42 Monday June 13 2022 | the times
Business
crucial to running a successful
business,” he said.
It is a skill he learnt from Ramsay,
albeit the hard way. “It was a hardcore
way of learning. In my first week at
Restaurant Gordon Ramsay I got
thrown off the service by Gordon and
told to go downstairs and clean the
fridge. When service was finished, he
came downstairs and he said, ‘Paul,
the name of the restaurant is
Restaurant Gordon Ramsay and these
people in the dining room have come
with a huge expectation. They’re
going to spend a lot of money and
they want it right. If it’s crap they’re
not going to leave and think it’s your
fault, they’re going to blame me’. ”
Despite the depictions of Ramsay on
television shows, Ainsworth said his
former boss was “an unbelievable
mentor” and that he aimed to nurture
his own team in a similar way.
Today, an extra pressure is the
rising cost of ingredients, especially
vegetable oil. It is a particular
challenge at The Mariners, which is
popular for its fish and chips. “It’s not
as straightforward as going, ‘We’ll put
the fish and chips up by five quid’.
People have a certain price they’re
willing to pay for fish and chips.”Paul Ainsworth believes that having aWhy you need appetite for
hard work to avoid burnout
P
aul Ainsworth was catching
his breath. He had just spent
a morning firefighting at
Caffè Rojano, one of the five
hospitality venues that he
owns in Padstow, Cornwall, with his
wife, Emma. “It’s like pulling teeth,”
he said of negotiating with kitchen
fitters who had been slow to get thejob finished. “We’ve taken so much
time over the years to get to this point
of being able to create this
unbelievable environment for the
teams to be able to perform in... and
then it’s the most annoying little
things, like the walk-in-freezer won’t
work, or the extraction [system].”
Ainsworth, 43, took over Caffè
Rojano from Stanley Rojano, its
previous proprietor, in 2011. He hoped
to build on the success of his first
restaurant, Paul Ainsworth at No 6,
where he had been head chef before
becoming chef-patron in 2009. In
2013 the restaurant was awarded its
first Michelin star, the first in Padstow
to receive the accolade. It has since
also been awarded four AA rosettes.
Yet becoming a business owner has
not been all perfect soufflés. He had
worked previously for Gordon
Ramsay, the business-savvy chef, for
six years, but was not ready for the
complexities involved. Fortunately, he
was able to draw on the experience of
Derek Mapp, the Mitie chairman,
who initially funded No 6.
“When I opened No 6, I put my
menu together... but I’d never seen a
spreadsheet; I’d never seen the
costing of a dish. I came up with this
sea bass dish. We costed it up and
Derek said to me, ‘Are you happy to
charge £50 for that main course?’
“I said, ‘I can’t charge 50 quid for it’,
expecting him to say we’ll just make
less margin or something, but he
didn’t. He said, ‘If you’re going to
survive and if you’re going to run a
proper business, be able to pay people
properly and make sure that the place
is decorated every January, you need
to go back to the drawing board and
do something else.’ He also taught me
that profit wasn’t a dirty word.” The
sea bass dish was changed to
mackerel.
No 6 may be bustling these days —
there is a four-month waiting list for
tables — but it was a different story
when it first opened. “One week in
the first two months we went to the
cinema four nights in a row because
no one was coming in.” Today the
Ainsworths also own Padstow
Townhouse, a boutique hotel in the
Old Town, the fine dining Mahé
Development Kitchen, which is
adjacent to No 6 and opened in 2019,
and The Mariners, a gastro pub in
Rock. Despite lockdowns, during
which almost its entire workforce was
furloughed, the group had total sales
of £9.5 million in 2021 and Ainsworth
expects to hit £11 million this year. It
employs about 150 people, with
additional staff in the summer.
It could have been a far bigger
operation. Ainsworth’s original plan
for Caffè Rojano was to create a
formula, obtain venture capital
backing and expand to multiple sites.
The plan was shelved after a visit to a
local branch of Zizzi, the Italian chain
owned by the Azzurri Group. “I just
realised this isn’t what I wanted to do.
I care too much.”
Ainsworth said that alongside his
passion for cookery and business is a
desire to train and develop his staff.
Many of the group’s senior leaders
started in more junior roles and Chris
McClurg, chef de partie at No 6,
recently won the BBC cookery
competition The Great British Menu,
the same show in which Ainsworth
competed in 2012. “Spending time
with your teams to nurture them and
mentor them and see them grow isBusiness Times Enterprise Network
T
enterprise
network
going for
growth
Gordon Ramsay and a
boardroom veteran have
added key ingredients for
one restaurateur, reports
Hannah Prevett