Hungry for success

Lucy Hunter Johnston meets the young restaurateurs who ditched the day job to follow their dreams

Simple pleasures
Ducksoup, 41 Dean Street, W1

Following in the footsteps of Polpo and Copita, Ducksoup is the latest super-trendy boutique wine bar to spring up around Soho. With stripped floors, whitewashed walls, hand-scrawled wine lists and a menu that changes daily, it's run by owner Clare Lattin and head chef Julian Biggs, who met while working together at Hix Oyster and Chop House. (Clare is also the publicity director at Quadrille, which published Hix's books, as well as being his ex-girlfriend.)

Clare saw a lack of affordable and unintimidating bars in London where you could pop in, even alone, to eat a quick dinner with a glass of extremely good and reasonably priced wine. 'In Paris you can go out and have one plate and a glass of wine and you've spent a tenner, but you just couldn't do that in London. I live on my own in De Beauvoir Town, so I don't always want to go home and cook. The idea of being able to pop into a place that isn't too formal where you can sit at the bar, have a glass of good wine and something to eat and be home by eight is very appealing. People do that here; we get a lot of women who come in by themselves. In fact, on Friday nights we normally have more people on their own than in pairs.

'Ducksoup is an amalgamation of all our memories and experiences,' she adds. 'It takes a bit of all the places where we've enjoyed eating and drinking on our travels. There is a tiny wine bar in Copenhagen that I stumbled across, just a table and lots of different wines. You could order as much or as little wine as you liked, and eat from a really simple menu. Then, on a wine trip to Burgundy, I went to Le Verre Volé; it's a natural wine bar with no list - they just recommended what to have - and the menu was chalked up on a board. Julian and I have always been great fans of Terroirs, too; we love the natural wine movement so our list nods to that.'

There are no plans to open any more branches at present. 'I only had one burning idea in my head, something timeless,' says Clare.
(020 7287 4599; ducksoupsoho.co.uk)

Salad days
French & Grace, Brixton Village, SW9

Rosie French and Ellie Grace, both 28, never intended to open a restaurant. Having met at Sussex University, they moved to London and settled down reluctantly in publishing and PR. 'On paper, we had really good jobs and were doing very well,' Ellie says, 'but I didn't want to sit at a desk all day. I can't bear it when the weather is changing outside but you don't get to see it, and you aren't working with your hands.'

The pair started to meet for supper each week in Ellie's Electric Avenue flat, to share their grumbles and increasingly hearty bowls of salad, with ingredients and combinations becoming ever more complex. They began to refer playfully to themselves as 'The Salad Club', and set up a blog to share their recipes. 'We thought having a blog was really geeky, so it was almost a bit of a joke,' says Rosie. But it gained such a following that they started a supper club twice a month. This, too, quickly gained cult status and always sold out. On the back of this success, the pair left their jobs and opened a tiny restaurant, French & Grace.

'The idea was never to be a restaurant,' says Rosie. 'But we recognised we could do it when our supper club was featured on BBC London and a guy from Dulwich who'd seen it asked us to cater his party. We both pulled a sickie and spent the day cooking at his house. At the end of the day we looked at each other and thought, "Yes, we really want to do this." ' With support from the Prince's Trust they set up shop in October.
(saladclub.wordpress.com)

Fine wining
The 10 Cases, 16 Endell Street, WC2

Ian Campbell and Will Palmer, both 30, have been best friends since meeting ten years ago in a French lecture at Edinburgh University. The idea for a restaurant took a while to crystallise and they opened the doors of The 10 Cases this September.

In the intervening years each gained a grounding in the hospitality industry: Will studied for a masters at Bristol before going into hotels; Ian spent a year working at The Builders Arms in Chelsea before taking an internship with the Conran Group. He ended up running the front of house at Coq d'Argent before becoming manager of the Ebury Wine Bar.

The restaurant's curious name comes from their unique concept: the wine list will only ever include ten reds and ten whites, and they will only ever buy ten cases of each. As Will describes it: 'The basis is that we will always change the wine, but we don't want to get lazy in six months' time and only change the ones we don't like, so we built a system by which we have to.' The menu changes daily, with Juette Shallow, ex-head chef at Coq d'Argent, creating just three choices each for starter, main course and pudding.

There are currently no plans to roll it out. Not only do Ian and Will feel the concept works best on a small scale - the restaurant holds just 28 covers, including eight seated at the bar - but they also love being able to spend their days on site, getting to know the regulars. 'We have a real emotional connection with what we're doing. We are definitely living the dream - the dream has its ups and downs, but thankfully you quickly forget the downs.'
(020 7836 6801; 10cases.co.uk)