On the website for Michael O’Hare’s new restaurant In Lamentation a video plays on loop of a person, wrapped fully in a silver sheet, making smooth, rhythmic movements. The video, and indeed the restaurant’s name, is a nod to a performance by American modern dancer Martha Graham in 1930 called Lamentation, in which Graham wears a long tube of material that symbolises a person’s ability to stretch inside their own skin ‘to witness and test the perimeters and boundaries of grief’.
For those familiar with O’Hare’s recent history, which has included the closure of his noted Leeds restaurant The Man Behind the Curtain and its spin-off concept Psycho Sandbar, eventually forcing him to declare bankruptcy, it could be regarded as something quite poignant. Yet it represents something different for the chef.
“What struck me about this particular piece of dance, and I know it’s not to everyone’s taste, is that it is unbelievably modern and avant-garde by today’s standards but it’s nearly 100 years old,” he says. “With gastronomy, anything that’s modern tends to date quite quickly. There doesn’t seem to be a wave of modern classic dishes unless they become simplified - so anything avant-garde doesn’t age that well.
“I love the Adria brothers but if you look at old dishes from El Bulli it’s all a little but rough by today’s standards. I like the idea of creating something that is still avant-garde but isn’t on trend or in vogue and which is more about modernity and having a lifespan to it rather than being a flash in the pan.”
An avant-guardian
As a chef, O’Hare set his stall out early as someone with a keen interest in the arts. Before he took up cooking, he did ballet and modern dance from the age of 11 to 18 - “I’ve got more degrees in dance than I do in cooking,” he says - and the cooking at his Leeds restaurant The Man Behind the Curtain was a masterclass in striking plates of high impact food.
Often arty, always visually engaging, dishes such as Dali to Delhi - a tikka spiced Denei red prawn served on a miniature black bakelite telephone - and Emancipation - a monochrome dish of squid ink-dyed fish and potatoes served on a canvas inspired by fish and chips and the industrial landscape of O’Hare home town of Redcar - took cues from Spanish techno-emotional cuisine as well as reflecting his own character.
There’s loads of chefs in the country who are more talented than me, but if I can be proud of anything, without being arrogant, people know it’s my food just by looking at it
It is this style of presentation that will become a hallmark of In Lamentation, O’Hare’s new restaurant, when it opens in Boston Spa in March. “I love this idea of aiming for something that is true to myself,” he says. “Without hopefully sounding too much of a wanker, I want to be an avant-garde chef, because that’s what I love. I’m never going to be the best chef in the word, but creatively I think I can be up there.”
Does he think his dishes have aged? Some have, he concedes, but other less so. “When I look back at my cookbook, which is now seven years old, there are things I’d tweak here and there but I feel like I didn’t push hard enough. It’s so easy to be led and it’s natural that it happens - you see something and think ‘that’s cool’ and before you know it everyone’s doing it and you fall into this homogenisation of gastronomy.
“The more leftfield things I’ve done haven’t aged as badly as some of the current things. I can’t see a world where Emancipation looks dated; it’s too weird to have a time and place, whereas the plant pot at Noma feels old fashioned now but at the time that it came out everyone was like ‘shit the bed it’s amazing’. And it was brilliant.”
In Lamentation
With his new venture, which will have just 16 covers and will serve a set menu of between 16 and 20 dishes, O’Hare is looking to push the envelope even further on his singular style of cooking. “With [In lamentation] I’m doubling down on everything. What worked in the past was being who I am and so I’m just going for it. I just want to cook and express myself through culinary arts, for want of a better term. I know I probably sound like a bit of a twat for saying that.”
Despite its often-unconventional appearance, O’Hare insists his food isn’t challenging. “It’s food that tastes nice and is cooked well,” is how he describes it. “The artistry that comes with that is a by-product of who I am. It’s not the purpose for doing it but my food will always look like that.
“I like to think it something I’m known for. There’s loads of chefs in the country who are more talented than me, but if I can be proud of anything, without being arrogant, people know it’s my food just by looking at it,” he continues. “I don’t think you can say that about that many chefs.
“There’s a lot of reactive cooking at the moment. The big thing is to have the name of the restaurant printed on the plate because otherwise a dish could be from anywhere. That’s not to say they are not great restaurants, but they don’t have an identity that’s maybe as personal or idiosyncratic as mine.”
At In Lamentation, O’Hare is giving nothing away to customers before they arrive. No menu is available on the website and dishes will change regularly based on what he can get his hands on.
“I don’t like the idea of the commitment of a menu - if there’s no choice what’s the point of me writing it down?,” he says. “I want the freedom to do whatever feels right. It’s not going to be complete off the cuff cooking because I don’t work like that; everything is developed and my cooking is more evolution rather than evolution.”
With only 16 cover a night, O’Hare adds that he doesn’t need large quantities of ingredients for each service, which he says gives him even more flexibility to be creative.
I like the idea of creating something that is still avant-garde but isn’t on trend or in vogue and which is more about modernity and having a lifespan to it
As for the restaurant itself, O’Hare has kept the minimalist, slightly austere look that characterised The Man Behind the Curtain but has softened it. Neutral tones of a wooden parquet floor, whitewashed walls and spotlight-lit round white tables are punctuated with some striking features that include an undulating silver fireplace (another nod to figure in the video). The dining room is smart, clean, and modern but not sterile and with more of a warmth and maturity than his previous restaurants.
