DAMIEN'S DAMIENS

Someone, I think it may have been Terence Conran, once said, ‘Everybody wants to write a novel, and everybody wants to open a restaurant.’

I, of course, am guilty of the first of these, but I’ve never, ever wanted to open a restaurant, and it strikes me that the non-professionals who do it must be more or less insane.  Which brings me to Damien Hirst.

There’s a lively interview with him in the current Idler.  Much of it is actually agonized boasting – he lost so much money because he HAD so much money to lose, and he has indeed opened a restaurant or two.

Hirst says, ‘I remember there was a restaurant of mine that was losing £20,000 a month and I went there and looked at the people eating dinner and I thought: “You c***s.  I’m paying for your food.”  Possibly this is how many restaurant owners feel.

I imagine, though I’m not sure, that Hirst is talking about Pharmacy, the restaurant he opened in Notting Hill in the late 1990s.  I walked past it once in a while when it was open, and I used to think it looked like an interesting place, and it was full of Hirst's art, but it never occurred to me that I would actually want to go there to eat, and I didn’t.  Obviously some others did, but maybe not enough of them, or maybe there were other problems with the business plan.

Digging, around I find that when Pharmacy opened, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society threatened legal action under the 1868 Medicines Act, on the grounds that people might confuse the restaurant with an actual pharmacy.  This sounds pretty bogus to me – I’d guess they just wanted attention - but naming restaurants is a tricky business.

How many people have wandered into the Oxo Tower Restaurant hoping to buy a few Oxo cubes?  How many people have mistaken the Ivy for a garden centre?  How many had their hopes dashed when they went to the Gay Hussar and failed to find gay hussars?

I did, however, once eat at Elaine’s in Manhattan, and was amazed to find Elaine was actually there.