The Independent - United Kingdom; Mar 14, 2001
BY DARIUS SANAI

The man who ate the great British lunch hour how Julian Metcalfe turned Prêt a Manger into the McDonald's of the sandwich business, and is now making a meal out of sushi

Julian Metcalfe is becoming annoyed. We are in a smart restaurant in Soho, London, having ordered lunch 40 minutes ago. The waiter has been hovering with offers of more bread, more mineral water, another glass of Chardonnay. But there is still no sign of our food. "This is precisely, precisely what I was talking about when you asked me why I have done what I've done," he says to me, tapping a hand on the table. "I mean, who has an hour and a half spare to have lunch these days? Do you? Do I?"

Mr Metcalfe, the co-founder of Prêt A Manger and the man as responsible as anyone else for changing the way most urban office workers eat lunch over the past 15 years, is not someone who likes to dawdle. His mind is constantly in overdrive. "Is it value for money?" Mr Metcalfe says, to nobody in particular, when the food finally arrives. He examines a bit of sea-bass on the end of his fork. "It's very good. I suppose it's good value. But pounds 20. I don't know. And it takes so long."

Mr Metcalfe's lunch guests can be forgiven for not sharing concerns about his wallet. In January, he sold a third of Prêt A Manger, the revolutionary sandwich-shop chain he co-founded in 1986, to McDonald's for pounds 26m, in a deal that drew gasps across the chattering classes. Prêt, as it is known to a generation of office workers familiar with its bright shops, breezy service and displays of fresh food "always made on the premises today", is the antithesis of the American burger giant. After 15 years of steady growth in the hands of Mr Metcalfe and his co-founder, Sinclair Beecham, Prêt has a staff of more than 2,000, an annual turnover of pounds 100m and 107 outlets.

Two years ago, McDonald's had signalled its intention to diversify from burgers when it bought Aroma, the British coffee-shop chain, for an estimated pounds 10m to pounds 15m. Around the same time, it bought a minority stake in Chipotle Mexican Grill, a chain of 18 fast-food restaurants in Denver, Colorado. But the Prêt deal was the subject of radio phone-ins, national newspaper editorials and hand-wringing on the opinion pages.

A politically correct British success story (the chain uses no preservatives and no GM products) had sold out to the symbol of faceless global greed. Was Mr Metcalfe surprised by the reaction? "No, not really," he says. "I knew the press would have a field day. In this country the press love to knock a big American giant. McDonald's is seen as being brash and a bad employer of people. Quite why people think its attitude towards its staff is any worse than any big supermarket is a mystery to me."

But Prêt markets itself extolling the virtues of its chemical-free, healthy food, while McDonald's is rather different, isn't it? "It uses topside of beef and only topside," he says. "The same stuff people have for their Sunday roasts. People think they put all kinds of mixes of different cuts of beef into their hamburgers. They don't. They have among the tightest quality controls of any company in the world. I don't think McDonald's have been very good at retaliation. They should tell people. People know our food doesn't have any chemicals or preservatives in it because I tell them."

Isn't McDonald's the company that launched a lengthy, and ultimately self-defeating libel case, that ended in a pyrrhic victory against two bedraggled environmental campaigners? Don't they raze South American jungle to create grazing for their cattle? "They don't operate a single farm anywhere in the world, and rainforest is being cut down after pressure from just about every business," he says. "And I wouldn't have thought rainforest makes particularly good grazing ground for cattle. It's probably diabolical." I'm not sure if he's joking.

Mr Metcalfe has an unlikely background for a champion of trendy food causes. He went to Harrow and studied estate management, the classic route into the conservative, lucrative trade of the chartered surveyor. He started Prêt after meeting Mr Beecham at Central London Polytechnic, where they were reading property law.

After numerous unsatisfactory experiences with the greasy, packed sandwich bars that formed almost the only option for a rapid lunch, they decided to start their own place, where all the food was prepared and packaged at the beginning of each day - meaning fresh food with no queues. It was an instant success, providing quality food for a price matched only by greasy sandwich and burger bars.

