Roy Ackerman
Well-liked bon vivant whose many food-related enterprises included restaurants and gourmet guides
ROY ACKERMAN, who has died aged 75 after suffering a stroke, was a popular fixture on the London restaurant scene who acknowledged no conflict of interest between his roles as a restaurateur and as a publisher of restaurant guides.
A friend of many of the most famous chefs in Europe, he was also an author of cookery books, television presenter, patron of the arts and the founder of the Henley Festival.
Of ample girth, fond of cigars, sporting a ponytail and a beard resembling that of an Old Testament prophet, Ackerman was an instantly recognisable and ever-welcome figure on the London party circuit. Although often described as “flamboyant”, he was softly spoken, and never paraded his considerable intellect or his tireless work promoting British cuisine on innumerable culinary committees and organisations.
“Roy has quietly and relentlessly raised the image and profile of our industry,” observed his friend Raymond Blanc. “His other great quality is his compassion and his ability to listen and advise others without thought of reward for himself.”
Ackerman was always up for a lark, whether attempting to recreate banquets from classic artworks for a television programme with Brian Sewell, or trying to reproduce the distinctive pink custard favoured by the Teletubbies for a newspaper feature.
With his business partner Michael Golder he founded, in 1979, the company Kennedy Brookes, which came to own more than 130 restaurants and hotels around the country. Golder’s was the business brain, he claimed, “while I got to do the ‘fun’ bit” – schmoozing over long lunches, overseeing menus, carrying out surprise inspections.
The company was sold to Trusthouse Forte in 1988. Ackerman had ensured that the business looked as attractive a prospect as possible by moving a hand-picked team of his best chefs to whichever restaurant he was due to take Rocco Forte to inspect. When Forte observed that the faces in the kitchens were starting to look familiar, Ackerman was heard to murmur that all chefs look the same in their whites.
Meanwhile in 1987 he had published the first edition of the Ackerman Guide to the Best Restaurants and Hotels in the British Isles, described by Jonathan Meades as “syntactically haphazard and restaurateur-friendly”. The guide was liked within the industry because it offered an insider’s view, but critics complained that because its policy was to omit any adverse comment, a good deal of reading between the lines was required.
At first Ackerman seemed to see nothing absurd in a man who owned so many restaurants publishing a guide book. After much derision, in later editions he marked entries for his own eateries with a picture of a string vest – symbolising a vested interest.
In 1992 his publishing company bought the much more respected Egon Ronay Guide, following its founder’s retirement. In the next edition Ackerman’s restaurant 190 Queen’s Gate was granted the rare distinction of two stars, prompting the Guide’s long-standing chief inspector Michael Edwards to resign in disgust.
Those who questioned whether the proprietor had too much influence over the Ronay Guide’s editorial policy began to notice that the person named on the title page as its editor, Bernard Branco, seemed to be unknown to anybody except Ackerman.
Although Ackerman would explain to journalists that Mr Branco suffered from extreme shyness, the Independent eventually accused him of editing the Guide himself behind an alias.
The combative Egon Ronay unsurprisingly took against Ackerman, and even years after the Guides had ceased publication would frequently denounce him in public. After one such tirade in 2001, Ackerman responded: “Hardly surprising for a man whose name is an anagram of O Angry One.”
The only child of Edward Ackerman, a printer, and his wife Marjorie, Roy Ackerman was born in Bedminster, Bristol, on February 22 1942 (not, as he told Who’s Who, 1944). Attracted by the glamorous, welltravelled folk who appeared to work in the restaurant trade, he signed up for a five-year apprenticeship as a chef when he was 14 (claiming to be 16).
He took on many jobs in the hospitality trade before working in Oxford as a PA for the gargantuan George Silver, a restaurateur who often took parts as thuggish heavies in films, whom he regarded as his mentor. In the 1970s he bought a number of bistros in Oxford, working both front and back of house in evenings and at weekends while holding down a day job at a caterer’s in London. By the end of the decade he was in partnership with Michael Golder.
Against Golder’s wishes, the business was sold after nine years for £173 million, but Ackerman continued to buy restaurants. In 1994 he rescued the Fitzrovia bistro L’etoile from receivership, hired the renowned septuagenarian Soho maitre’d Elena Salvoni, and renamed the restaurant Elena’s L’etoile in her honour; she worked there until a new owner sacked her at 90.
In 1988 he bought The Gay Hussar in Soho, the favourite haunt of Labour Party grandees, from its celebrated Hungarian founder, Victor Sassie. Ackerman looked after the treasured restaurant, and abandoned plans to sell it following a campaign led by Michael Foot, amid fears that it would be turned into a sex shop.
He lived in Henley for many years, and while catering for the Regatta spotted an opportunity for utilising the marquees that remained up once the sailing was over. He launched the Henley Festival of Music and Arts in 1983, and it continues to thrive.
Not all of his enterprises were successful, however, and his time as chairman of the Catering Review Board for the Millennium Dome was characterised by the failure of his promised rotating programme of celebrity chefs, as most did not to want to have anything to do with the place.
Ackerman enjoyed appearing on cookery programmes on television, although as one critic unkindly put it, his “enormous beard is guaranteed to spoil one’s appetite at first sight”. The Chef ’s Apprentice (1989) was a series which combined Ackerman cooking alongside the likes of Anton Mosimann and Prue Leith with a dramatised history of gastronomy; a spin-off book was successful.
In 1996 for the BBC’S The Best of British he interviewed luminaries such as Sir Terence Conran and Frank Bruno about their love of food, and in 1998 he was the host of Chef for a Night on Channel 4, in which amateur cooks were let loose in the kitchens of famous restaurants; the bungling of some proved, entertainingly, too much for his patience. From 2010 he hosted Coolcucumber.tv, an online television programme which he hoped would show that the restaurant business was not all about “bad language and stress”.
Ackerman was a good man to have on one’s side in a fight. When he was chairman of the Restaurateurs’ Association of Great Britain he launched a campaign to change the law that forbade restaurants from serving alcohol to diners between 3.30 and 5.30pm. Although he received no support from the Good Food Guide
– which declared the campaign to be Londoncentric – he organised a march on Downing Street of 200 members of the Association, wearing chef ’s whites. The Licensing (Restaurant Meals) Bill duly rectified the situation in 1987.
Ackerman ran the restaurant consultancy Tadema Studios for more than 30 years, devising concepts for dozens of new restaurants. From 1988 to 1999 he was chairman of the Hotel and Catering Training Board, and was passionate about getting more home-grown young talent, especially from poorer backgrounds, into the industry. He was appointed OBE in 1991 and CBE in 2004.
He is survived by his wife Sally (née Simpson) and their two daughters, as well as a son from his first marriage to Chris Eveleigh, and a daughter from another relationship.
Roy Ackerman, born February 22 1942, died May 16 2017