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 Chez Gérard manager Craig Teasdale with Brian Daniels |
Fine cuisine stirs Brian’s memory
Theatre boss and manager to the stars Brian Daniels tells Sunita Rappai about the childhood that keeps him striving for success
BRIAN Daniels has his finger in a lot of pies. As well as owning the New End Theatre in Hampstead, he leases Euston’s Shaw Theatre, where recent star acts have included Van Morrison, Harry Connick Jr and legendary American diva Eartha Kitt.
On top of this, he has an artist management company – his clients include former Coronation Street star Julie “Bet Lynch” Goodyear. He dabbles in property, and once owned a film production company. And for many years was a hugely successful head-hunter. Oh, and he was also the British typewriting champion of 1978.
Where, I ask, does this Yorkshire-born entrepreneur who left school at 16 get his incredible drive?
“I’m from a working-class Jewish family in Leeds,” he says.
“I grew up in a council house. I think when you have unambitious parents, you have a drive not to replicate it.”
Brian’s hard work has obviously paid off. As well as enjoying the usual trappings of success – a nice house in Hampstead among them – the New End is also flourishing with its longest-running play so far: From the Hart, a biographical musical about the song writer Lorenz Hart. So I’m impressed that he’s managed to find time to meet me for lunch at the Brasserie Chez Gérard, located in the front of the Premier Travel Inn Hotel in Haverstock Hill.
The building has many memories for Brian.
When he owned his chain of head-hunting offices, he arranged many meetings at what was then a Holiday Inn and later a Forte PostHouse hotel. He was delighted, he says, when he found out that the upmarket Café Gérard chain had decided to locate one of its brasseries there.
The brasseries are the slightly more boisterous younger siblings of the Chez Gérard chain. Like all the Chez Gérard restaurants, this one promises “the best steak frites this side of Paris”, and has a selection of classic French dishes on the menu, such as onion soup and duck leg confit among them.
But it also has a lighter, more relaxed bistro feel, so there’s also a selection of gourmet burgers to choose from and even Moroccan tagines for the more ambitious.
Brian chooses the French onion soup to start and a lamb tagine to follow – which he pronounces “delicious, authentically Moroccan”. The soup is thick and lustrous, laden with fat croutons and molten globs of cheese.
I opt for the gravadlax followed by grilled fillets of sea bass with baby spinach and a salsa. Both are excellent – fresh, light and beautifully presented.
With myself and Brian both sated and lulled into relaxed contemplation by the perfect service and ambience of the place – surely the hallmarks of a perfect lunch – the conversation becomes more reflective.
“I was in Leeds recently,” he says, “And I felt compelled to go back to the little council house I had grown up in. I was trying to work out my journey from that point to here. Because that’s also what every play is about in the end. It’s about trying to work out your journey.”
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