Mr Metcalfe's insistence on the finest-quality ingredients, and on keeping additives out, matched the early Nineties' concern for healthy eating at a reasonable price. The 100th Prêt opened in 2000 and, although the two founders appointed Andrew Rolfe as chief executive in 1998, Mr Metcalfe is as hands-on in the creative process as he ever was.

We had met at Itsu, the second member of a new food concept he is creating, a colourful chrome-and-glass premises serving Japanese food on a conveyor belt. The Itsu in Soho is the second in London, and Mr Metcalfe is opening branches in Madrid and Tokyo later this year. But Itsu was full of loud creative types and loud music and unsuitable for an interview, so we went over the road to the famous Soho restaurant with the slow service.

Mr Metcalfe is a big, manic man of 40, with a grey suit and wrinkled jacket, below a face that looks slightly anguished, as if to say he will never be happy with his lot, even if he creates a Prêt to go with every McDonald's in the world.

There have been suggestions that the money he and Mr Beecham, the financial brain of the operation, made from the McDonald's deal has not been earmarked for global expansion, as initially announced. Was the deal perhaps Mr Metcalfe's initial step in graduating out of the sandwich trade as a multi- millionaire?

"Money?" he says. "If it was to get money I could have had five times more from tons of sources. The vast majority of the money went straight back into Prêt. We never saw most of it. It was the total opposite of doing it for the money. We could have gone public. Or sold ourselves. Can you imagine how much a UK conglomerate would have paid for Prêt? I could have retired to the Bahamas. But I don't want to. I need new challenges, and the overseas expansion we can now do after the deal is an incredible challenge."

Why expand? Why not stay small and beautiful? "I have always said from day one I want to build Prêt into a global company. I love the challenge of it. I love the idea of Prêt opening across the world selling preservative- and chemical-free food." With the help of the Golden Arches, presumably. "We've been having discussions with McDonald's for many years, since the start of the Nineties," he says. "It took years for them to say they'd be happy with a minority interest. They wanted more. Big companies don't take minority interests in little companies. They buy them, it's much easier. But they trust us and we trust them. It's a matter of using their know-how."

He says that if you reject the loose-franchise model, as he does because he believes loss of control inevitably means loss of quality, expanding overseas is enormously difficult. "We have to go in there and set up an operation ourselves, wherever we want to go," he says. He tried for years to move into Holland. "The planning laws are very different and it took us a year to realize we were going to fail. It's a funny system. You can't sell food in Holland unless you have a license and there's a closed shop for licenses. The result is the worst food in Europe."

The first Prêt in America, on Wall Street, which opened last year, is doing as well as any of his shops in London, Mr Metcalfe says. "Considering we don't have a brand there it's very encouraging." There are plans to open seven more New York stores this year. "And after that we will spread to Boston and Chicago." Casual visitors to Manhattan could be forgiven for thinking the last thing New York needs is another food outlet; it is a city where you can find an organic poppyseed smoked salmon bagel at four in the morning, and where the quality of snack-foods such as those served by Prêt is in a different league to those in London. So what was Pret's brand differentiator, its unique selling point (USP), in New York?

"They don't know about GM-free, it's true, they think GM is General Motors," says Mr Metcalfe. "But nobody offers chemical-free, preservative-free food, quickly, at our prices, not even remotely." But why would a New Yorker prefer Pret's sandwiches, which look wimpy against the average massive Manhattan deli offering, to their own? "Yes, you can buy a good sandwich in New York now, a fresh, homemade, delicious product, but you have to queue for a quarter of an hour while they make it. It's unacceptable but they do it because they have no choice."

The combination of factors that make Prêt unique - and successful - in the UK will be the same in Prets around the world, Mr Metcalfe says. Other outlets in other countries may offer good-quality sandwiches, or healthy, additive-free food, or sandwiches made on the premises that day, or cheery and rapid customer service, but nobody offers all of these things.

But is Prêt still unique? The nearest

branch to The Independent's offices is at Canary Wharf, in the reborn London Docklands, ringed by competitors and imitators, including two gourmet outlets offering customized sandwiches made in front of you (thus even fresher than Pret's offerings), a health food cafe, a salt-beef bar, three general sandwich-and-lunch outlets, a soup bar, a salad shop, Burger King, Boots's sandwiches, Tesco's sandwich and pizza section, a sushi bar, two old-fashioned Italian-style cafes ...

