Angela Hartnett: ‘A full English? It's a lot. I don't know how some people manage it every day'

Telegraph

4 hours ago

'The Italians don't really do breakfast,' laughs Angela Hartnett. 'You maybe have a tiny little biscotti or a cappuccino and that's it. It's certainly not cooked. But we're in London, we're in Marylebone, so we're going to do a little twist on an Italian cooked breakfast.'
Marylebone is home to the fourth of Hartnett's Cafe Muranos, the more relaxed cousins of her Michelin-starred restaurant Murano in Mayfair. In Marylebone, as at the branch in Bermondsey, south-east London, residents crave brunch, especially at the weekend. A restaurateur as accomplished as Hartnett, who draws upon her Italian heritage for her menus, is not going to miss the chance to give it to them. 'It's the kind of place where people might come in at 10am, and I didn't want to just do a croissant and a Danish,' she says. 'We've become Americanised: people want to eat brunch on a Saturday morning.'
Among the breakfast dishes she has chosen to serve there are a frittata with courgette and feta, and a ciabatta bulging with mozzarella and mortadella. There is even, borrowing somewhat contentiously from the Austrian borderlands, a strudel. What there is not, is anything like a full English. 'I can't remember the last time I had one. It's a lot. I don't know how some people manage it every day. I probably do one every six months, if I've been out the night before!'
Hartnett is hardly the first chef to dream of a busy breakfast service, but it is easier said than done. For every restaurant – such as The Wolseley or Hide in the capital – that manages to establish itself as a morning destination, there are countless others that fail. 'The mistake everyone makes is they start it, it's quiet, and they give up,' she says. 'They let things slide. They don't staff it properly, they reduce the menu, so people don't come back. You've got to stick at it for at least a year and build up the trade.'
It is encouraging that Hartnett continues to expand at a time when most of the music from British restaurants is rather gloomy. 'It's not easy, but our business has never been easy,' she says. 'You've always had to work at it. You have to keep thinking about how to improve it and never stand still. But it is hard. After what the Labour government just did to us [with national insurance increases], we had to find another half a million a year just to make it work, which is nuts. There are places that will close. We're not out of the woods.
'The governments see it as survival of the fittest; I don't think they're fussed. Which is a shame. Because hospitality [businesses] – pubs more than anything – give people a lifeline in the community.'
Still, Hartnett, 56, has never shied from a bit of graft. She fought her way to the top, working with Marcus Wareing and Gordon Ramsay, rather than being whooshed there at 25. As well as running the restaurants, she has hosted seven series of a podcast for Waitrose, Dish, with radio presenter Nick Grimshaw, on which they have interviewed everyone from Florence Pugh to Richard E Grant. She concedes her profile 'does make a difference' to business – the podcast has drawn a younger crowd to Murano – but says it does not 'make or break' a restaurant.
After all the telly (she's frequently on Great British Menu and Saturday Kitchen), three cookbooks, the OBE (for services to the hospitality industry, and to the NHS during the pandemic) and countless awards for her cooking, she has an agreeably robust perspective. 'I can't be bothered to sit and moan about how tough [the industry] is. And you can't blame the Government for everything,' she says. 'There are places that are packed. We just need to make sure we are those places.'
And it starts with an Italian-ish kind of brunch.