and George, not to mention Soho House and all its groovy offshoots, have been tossed into his brimming shopping basket. These destination London joints are now being rolled out across the globe: imminent openings include Le Caprice New York, a Cecconi's in Miami, Soho House in Berlin and another in LA. World domination, Mr Bond.

At first, Caring's spending spree drew howls of protest from diners convinced that their favourite canteens were going to be blanded down. In fact, Caring seems to have managed the opposite, confounding his critics by making his restaurants even more glamorous and popular than they were before. J Sheekey's new oyster bar has drawn universal plaudits; he's adding a boutique hotel and pizza restaurant to Shoreditch House; and when I had dinner at The Ivy Club last month, fresh from its £9 million refit, the celebrities were wall-to-wall, with a young, cool crowd (Beth Ditto, Pixie Geldof) mingling with habitués such as Stephen Fry and John Cleese.

Caring's influence over the mid-market dining scene is almost as pervasive. He owns a 12 per cent chunk of Carluccio's cafés, and plans to expand Côte, his six-strong French bistro chain, across the UK. 'We see Côte as having more than 150 units around the country,' he says. The latest acquisition is Bill's Produce Store, 'a giant greengrocer's with a restaurant in it', which he feels is also ripe for expansion. The entire empire is worth, he says 'substantially in the hundreds of millions. If it isn't, I've made a big mistake'.

Most entrepreneurs would be chary about opening a single restaurant in the current economic climate, let alone dozens of them. But Caring is bullish. 'I'm not a financial whizz, but I think the worst is over,' he says of the recession. 'I think if a business has its act right and the quality is good and consistent, and it's value for money, it will do well. Our results are very good.' While his views on Heston Blumenthal's experimental cuisine may appal dedicated foodies, there's no doubt which one of them has the greater influence over the way we eat.

On the other hand, I'd much rather Heston cooked me my dinner. Caring only knows how to rustle up one dish: scrambled eggs. 'I make it with 82 different ingredients, and I'm pretty good at that,' he says. 'I put in anything that's in the fridge - baked beans, ham, lots of chillies, tomatoes, cucumbers, cheese - whatever's lying around, I'll cut up and stick it in scrambled eggs. I'm quite famous for it.' Hmm. I'm not surprised he eats out four times a week. 'My wife hasn't set foot in the kitchen since we got married 38 years ago,' he goes on. 'We should brick up the kitchen and use it as a storeroom. I keep promising myself I'll go and stand by Michele [Lombardi, the chef] at Harry's Bar and learn a couple of pasta dishes but I'm always too busy.'

He keeps his svelte figure by skipping meals. He doesn't eat breakfast or lunch if he can avoid it. 'I can go a day or two without eating anything if I feel I've overdone it,' he says. 'If I have lunch, I don't feel like working in the afternoon. I'm much sharper if I don't eat. I'd like to be 10lb lighter, as I expect anyone would.'

Though he's hit 60, Caring has no intention of taking life easier. He works a basic ten-hour day, keeps an eye on his restaurants in the evenings and at weekends, and likes to tour the shops. 'I go from Topshop to BHS to Selfridges,' he says. 'I'm looking for styling, fashion, what's happening out there.'

It's not that he doesn't have the opportunities to relax. His home is near Kenwood House. There's also an estate in Dulverton, on the border of Devon and Somerset, and no fewer than 16 dogs living between the two. And he has just got himself a new boat, a motor cruiser, Silver Angel, which he keeps in Naples and cruises around the Mediterranean.

'My dream is to take a month off,' he says 'but I haven't managed it yet.' The mere idea of retirement makes him laugh out loud: 'What does it mean?' he expostulates. 'No purpose, no reason to get out of bed every day? I couldn't do that.' So he'll work till he drops dead? 'Yes.' He is driven on by an everpresent fear, unlikely as it seems, of failure. 'I think insecurity makes me want to succeed,' he confesses. 'I do suffer from it. I have to prove myself to myself. If I'm in London and I'm not busy, I'm a nervous wreck. I have to find things to do. I think insecurity is a great driving force - it makes you want to achieve.'

