Richoux has been rebooted on London's Piccadilly

Twelve months is nothing for a restaurant that has been around for over 100 years. Richoux originally opened as a pâtisserie on Baker Street in 1909 by two French émigrés; by the time the company behind Richoux, Dining Street, went into administration in 2021, there were two UK branches left, in Mayfair and on Piccadilly. The brand and intellectual property were sold to Naveen Handa, whose family owns the Cairn Group, and who is planning to develop and expand Richoux, both in the UK and internationally.

Butler and Spencer were introduced to Handa by a mutual contact. The pair had met working together at Moor Hall – Butler as pastry chef, Spencer as sous chef – and bonded, Butler says, "over supporting terrible football teams" – Littlehampton-born Butler is a Crystal Palace fan and Blackburn-born Spencer supports Blackburn Rovers. They never planned opening somewhere together when they were at Moor Hall, but they kept in touch when they both moved to London in 2018.

Given their fine-dining backgrounds – Butler has also worked as a pastry chef at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons while Spencer was a sous chef at Pétrus and Davies and Brook – an approachable all-day brasserie might not seem like the most obvious career move. Yet Butler, who is 30, says that Richoux's crowd-pleasing menu reflects why he and 34-year-old Spencer work so well together. "You can see from the food that there's no ego involved. We're on a mission to cook for the people and to please the people."

Simple food on the Richoux menu

It is a mission that is, so far, going exceptionally well, despite Spencer's caution. Jay Rayner called Richoux an "instant classic" in his Observer review, citing "dishes you could imagine happily eating on any day of the week", while in the Evening Standard Jimi Famurewa praised "relatively simple food cooked with a blindsiding confidence".

But it is not just the quality of the food that is attracting full houses. Prices offer remarkable value for the West End of London. To start, there is French onion soup for £6.95, salmon sashimi for £8.95 or a jumbo prawn cocktail for £9.95. There are sandwiches and salads for around the £10 mark – a chicken club or a croque monsieur, Caesar salad or crispy duck and watermelon. Mains include sea bream with salsa verde for £15.95 and there's a three-egg omelette and fries for £8.95. Rib-eye steak, the most expensive item on the menu, is £19.95 or there's flat-iron steak for £14.95.

Given Richoux's location slap bang in the most expensive part of London, it's unsurprising that the two bestsellers are the sashimi and rib-eye, which would cost more than double that at the likes of Goodman and Sexy Fish. What's more, Butler and Spencer maintain that their produce is as good as anyone else's. "We just source really well and we have a lot of contact with suppliers we've known for over 10 years," Butler says. "We've pulled in a few favours. Smiling helps a lot."

But there's more to maintaining reasonable prices than charming their suppliers. "Keeping dishes simple, with only two or three things on the plate, cuts down on a lot of waste," Spencer says. "We used to work in places where there might have been 15 ingredients on a plate. Now we're taking a simpler path."

Customer expectations are also different to a Michelin-starred restaurant, he says. "The beef and lamb that we use are great British products, but we don't need to ask suppliers to age things like we used to. That's not what our customers want. The everyday person doesn't care whether their steak has been aged for 60 days. They just want a steak that's been well cooked and well rested. A lot of restaurants don't get those simple things right."

That said, Butler and Spencer are just as concerned by rising prices as everyone else – perhaps even more so given their determination not to have anything on the menu over £20. "The biggest shock was around Christmas," Butler says, "which is when we were finalising the menu. Everything went up by about 8% and it hasn't stopped since."

Butler and Spencer have only increased the price of a couple of desserts since Richoux opened. "But there'll never be a huge change," Spencer says. "If we had to do something drastic with the price of a dish then we'd take it off the menu. We want to be a good-value restaurant, forever."

All are welcome

Ensuring the restaurant is busy throughout the day is another incentive to keep prices reasonable, and also dictates the dishes on offer. "We get a lot of people turning up at half past three for a plate of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs," Butler says. And who are those customers? "There's such a variety of people who walk past the restaurant," he says. "We want to please the everyday person every day."

There was no discussion of a target market in the run-up to opening Richoux, but Butler says the location attracts everyone from families and business people to tourists and dates. But Richoux's ideal customer is perhaps closer to home. "I've always just wanted to own a restaurant where my parents could come every day," he says.

‘Every day' and ‘everyone' are the sort of inclusive terms never far from Butler and Spencer's lips. But having worked at the likes of Moor Hall, will cooking this menu day in, day out not become boring for the pair? "It's refreshing to be doing this after spending so many years in Michelin-starred kitchens," Butler says. "It feels great to come out and have a new challenge. I feel as if we've achieved working on the Michelin side of things and we're now moving on to the next phase of our lives."

