Russell Norman, restaurateur behind Polpo who blazed a trail with small plates and no reservations – obituary

Russell Norman, who has died suddenly aged 57, was an Italophile restaurateur who gained a reputation as “the coolest man in food” in the early 2010s as founder of the Venetian-style tapas restaurant Polpo.

Norman opened Polpo (Italian for “Octopus”) in Soho in 2009. Having found the English restaurants he had previously worked in excessively formal, he aimed to capture the relaxed atmosphere of eateries in Italy and the US.

His unconventional formula of “small plates, loud music [and] waiters with tattoos and bed hair” was rapidly emulated by restaurants throughout London. Polpo was also renowned for its cocktails and Norman was credited with restoring the Negroni to fashionable status.

On opening, Polpo received enthusiastic reviews and was booked up for weeks at a time, but as Norman recalled, its well-heeled patrons were often “disappointed” when they turned up: “They’d look at the bare brick walls and the exposed filament light-bulbs, the rough butcher paper place-mat and the reclaimed cutlery, and they’d wonder: what’s all the fuss about? They were coming out for a fancy-pants destination restaurant experience, and they were getting this backstreet wine bar.”

He rapidly decided to institute a no-reservation policy, lowering his prices and relying on a younger crowd who worked and played near Soho and were happy to turn up on the off-chance of a table. Both the no-frills aesthetic and the no-reservation policy were, again, widely copied – the latter to the annoyance of London’s less spontaneous gourmets.

Polpo in Soho – Julian Eales/Alamy

Within two years, and in the teeth of recession and the fall-out from the financial crisis, Norman and his business partner Richard Beatty had opened four more restaurants in London: the Polpo clones Polpetta and Da Polpo; Spuntino, a New York-style Italian diner; and Mishkin’s, a combination of East End caff and Lower East Side Jewish deli, in Covent Garden.

Norman was a serious cook, and his 2012 book Polpo: A Venetian Cookbook (of Sorts) was critically acclaimed and beat Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies to win the Waterstones Book of the Year Award. And yet he admitted that the food in his restaurants was not haute cuisine: “It’s supposed to be comfort food. It’s supposed to be … a little bland.” It was his young, slightly edgy clientele rather than his food that saw him hailed as London’s coolest restaurateur; it helped that he was himself tall and very good-looking.

Norman and Beatty opened a total of 17 new restaurants together, but Norman came to lose his sense of the romanticism of the trade. “Like with Tinkerbell when her light fades, I felt that the original idea of Polpo has always been slightly tarnished by subsequent Polpos.”

In 2017 Polpo Group’s major investor suddenly withdrew. “There we were, a scruffy, boutique restaurant group set up by two mates from Sunderland Polytechnic suddenly left with a huge corporate structure, still committed to sites we now couldn’t afford.”

Norman stepped down from Polpo Group in 2020, a promised pay-out not materialising owing to the financial difficulties caused by the pandemic.

The cookbook beat Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies to win the Waterstones Book of the Year Award

He vowed never to go through the trauma of opening another restaurant, but within a year he had changed his mind and established Trattoria Brutto (from the Italian expression “brutto ma buono” – “ugly but good”), a Florentine-inspired eatery, on the old site of Mark Hix’s Oyster and Chop House by Smithfield Market.

It was to be Norman’s sole professional focus from then on. “I’m 55. I’m going to work until I’m too old to, or until my wife tells me to stop. If Brutto succeeds and I can run it for the next 15 or 20 years I’d be very happy,” he said in 2021.

Russell Norman was born in Ealing on December 9 1965, one of six sons of Ernest Newman, a toolmaker, and his wife Carole, née Giddy, who divorced when Russell was small. He grew up in Twickenham and attended Heathland School, Hounslow.

His family was bemused by Russell’s preference for Shakespeare over sport, and he later confessed to feeling like “the black sheep of the family” – “It’s me, not them. I’m the prickly one.” He chose to put some distance between himself and the family home, and studied English at Sunderland Polytechnic. He went on to work as an arts administrator for Easington District Council, “trying to engage ex-miners in community arts”, before giving it up to work as a bartender back in London.

Fig, Prosciutto and Mint at Polpo – Andrew Crowley

From 1990 he was the Saturday maitre d’ at Joe Allen, the Covent Garden restaurant favoured by the theatrical profession, where he had to rapidly learn which critics could and could not be seated at adjacent tables. After fathering a son, he studied for a teaching qualification at the University of London Institute of Education and went on to be head of Drama at Bentley Wood High School, but continued to work at Joe Allen on Saturdays.

He eventually went into restaurant management full-time, and in 2006 was recommended by Mark Hix, chef-director at Caprice Holdings (owner of the Ivy and other restaurants), to be its Operations Director. He loved the job until the financial crisis brought in a new emphasis on cost-cutting and he decided to strike out on his own with Polpo.

In 2014 Norman hosted the BBC Two series The Restaurant Man, in which he guided fledgling restaurateurs in establishing their businesses, and he was often a guest cook on Saturday Kitchen. He was a witty writer and a contributing editor to Esquire.

He remained addicted to the nightly buzz that came with a restaurant filling up: “It’s almost tangible and you just sort of start to feel ‘wow, it’s happening’. It’s like someone’s plugged you into the mains.”

Russell Norman married, in 2004, Jules McNally, whom he had met as a fellow teacher; she survives him with their two daughters and Ollie, a son from a previous relationship, who has followed him into the restaurant trade.

Russell Norman, born December 9 1965, died November 23 2023

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