BusinessWings: One of the big selling points of your restaurant is that it is child-friendly. Did you feel you were starting something different from everything else in the area?
Andrew Wilson-Smith: Definitely. We tried to be unique.
I have never come across anywhere particularly similar to our place and I always struggle to think of anywhere to compare it to, really.
It’s quite stressful bringing up children, so we wanted to provide a place where parents can sit down for half hour and have something nice to eat and drink
BW: So how was the idea originally formed?
AWS: It took about five years to plan. Originally we wanted to open a tea room, and although we do our own range of teas, it has ended up becoming a child-friendly restaurant.
We’ve lived here for 10 years and there are a lot of mums round here. The idea is that they can come in, sit down and relax.
It’s quite stressful bringing up children, so we wanted to provide a place where they can sit down for half an hour, have something really nice to eat and something really nice to drink.
We do organic food and also sell some of our own stuff, which we keep additive-free. So they can relax about the food and they can relax about the environment — there’s an area for the children to play — and they go out feeling better than when they came in. That’s the basic idea.
BW: So you provide somewhere for hard-pressed mothers to relax. But what about you — how difficult is it juggling fatherhood and running a restaurant?
AWS: It’s fun during the school holidays! It’s not easy, but I enjoy it. I look after my kids quite a lot because that is what I want to do. I have to manage the shop, so it is hard, but I have a manager called Gabi who helps me a lot.
BW: Have you been able to hire extra staff to free you up?
AWS: Eventually we will. We have 10 staff at the moment, and we’re open seven days a week, from nine in the morning until six o’clock at night.
I do believe in delegation. There’s that classic thing where you work on the business, not just in the business.
I do a two-day week, working 12 hours in the restaurant, but in addition to that I spend time working to improve the business — trying to find better ingredients, products and so on.
BW: And what does your wife bring to the business?
AWS: She helps with the design side, although she is working full-time as a barrister.
Congratulations on your award from Observer Food Monthly for Best Restaurant for Kids 2006 by the way. Why do you think they chose you?
We’re different from your average place. We sell healthy food and we’ve thought specifically about catering for children.
We have a little play area, books for them to read and an organic baby menu. We also have our own line in children’s food. You can’t get proper children’s food — it seems to me — so we came up with our own.
BW: Did you work in conjunction with another company to produce this range?
AWS: Yes, an Italian deli up the road called Il Sapori helped us.
Presumably you have to deal with a lot of health and safety regulations governing what should and shouldn’t be put into children’s food...
Yes, there are all sorts of rules and regulations, especially with regard to feeding babies. A lot of governmental and local bodies oversee these things.
Running a restaurant, there is a huge number of things I have to comply with. I’m meeting with all the staff tonight and all we will talk about is health and safety.
We try and work with the authorities. When we made the baby food we actually called Trading Standards in before we started selling it and got it tested.
Normally they’ll come in a year after you start selling, but I thought: “We’re not going to do that, we’re going to be safer than that.” It was a pre-emptive move and they said we were the first company in Wandsworth to have done it.