Caring was the middle child of three, born to Lou Caringi, an Italo-American GI who was wounded during the War, and Sylvia Parnes, the Polish Jewish nurse who looked after him. 'I got a bit of the Italian side and a bit of the Jewish side, and the combination created the hunger,' he says.

The family lived in Finchley. Caringi anglicized his surname and set up in the clothing industry, sourcing knitwear for M&S among others. His office was north of Oxford Street, up the road from his son's palatial HQ today. He also seems to have been his son's culinary inspiration; Caring tells me that his favourite restaurant he doesn't own is Cipriani in New York because the classic Italian cooking reminds him of what his father used to cook at home.

The young Richard won a tenshilling-a-week golf scholarship to the sporty Millfield School. His plan was to turn professional but he realised he wasn't good enough. Instead, when his family got into financial difficulties, he was taken out of school at the age of 16 and put to work in his father's business. 'I understand the thought process, "Let's throw him into work," but looking back, I would very much have liked to go to university,' he says. 'You get a much broader mindset.'

But the family was in danger of losing their house, so the young Richard had to pack and ship dresses, before designing his own with a girlfriend and selling them for 69 shillings and sixpence. 'We saved the house in the end,' he says. 'Maybe that's why I'm driven, because I saw it all happen at a young age.' By the time he was 22, his business was thriving and he had got married to a beautiful blonde model, Jacqueline Stead, whom he had first spotted on the catwalk. 'She gave up modelling three days after she met me,' he chuckles. 'She's not a fool. She doesn't cook, and she doesn't work.'

It was at this time that Caring first started sourcing clothes from Hong Kong, where labour and materials were far cheaper than in Britain. He ended up moving there with his family for a decade --he has two sons, Jamie and Ben, who both work for Soho House - and cornered the market in high street fashion, supplying to, by his estimation, 70 per cent of the retailers in the UK, everyone from M&S to Next, and of course, all Philip Green's stores.

He and Green are very close. 'I speak to him every day,' he says. 'We're more than friends - I think we'd do anything for each other. We're like brothers. We've grown up together and experienced lots of good times and tough times.' For Green's 50th birthday, Caring presented him with a scarlet Ferrari.

Caring's move from rags to restaurants has been linked to his extraordinary escape from death during the 2004 tsunami - he was actually scuba diving with his two sons in the Maldives when the giant wave passed overhead. 'We felt a blip,' he says, 'but it could have been a big boat. It was only when we got back on to our boat and started getting phone calls that we realised how disastrous and terrible it had been and how many people had been killed.' Green sent his private jet to pick them up. Their lives were saved by the fact that they had chosen to dive in the lee of an island; two other divers, who were at the front of it, were found dead 100 miles away. 'After you've experienced something like that, you examine things for a couple of hours and think, I must smell the roses. But it doesn't last very long,' he says.

It's more likely that his permanent restlessness and need to be doing caused him to look around for fresh challenges once he sensed that, as he puts it, the fashion industry didn't need him any more. Maybe, also, the allure of designing clothes for teenagers was slightly losing its appeal? 'What I do takes a lot of work, effort and time and stress. If you love what you do, it's much easier,' he concedes. At any rate, when his friend Elliott Bernerd advised him that Wentworth Golf Club was for sale, Caring couldn't resist. He snapped it up in 2004, then realised that the catering was in dire need of improvement and approached his favourite restaurant group, Caprice, to see how much they would charge to do it. 'When they told me, I jokingly said, maybe it would be cheaper if I just bought Caprice,' he explains. 'And I bought it six weeks later.'

His master plan now is to create a kind of super-concierge service for all his high-networth members (with Soho House, Wentworth and the Birley clubs - Annabel's, George, Harry's Bar, Mark's Club - he's got around 70,000 on his books) so that, for instance, members of Annabel's will get cheap deals at Soho House, and golfers can book tables at The Ivy. 'My ultimate ambition is to be able to wake up one day and feel content,' he says. 'I hope it will happen. But at the moment, I see so much opportunity. I can't drive down the street without seeing places to rent and wondering what I could put into them.' Though not, you can be sure, any outposts of the Fat Duck.

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