Lloyd Webber’s prize Piglet pulls in the plaudits
Musical impresario’s first restaurant – in a theatre – makes The Good Food Guide after just six months
IT MUST always be nerve-racking reading the first reviews, even for someone with as many years in the game as Andrew Lloyd Webber.
But it turns out he had no reason to be worried about his first foray into the restaurant trade.
Lord Lloyd-webber’s The Other Naughty Piglet has been chosen by the latest edition of The Good Food Guide as one of the best new places to eat in Britain, barely six months after its opening.
In fact Lord Lloyd-webber said jok- ingly that it is more popular with the critics than some of his shows.
Not content with being one of the most successful musical impresarios of the British stage, Lord Lloyd-webber has always nurtured an ambition to become a restaurateur. So he is naturally more than pleased that his first attempt has been chosen by The Good Food Guide’s secret reviewers for inclusion.
The venue, housed inside Lord Lloyd-webber’s theatre The Other Palace, in Victoria, central London, is a spin-off of one of his favourite restaurants, the Naughty Piglets in Brixton, first recommended to him by one of his children. In fact you could say he liked it so much he decided to open one of his own.
Lord Lloyd-webber, who brought us the likes of Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar and Phantom of the Opera, teamed up with the husband and wife team Joe Sharratt and Margaux Aubry, the couple responsible for the original Naughty Piglets, to make his dream of running a restaurant come true.
“I always thought that if I ever got the opportunity to put a decent restaurant into a theatre I’d do it,” Lord Lloyd-webber told The Daily Telegraph.
“The Brixton restaurant was my son’s local and he recommended it to me. I thought it was wonderful and I thought it would do really well at The Other Palace, which has a purposebuilt restaurant space we have completely refurbished.”
A large open kitchen dominates The Other Naughty Piglet, which specialises in sharing dishes, playing on the idea of a theatre within a theatre. Lord Lloyd-webber, who was The
Telegraph’s food and wine critic for five years, said: “I wanted to have something that wasn’t too expensive, a bit casual, but good, where people could hang out and talk about theatre.”
The Good Food Guide, published this week, says standout dishes include XO linguine with confit egg yolk, black pudding, BBQ pork belly and brownbutter chocolate crumble and honeycomb. It states: “Up a sweeping marble staircase, it’s a light-filled space ... overlooked by a kitchen counter where a young brigade turns out small plates of sublimely creative, flavour-driven dishes, where balance and complexity come together in flashes of inspiration. Service could hardly be more knowledgeable or more engaging.”
Lord Lloyd-webber has plans to open restaurants at some of his other theatres, on the back of The Other Naughty Piglet’s success.
As he says, tongue partly in cheek: “The critics seem to like it more than some of the shows.”
‘I wanted to have something that wasn’t too expensive ... where people could hang out and talk about theatre’