David Nicholls (left) with kitchen designer Gareth Sefton and chef Ashley Palmer Watts (right) at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in London

I do terribly miss cooking,” says David Nicholls, who started in the kitchen at 15 and, in the 35 years since, has risen to become food and beverage director for the Mandarin Oriental hotel group. He is responsible for the kitchens of 23 hotels worldwide, with annual combined sales of $600m.

We are having lunch at London’s Fino restaurant to discuss Nicholls’ role in creating what promise to be some of the world’s most exciting new restaurants. He has put together deals that will bring Heston Blumenthal and Daniel Boulud, two renowned chefs, to the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge, London next year.

Before that, he will oversee the opening this month of Moments by Ruscadella, from Catalan chef Carme Ruscadella, at the Mandarin Oriental Barcelona, followed next month by Twist in Las Vegas, the first US venture by French chef Pierre Gagnaire, who already runs a restaurant in the group’s Hong Kong hotel. Nicholls explains how he goes about planning each restaurant. “The first, and most important, element is the local market research. We’ve got to understand the local food scene, the demographics, tourism and the hotel’s precise location. This is what we are doing in Mumbai, Shanghai and Jakarta at the moment. We can’t afford whims. Sometimes there is an obvious lack of, say, an Indian or an Asian restaurant in a certain part of any city simply because that’s not what either the locals or our [hotel] residents want to eat there.”

He has approached Blumenthal to create an extension of the traditional British dishes served at his pub, The Hind’s Head in Bray, Berkshire. Chef Ashley Palmer Watts, from Blumenthal’s original restaurant, The Fat Duck, will run the new kitchen and a researcher is at work in the British Library resurrecting neglected recipes.

On the phone, Blumenthal says of Nicholls: “It’s been absolutely vital for me working with someone who is so enthusiastic about quality ... He’s been absolutely brilliant.”

Blumenthal’s as-yet unnamed restaurant is scheduled to open next October. Before that, in April, the same hotel will welcome Daniel Boulud’s new restaurant, an outpost of Bar Boulud, the popular wine bar opposite New York’s Lincoln Center. It will provide what Knightsbridge lacks, says Nicholls, “a local bistro with a great wine selection, that is affordable, between £35 and £40 a head.”

Nicholls describes the chefs he works with as “custodians of enormous knowledge and it is my role to create a platform from which they can best pass this on. We need to attract the best talent and signature chefs enhance that process. It’s about allowing young people the opportunity to aspire.”

Nicholls speaks with a conviction based on his long career as a chef. His first job was washing pots and cooking bacon and eggs at the Queen’s Hotel in his hometown of Deal in Kent. He rose to become executive chef at the Ritz Hotel, London, and then took on a second, more strategic role. “Most unusually, I combined being chef with being food and beverage director at the hotel, so I was responsible for all the food that was served whether as a banquet or in the bars. Sales increased six-fold in nine years but this combination of roles allowed me to develop a vision for hotels that I am now just beginning to implement.”

Nicholls says his success has partly come from adversity. In 2003, his son Daniel, then 19, was paralysed after breaking his neck in a diving accident. The Nicholls Foundation has since raised more than £2m for medical research into spinal injuries, mainly through fundraising events Nicholls has set up with chefs all over the world. “It has had extraordinary implications,” he says. It has taught me not to be confrontational which I think has helped me to pull these deals off.”

www.mandarinoriental.com
www.nichollsfoundation.org.uk

nicholas.lander@ft.com
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