Farewell to restaurateur Russell Norman, a true food original
The world of restaurants can be a fractious place. Staff fall out, sites close, critics bitch. In this fraught context, the united shock at the death of Russell Norman, the restaurateur, author and TV presenter, has been remarkable.
Norman died 10 days ago at just 57, after a cardiac arrest.
Everyone from Mishal Husain to Jay Rayner paid tribute to him, with journalists, writers and fellow restaurateurs remembering his influence on how we eat out and his unfailing generosity.
It is no great exaggeration to say that if you have eaten at a restaurant that opened since his first, Polpo, did in 2009, you have eaten at a restaurant it helped to shape. More than that, there is a good chance many of the people involved sought – and received – Norman’s advice.
It didn’t matter how busy he was, launching his London restaurants Polpo and Polpetto and Spuntino or Brutto, or the bestselling cookbooks they spawned, or starring on the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen or his own programme The Restaurant Man.
He always had time for an encouraging word or some helpful advice – even, as I learnt several times, if you were a hack looking for an expert comment on a tight deadline.
Norman was a restaurateur, in the greater sense, with an exacting – at times exasperating – eye for the details of hospitality, from lighting to glassware to the correct length of a bar and the correct price of a negroni (£5). He was guided by what worked.
Venetian-style flavours were a vehicle for his hip ideas from New York: small plates and no-bookings and exposed light bulbs.
It didn’t always work. Lisa Markwell, the editor of the Telegraph Magazine, remembers him talking about trying to take his idea of serving wine in tumblers – the height of chic in London – up north. They weren’t having it.
Norman made no outlandish claims for his food. ‘It’s just a trattoria,’ he would say, apologetically, when he welcomed you to Brutto, his latest restaurant. Its Instagram account says: ‘Noisy. Not too fancy. Don’t expect too much.’
Correct in the sense that its food, crostini and pastas and steak, is hardly experimental. But the reality of eating there was so much more.
It was not an accident that Norman’s first love was theatre. Even as he was sucked into hospitality, working at Joe Allen’s in theatreland, he kept up a day job as a drama teacher. He knew a great restaurant, like a great theatrical performance, works through the magic of small gestures, which accrue to dazzling effect.
His success tracked London’s fortunes as a dining destination. To eat at one of Norman’s restaurants in its pomp was to know that you were eating at the coolest restaurant in the coolest city in the world.
Norman’s death was all the more shocking because he was so much in the middle of things. He had just launched the Brutto cookbook. He was out and about, presiding over his empire, doling out advice. His life was stopped horribly short, but his work will endure.
There is an exposed light bulb that never goes out.
