They are now almost so ubiquitous that it is no longer a relevant descriptive quality. “Small plates” dining in London has been influenced by one iconic restaurant more than any other. Mr Russell Norman’s Polpo opened on Beak Street in Soho exactly 10 years ago this month and effectively laid the foundations for the bao buns, new-Thai and tapas sharing-style eating that we’re now spoiled with in this restaurant-heavy area of central London. As Mr Norman gears up to celebrate this anniversary with a party on 30 September – expect a host of chefs with serious Italian cooking credentials (including Ms Angela Hartnett and Mr Stevie Parlie) serving up Venetian specialties and a Campari room downstairs – we spoke to the restaurateur about the impact of his restaurant and how Soho and the political situation in Britain have changed how we eat out.

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How did you get involved with restaurants?

Like most people, my entry into the industry was accidental. The restaurant industry is essentially a collection of misfits, people who haven’t really decided what they want to do when they grow up. I tried to stop being a waiter. There was a period in the mid-1990s when I was teaching in a girls’ school in north London for three years. The whole time I was doing that, I was still working weekend shifts in a restaurant called Joe Allen in Covent Garden.

I realised I was kidding myself, so started a full-time role at Joe Allen. I was headhunted to take on something at a new restaurant called Zuma. They had opened with a massive amount of interest but the front-of-house team couldn’t cope. I was asked to troubleshoot and I worked out the problem quite quickly. I stayed there for three or four years, but I decided I needed a serious role to take me into middle age, which was operations director at Caprice Holdings.

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What inspired Polpo?

I was always going back to Venice. It’s a city I’ve always loved. While I was there, I started to notice little back-street wine bars, which Venetians called bacari. You get all walks of society and Venetian life. You’ll have the chief of police standing next to the market trader gossiping about the mayor. Or you’ll have a gondolier chatting to a bank manager. They are melting pots, social clubs for the community to come together and have a glass of wine. I wondered if it was something that could work in London.

I met my best friend Richard in 1986 and we went to Venice the next year. After he sold a business [in 2009], he suggested we open our own restaurant and base it on those places in Venice. I resigned from Caprice and took a punt after we found a site on Beak Street.

This was around the time Lehman Brothers collapsed and things started to go wrong financially. It was a strange market, which is actually very similar to the atmosphere I’m feeling in the industry now. In 2009, the uncertainty was because of the financial meltdown and now there is a great deal of uncertainty because of Brexit. There are huge rent increases and perverse business rates. I think the opportunities will come once we know what we’re doing with Brexit.

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How is that affecting the restaurant industry?

Landlords will have to rethink things. It might be a buyers’ market. Restaurant companies will have a better deal on the high street and in Soho and Mayfair because there isn’t a huge amount of opportunity. We will find a return to zero premiums, which is exactly the same situation we found ourselves in when we were looking in 2009. I feel the doom and gloom, but I try and see a silver lining. We’re already feeling the pressure with the cost of ingredients, simply because the pound is atrocious against the euro. It’s the same with our suppliers. We’re a Venetian sharing-plates restaurant with exclusively Italian wines. And even though the price of the wines hasn’t gone up, it has in real terms because of the exchange rate. Even superstars such as Jamie Oliver are suffering. There is a significant softening of mid-range restaurants. It’s made us wake up and think, crikey, we need to up our game.

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How has Polpo influenced other restaurants?

Polpo was always connected with small sharing plates because in the back streets of Venice that’s what you get. You stand about with your friends and you share. It was also the way I like to eat. I’m always stealing my colleagues’ or family’s food. It didn’t compute to have anything other than a family-style menu for Polpo. I wanted it to be convivial. People got the idea. The traditions of Greek cooking had prepared people for mezze style. Wagamama predated Polpo by several years. They have a family-style, sharing-everything mentality. It wasn’t a revolution, but it was one of the first restaurants to do that as a USP. Now it’s ubiquitous. It’s nice that the majority of people want to eat in that way.

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How was Soho changed over the past decade?

When we opened in 2009, there were some long-established classics in the neighbourhood such as Andrew Edmunds, which opened in the 1980s and I still love. There’s an Italian on Poland Street called Vasco & Piero’s Pavilion, which has been there for ever. There wasn’t the current community of cool, individual, independent restaurants. Soho for me was always about Old Compton Street, Frith, Greek, Wardour. We opened Polpo near Carnaby Street, which wasn’t really a restaurant destination, but it became so after Polpo opened. Each time a restaurant opened we wondered if we’d see a drop in sales, but we didn’t. It established that part of Soho as somewhere you could go for a great night out without having to book weeks in advance. At Polpo, you could just walk in. All the restaurants that have opened in the past 10 years have been brilliant.

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Where do you like to eat in Soho?

I still go into Andrew Edmunds. I love Kiln on Brewer Street. Bocca di Lupo is still a fantastic place. I like the fact that we have a greasy spoon in Soho. It’s called Bar Bruno on Wardour Street. I love going in for a bacon sandwich and a mug of strong tea. Even some of the chains that have opened are doing decent stuff. The Ivy on Broadwick Street is always busy. We’re about to get a Sticks’n’Sushi on Greek Street, which I’m quite excited about.

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Don’t you see chains as a symptom of the decline of Soho?

I think as long as the smaller units are taken over by independents, it’s fine. The development that houses the Ivy Soho Brasserie was a huge new building with a massive 5,000sq ft space. There’s no way an independent could afford that, so it was always going to be an organisation with a deep pocket. There is always going to be a mix of cool, scruffy independent operators and the corporate operators.

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