It is Wednesday lunchtime and Sam’s Riverside near Hammersmith Bridge in West London is packed, including a private celebration in the 18-seat private dining room to one side. A young couple who walk in on the off chance of a table are disappointed to find none available – but are quite happy to eat lunch at the bar. Despite the crowd, there are so many staff on duty that drinks and dishes come very quickly when ordered. At the end of this busy service, founder Sam Harrison sat down to talk with Harden’s. 

Harden’s: Wow, is it always like this?

Sam: Well, we don’t get many quiet days. This is one of the busiest restaurants in West London – we do close to 2,000 covers a week, including 200 for Saturday lunch, 240 on Saturday evening and 250 on Sunday lunch.

There’s a lot of business around Hammersmith and not many places to take clients. This is a room full of regulars – some people come three or four times a week. But it’s not all business. We have couples, friends, people of all ages – mostly local people. There’s nothing like a buzzing room!

The atmosphere changes in the evening, when it’s even more a matter of locals. We have a lots of celebrations – birthdays, anniversaries, graduations. We’re also a venue people use for a lot of different reasons: they might be on their way to the theatre, or they’ll come because they can’t be bothered to cook at home this evening – that’s why we have a burger on the menu: it’s so comforting, a good menu always needs that, it’s a no-brainer.

How do you differentiate yourself as an independent, and how do you compete against the chains?

Fundamentally, restaurants have to come from the heart. They can’t be formulaic. The Ivy, for instance, is cut and paste, it’s cookie-cutter, whereas we take a more personal approach – we can adapt to create an atmosphere in the room that’s based on the location and the customers.

Here at Riverside, we could have fitted more tables in but we needed to make the customers feel comfortable as a first priority. It’s about hospitality: I wanted a room where I could interact with our guests, putting the customer first.

We now have Sam’s Waterside at Brentford, where we have the same standards, the same quality, the same underlying approach – but it is in many ways a different restaurant.

Waterside in Brentford opened a year ago, and there are also Sam’s Kitchens here in Hammersmith and in Chiswick, and Sam’s Larders in Hammersmith and Brentford. So as you have expanded, you’ve kept your focus very much in this stretch of West London.

I was born and brought up next door to Craven Cottage [10 minutes’ walk along the Thames Path from Riverside], and I still live in the area, so I understand the West London customer. We’ve been offered places in the City, Shoreditch and Soho, but I couldn’t be there in the same way I can be in all our six sites here – I have served customers at all six on the same day: Chiswick is 10 minutes away, Brentford is 20 minutes.

I know there’s a great volume of trade in Soho or wherever, but I don’t really know that customer. I have customer relationships going back 20 years personal ones my whole life”. In the last two months I have been to two guests’ funerals – and I feel very flattered to be part of people’s lives, it’s a real compliment. We’re very much part of the community, and I believe the benefits run both ways: we wouldn’t survive without our locals, and it wouldn’t be so good for them to live here without us.

How do you attract and keep staff – a notoriously difficult issue in the industry at these days?

We look for passionate chefs, people who cook from the heart. But beyond that, a lot of people who work for me, chefs and also front of house, have the aspiration to owning their own place, and I hope they can learn so much with us. At an independent you are exposed to all aspects of running a restaurant – marketing, PR, profit and loss, cashflow, costs, everything. Managers in chains don’t have that exposure because of the corporate structure, with accountants, HR departments and so on.

When I was 27, I was appointed General Manager of Rick Stein’s operations in Cornwall. I was way out of my depth, but I gave my life and soul to the role for four years and learned mostof what I know about about running restaurants.

You’ve had an unusual career path. Having opened and run successful restaurants for 10 years – Sam’s Brasserie in Chiswick and Harrison’s in Balham –  you sold up in 2015 and then a few years later started all over again. How did that come about?

I had been quite unwell – clearly I was suffering from some sort of burn-out – and then I received an offer that gave me an exit. I had the romantic idea of buying a hotel in the Cotswolds…

Then I was asked me to come back to the area, so I had a look at this site and it felt right – in a perfect position beside the river. I said to my investors I would do one restaurant, so my work/life balance would be better than it had been before… [Sam grins in acknowledgement that it hasn’t worked out quite like that].

Weirdly, it was lockdown that caused us to want to expand. The Covid pandemic struck just four and a half months after we opened, at a point when we had no money in the bank. Some restaurants closed down at the time because they couldn’t manage their cash flow. We survived because we had a large West London fan base – we weren’t a brand new restaurant in a sense, we had history – and we also had four months of great feedback. 

So we set up a pledge page and were quite vocal in saying ‘We need help’. We received £100,000 in pledges, which provided the cash flow we needed to survive – and it also meant we had customers who were committed to coming back when we reopened, which gave us a bit of a club feel.

We opened our storage unit at the back of the restaurant as a shop [Sam’s Larder] during Covid, then the café on the corner opposite the shop wanted to close after the pandemic, and we loved the site, so we took it on [Sam’s Kitchen].

Chiswick also felt right, and during the pandemic I was cycling along the river a couple of times of week and came across the new Brentford Project, by Ballymore, which I felt was a great community. 

We took a punt to go in early at Brentford – we were brand new and there was not a lot of footfall to start with, things were slow. But the area came alive during the summer and people are now finding us – you win a lot of favour with the residents for going in early, and we also attract people who already know us from Chiswick, as well as people from nearby areas like Ealing or Richmond or Isleworth.

It is interesting to hear that this was all in a sense a response to the pandemic. How has it changed things?

Dining out changed forever after Covid, and that has certainly shaped what Sam’s Riverside has become. More people work from home, and people don’t want to travel as much. People also eat much earlier. It used to be that we’d have no bookings before 7pm, whereas now we can be full by 5.30 or 6. And while recruiting staff is hard, a lot of my guys don’t want to commute into the West End or the City any more. 

So how do you feel about future prospects?

As a whole, considering how affluent the area is, there is still not a huge variety of restaurants in West London. That’s partly because of the lack of suitable property, which means rents are high proportionately – certainly compared with East London. 

Trade is still very unpredictable, and is pretty much the hardest trading many of us have every known. Some of the chains are faltering a bit, but if some of them don’t survive, that opens opportunities for younger people coming into the market. And there are always opportunities for good operators. I think restaurants should never be average, and that people are getting bored with some of the chains. 

Value for money, perceived value, is so important, too – I am amazed at what some restaurants get away with charging. Of course, we’re all in business to make money, but you have to take a long-term view, whereas the chains are often owned by money men who need to make a return – and if money is the object, possibly the customer will suffer.

I just hope London doesn’t become too expensive to operate in.