For his part, Spencer says he and Butler have a new-found freedom in the food they are now able to serve. "We want to be accessible. It's fine if somebody wants to eat burrata with cherry tomatoes and it's not summer, as long as it's delicious. Most of the time the only thing the customer cares about is how their meal tastes. We don't want to put ourselves in a bracket of only using seasonal British ingredients. We're not going to start buying asparagus from Peru in November and we won't go too far off the map. But we want to use the ingredients we want, when we want."

The pair have no current plans to change the menu, not least because they don't have enough staff. "We just need to get ourselves bedded in," Butler says. "And get ourselves sorted with a strong team." There are eight chefs in the kitchen and 10 front of house – "though it changes every day," Spencer laughs. The menu was deliberately created to be easy to follow, no matter the size of the team. "Jamie and I spent a lot of time coming up with this menu together," Spencer says. "It's a collection of easy-to-follow recipes from a simple repertoire."

The 70-seat restaurant is currently averaging 200 covers per day, though the pair want to do more once the team has grown and settled in.

Nostalgia in the restaurant

Offering a plat du jour is the first ambition and then, when the opening hours expand from five-and-a-half to seven days a week, breakfast and eventually afternoon tea. The original plan was to launch tea a month after opening, but being short-staffed has prevented that. "We want to do it right," Butler says. "We don't want to introduce afternoon tea and just get by and let the product suffer. We need to make sure we're doing it properly."

A core menu of brasserie classics supplemented by daily-changing specials and with breakfast and afternoon tea offered too? It sounds awfully like another nostalgic Piccadilly landmark – and Richoux has already been compared favourably in the press to the Wolseley. Could Butler & Spencer be the next Corbin & King?

"It's amazing to be included in the same sentence as them," Spencer says. "But it makes me laugh. The Wolseley is an absolute institution. We're just a couple of lads having a bit of fun serving some food." "Give us 30 years though," Butler adds, only half joking.

So what are their ultimate plans? "Who knows?" Butler asks. "We just take every day as it comes." Are there plans to open more Richoux? "We just have to focus on getting this one right," he says. "Preferably without us being in the kitchen. We need to get everyone trained up and then see how knackered we are after that."

Butler admits that life used to be easier when they were just cooking at Moor Hall and not having to worry about whether they need to find a plumber to unblock the toilet, but their ambition remains refreshingly modest. "We want to have a successful restaurant that is busy and makes people happy," Spencer says. "Not a special kind of person, but an everyday person who wants somewhere that feels like a second home."

Spencer might not believe it, but looking around the crowd of happy diners comfortably settled into Richoux at half past three on a Thursday afternoon, he and Butler have already achieved their ambition.

What's in the Richoux name?

The new-look Richoux is a completely different restaurant to the one that went into administration in early 2021 and which Spencer describes as a brand that was past its best. Why, then, did he and Butler agree with owner Naveen Handa to keep the name?

"It would have been disrespectful to ignore the heritage of what Richoux was," Spencer says. "It had been an institution for 100 years and that adds a trust and credibility to what we are doing. Hopefully we'll bring Richoux back to its glory days."

Butler and Spencer are shareholders in the new business while Handa owns the international brand, which also includes two branches of Richoux in the Middle East, one in Oman and one in Saudi Arabia.

"We're not involved in those," Spencer explains. "It's our job to run the UK brand. And if we step out of line, Naveen gives us a slap on the wrist," he jokes.

Pastries and cakes

When designer Lucy Porter of Fox & Church was drafted in to create the new Richoux look of mottled mirror walls and pale blue banquettes, there was one detail of the interior that Butler and Spencer were adamant should be kept: the pastry counter by the entrance.

"I worked as a pastry chef at Le Manoir so I've got pastry in my blood," Butler says. "Richoux was originally opened as a pâtisserie, but we wouldn't survive if that's all we offered. That's why we've focused on one pastry product, the cruffin, and we do that as best as possible. We want to be a restaurant first and foremost, but also famous for selling cruffins."

The cruffin is a sort of deluxe cream horn, a hybrid of croissant and muffin filled with three flavours: passion fruit and banana crème; sea salt and caramelised white chocolate custard; and vanilla bean and raspberry.

It is, however, not representative of Richoux's new food offering. "The world is getting a lot more health-conscious," Butler says. "We don't use dairy very much in most of our dishes. The dauphinoise is about as dairy as things get."

Images: Stephen Joyce