Times have changed since Mr Metcalfe started the revolution with Prêt 15 years ago.

"The major difference between Prêt and all its competitors is we make our food right there and they don't," Mr Metcalfe says, a touch huffily. "You can definitely taste the difference. Shops like Eat open, our sales go down a bit, then they go back up again and the other shops close and it's fine. With us, it's that last 5 per cent that makes all the difference."

Mr Metcalfe is known for his obsessive micromanagement of the sandwich- making process. "That's the difference between mediocre and great and it's extremely elusive and some of our sandwiches are bloody great, they really work. It takes years - years - of relationships with the suppliers to get the right cheese, to get the right seasoning mix in the mayo. You can't just go and buy Hellman's mix and bung it together. It looks so simple but it isn't."

This begs the question of how, if Pret's success is, in large part, down to Mr Metcalfe's obsessive quality-control, the formula can be successfully extended to hundreds of shops around the world? "That's exactly the reason why we did the McDonald's deal," he says. "We didn't do it for any reason other than the fact that they operate in 120 countries. The last thing in the world they want to do is change us or screw about with our winning formula."

Even accepting the American company's undoubted expertise in dealing with different markets, how can they make sure the Prêt quality is as good everywhere? "Well, there are controls and training, aren't there," says Mr Metcalfe. "BMWs are well-serviced whatever country you're in, aren't they? It's all to do with controls." (International quality-control is something BMW, with factories in South Africa and America as well as Germany, has struggled with for years. But we'll let that pass.)

Mr Metcalfe says London's record levels of retail rents have been an issue. "For the last few years it's been preposterous. We are terrified of having to put our prices up to our customers and it means that in some streets we just never gain representation. It's not good for anyone, the customer, us, the landlord or the market."

Apart from Pret's growing pains, Mr Metcalfe has another pressing concern on his hands. This is the nurturing of his other baby, Itsu. The first Itsu opened in 1997 as a Japanese-style sushi bar, with food wafting past customers on a conveyor-belt. Being in Brompton Cross, the chic west London shopping hangout of the It-girl generation, it also had a cocktail bar that soon became more famous than the restaurant. Itsu also found itself eclipsed by YO! Sushi, a similar concept run and rapidly expanded by another entrepreneur, Simon Woodroffe. There are now two of them in London, and Mr Metcalfe is taking his project overseas this year. "I signed the lease on Itsu long before YO! opened," he says, defensively. But hasn't his rival rather stolen his thunder? "YO! is different, substantially different," he says. "YO! is marketing-driven. We are much more focused on ingredients than YO!"

He says his reasons for starting Itsu are different to those for starting Prêt. "It's clearly not for the money," he says. "Although, of course, it's vital that Itsu does make money. But it's because I have a vision of the way I want to eat. I want delicious food at a good price, unbelievably informally. When I first saw a conveyor belt restaurant in Japan about 10 years ago it struck me as an excellent way of getting food to people and saving on staff costs."

He says the idea of taking Itsu to Japan developed when some of his regular Japanese customers approached him. The conveyor-belt eatery in Japan is very much a basic filling station, and the idea of bringing off the concept with panache appealed to them. "I don't know why, but in Japan they generally don't like to risk making changes and making mistakes. That's why we have this opportunity." Does he think attention to detail is as important for sushi as it is for sandwiches? "God, yes!' he says. "A prawn-and-rice sushi on a conveyor belt look so simple but it can take months - months - to get it right. You have to get the rice right. Then you have to ask how you cook it, how you vinegar it, how you store it, how you mould it. Then there's the ginger: which ginger, how much ginger, how do you store it, how do you season it ... Oh my God, it goes on! But then at the end you put it in your mouth and it's delicious."

I ask the king of gourmet sandwiches whether he is not, in fact, a chef manque. "No. I don't have the patience to be a chef," he says. "But I need a challenge. I'm intolerant, I'm quite impatient and I know what I want."  

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