In Praise of St. John (Ideas I Love #4)
Great brand ideas are characterised by three things.
Firstly, they are creatively fertile. They provide enough latitude to act as a lens for every facet of a brand’s activity. They can inform everything from advertising to HR policy.
Secondly, they are rooted in an enduring truth about the world in which they operate. They are robust enough to act as the foundations to build from over the long-term.
Lastly, great brand ideas are easily understood by the people they’re trying to influence. People intuitively and instinctively understand and respond to what is being placed in front of them, without the need for cumbersome exposition.
The best brand ideas therefore are the ones which manage to be both complex and laden with meaning whilst simultaneously remaining simple and straightforward.
Not many brand ideas meet all three criteria.
It may sound unusual to talk about a restaurant as an example of a brilliant brand idea, but that is exactly what St. John is. Having recently visited for dinner, I’ve come away thinking as much about how the restaurant communicates with its customers as I have the food that sat on my plate.
Opened in 1994 by Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver (pictured together above), the restaurant on St. John street in Clerkenwell, London is built around the idea of ‘Nose to Tail eating’. Seen as radical when it launched, Henderson’s philosophy on food “flew in the face of accepted culinary doctrine, both as proud proclamation of the true glories of pork, offal and the neglected bits of animals… and as a refutation of the once deeply held belief that the English couldn’t, and never could, cook” (Bourdain, 2004, p. i).
The restaurant’s influence quickly spread, helping to shape the way Chefs all over the world prepared food for their patrons. “Every time you see pork belly, or bone marrow, kidneys or trotters… you can feel the ripples of (Henderson’s) influence” (Bourdain, p. ii). The world eventually caught up with Henderson. The philosophy which has driven the menu of St.John since it opened its doors to diners now drives much of the way we all think about the production and consumption of food. Sustainability, reduction of waste and an emphasis on local and seasonal ingredients are key concerns for many people today when evaluating the choices they make around their food and diet.
St. John is not a brand in the way many Celebrity Chefs may conceive of one. It is not an identikit chain, an exercise in the superficial badging of a dining room designed to extract a price premium from its customers. This isn’t a faddish ‘concept’ restaurant that needs explaining at length by the front of house staff. Indeed, Henderson has described it as “anti-concept…it’s a place to eat lunch”(CraneTV, 2011). St. John is a brand in the way that Paul Feldwick or John Grant might talk about brands. It is a set of ideas in the mind of the consumer, a set of ideas to live by. The fact that St. John has remained both popular and largely unchanged for nearly 30 years is testament to the strength of the thinking which implicitly underpins the restaurant.
“It was only common sense that you could open the gastronomic floodgates if you looked beyond the fillet to discover new textures and flavours. Take a Pig’s head. There are myriad things you can do with it...It wasn’t a gimmick. If you were going to come up with a gimmick to open a restaurant it wouldn’t be a great one”
In the application of its core idea, St. John manages to exploit what Mark Ritson calls ‘bothism’ (less famous and influential than Ritson, I have talked about the same thing through the lens of what I have described as ‘the power of &’ ). At the heart of this thought is the observation that all too often in our industry we choose ‘or’ rather than ‘and’. We typically favour absolutes, rather than shades of grey. However, brands that manage to exploit the middle ground between seemingly polar opposites find themselves in incredibly fertile space, creating things that people find strangely magnetic.
The concept of ‘Nose to Tail’ may feel grizzly and unappetising at first. Before eating at the restaurant for the first time I was apprehensive at what I ‘may be forced to eat’. But, it begs the question why any self-respecting Chef would deliberately put disgusting food on their menu. At least one who was serious about remaining in business, anyway. Of his food Henderson has said “we do get tables of city boys in here, trying to eat the ‘scariest’ thing on the menu. But nothing on the menu is scary… it’s all delicious” (Rushton, p.95). And delicious it is. The food is comforting, generous and warm (the Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad would feature in my Off Menu choice)
Away from the menu, there are many more of these little contradictions at play.
The dining room is stark: white light, white walls, white tablecloths. The waiting staff, dressed head to toe in heavy white cotton, have an austere, almost monastic quality about them. To the uninitiated, they can appear stern and serious, the dining room cold, formal and intimidating. Yet to eat in this dining room is to sit in a buzzy, relaxed and welcoming environment. The waiters are envisioned as “sentinels of joy…friendly… knowledgable” (Rushton, p. 94).
Whilst the menu presented to a diner today may look very similar to the ones presented to a diner at the restaurant in 1994, there is plenty of innovation here too. The bar (which is worth a trip in its own right) is stocked with the best craft beer from the most interesting breweries local to the restaurant. Adhering to the policy of favouring local produce, the wine list which is exclusively French balances household names and varieties with newer, more experimental natural offerings from artisanal producers.
Time and again, the diner is tricked by lots of little rug-pulls. On the one hand it is a restaurant selling offal, yet the food is delicious and comforting. The setting is, at least superficially, cold, stark and clinical; yet this is a restaurant which exudes warmth, hospitality and fun. The menu’s steadfast dedication to specific dishes is offset by experimentation elsewhere. These ‘tricks’, which exploit ‘bothism’, are the types of tactics which make brand ideas sticky and magnetic when executed. As horrid a phrase as ‘surprise and delight’ may be, it’s a useful strategy for businesses to employ.
In an incredibly hostile industry where some 90% of independent ventures fail within a year of opening, to remain as successful and popular as Henderson and Gulliver’s restaurant has for nearly 30 years is an amazing achievement. To describe the restaurant as ‘authentic’ is perhaps incorrect and unflattering, given the way this word is now over used in brand and marketing circles. This is a business with a point of view and a set of beliefs in how best to operate. It does not have a purpose. If feels like we increasingly conflate the need for brand purpose with the importance of a distinct point of view and a clear, well articulated position in market. Useful synonyms for ‘authenic’ that we may think about using are perhaps words like conviction, integrity, commitment, clarity…. words that St.John embodies in spades.
At its core, the restaurant has the notion of ‘nose to tail’ eating - which has provided the formula for its success - the platform from which everything else is built. St. John is not just a brilliant restaurant, but a brilliant ‘brand idea’ - an embodiment of the three key criteria which lead to those magical, enduring and influential ideas which people find hard to resist.
Bibliography
Bourdain, A. (2004). Introduction. In F. Henderson, Nose To Tail Eating (pp. i-v). London: Bloomsbury.
CraneTV. (2011, August 26). Chef Profile: Fergus Henderson. Retrieved February 2022, from Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5lLzd_GMxg
Feldwick, P. (2002). What is Brand Equity Anyway? London: World Advertising Research Center.
Grant, J. (1999). The New Marketing Manifesto. London: Orion Business.
Rushton, S. (2015). Mr Henderson. In E. King, Fantastic Man (pp. 75-95). London: Phaidon.