The space itself has an unconventional fluidity to it (O’Hare describes it as a hybrid between walking into a chalet and high-end restaurant) with the kitchen divided into three sections that are dotted throughout the room. As they enter, guests almost walk through a kitchen area, giving them a closer connection with the chefs.
The 16 covers will be divided between six tables of two - no four tops - and a counter for four people. “That’s the perfect way to experience it and for us to serve the food,” says O’Hare of the decision. The counter is designed for people who want to come as more than a two but also for solo diners.
The end of The Man Behind the Curtain
What is striking about In Lamentation is that O’Hare still wants to do things on his terms and cook his uncompromising style of food to a very high standard. Yet he acknowledges that the world has changed since he found success at The Man Behind the Curtain and in order for him to continue in his ways he has had to adapt and make changes.
With The Man Behind the Curtain, O’Hare presided over a very successful restaurant, one that earned a Michelin star and was a regular on the UK’s Top 100 Restaurants list. But when the trading environment changed, partly as a result of Covid but also due to the cost-of-living crisis and soaring costs, the writing was on the wall.
“I found myself in a situation where the model that I had was no longer viable,” O’Hare recalls. “We couldn’t charge any more for the food, I think there’s a strong argument that it wasn’t worth any more, but with the rising costs of ingredients and overheads I wasn’t making any money.”
I just want to cook and express myself through culinary arts, for want of a better term. I know I probably sound like a bit of a twat for saying that
Like a lot of businesses, the restaurant was still taking good numbers but not making any money and was being dragged down by Covid debt so something had to change. O’Hare says his options were to lower the quality and charge less (never going to happen), reduce portion sizes and charge the same amount (offering poor value for money was also not an option), or increase prices.
“We weren’t at 100% occupancy anyway so we couldn’t charge more. Four years earlier the same meal would have been half the price, and there’s no value in that. What we needed was our overheads to be lower. I was paying £120,000 rent on a 7,500sq ft site that did 32 covers, which is unheard of. “It worked at the time, and I don’t regret but it didn’t have the longevity because the world changed and I couldn’t control that.”
O’Hare eventually settled on a fourth option, one that saw him create Psycho Sandbar in an attempt to do more volume. The more ‘surf shack’ approach was something not too dissimilar from the food at The Man Behind the Curtain but was pitched at a lower price point and was cheaper to operate.
Psycho Sandbar opened in the former The Man Behind the Curtain site in late 2023 but closed just seven months later, with O’Hare saying that it did similar numbers but took less money at a time when bills were still going up. Eventually he had no option but to fold the business.
“It was a monster that was out of control. It wasn’t cheap enough to be cheap or expensive enough to be high end. With The Man Behind the Curtain, I was fortunate enough to be able to do whatever I wanted and hope it was enough to fill it. I was now in a position of not even doing what I wanted and that was painful.
“In hindsight I probably should have closed it as The Man Behind the Curtain, but I had responsibilities. I needed a job and I had staff who relied on their incomes. In Leeds there are not a lot of other restaurant jobs at a high level.”
A fresh start
After the closure came bankruptcy, with the business collapsing and O’Hare owing more than £500,000 to HMRC. While it was an obvious low point in his career, he asserts that he left no supplier of out of pocket.
“I’m not ashamed of it, and nobody other than HMRC suffered,” he says. “There’s not a butcher that hasn’t received money for a steak that I’ve sold; I haven’t taken from one person, sold it, made a profit and run off.”
Even so, he says the process led to ‘a ton of soul searching’ as he contemplated his next move. “The Man Behind the Curtain had a level of success that was unprecedented for me. I had no right to reach that level of popularity and notoriety. When all the negatives happened, it felt like it was all in one moment, but I hadn’t had joy from the restaurant for a couple of years.”
The one unresolved issue is with people who bought gift vouchers for the Psycho Sandbar that O’Hare couldn’t honour with a closed restaurant, but he has publicly stated that any outstanding gift vouchers would be redeemed at In Lamentation.
Experiential dining doesn’t have a place in a metropolitan area anymore. If I’m going to London or Leeds for a weekend I want to experience as much of that city as I can
As a consequence of the bankruptcy, In Lamentation is not O’Hare’s business. Its backers want an outlet to “do something special”, but he says it is 100% him creatively.
This time round, however, he is creating a more sustainable business model to hopefully safeguard the restaurant while allowing him to express fully his creativity. The move out of Leeds city centre to Boston Spa has led to significant drop in rent while In Lamentation’s team will be much tighter, meaning considerably lower staffing costs. O’Hare has committed to always being in the kitchen, which he acknowledges will also help keep its running costs down.
“Fewer people are going out at a high end, there are more restaurants and less demand, so it needs to be a smaller thing,” he says. “At The Man Behind the Curtain I could cook for 300 people a week, at In Lamentation I can cook for 64 and I’m at capacity. I don’t want any more than that, I’m happy with that model.”
The restaurant will be open for four services - Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights and Saturday at lunchtime. In an ideal world he says he would not open for Saturday lunch and open on Wednesday night instead and have 12 people per service but has designed the hours so that his team have three days off.
As well as being cheaper, In Lamentation’s non city centre location has additional benefits, according to O’Hare, who believes that increased competition has made central locations a challenge for restaurants such as his.
“Experiential dining doesn’t have a place in a metropolitan area anymore,” he asserts. “If I’m going to London or Leeds for a weekend I want to experience as much of that city as I can, I don’t want to commit to a four-hour dining experience in one place unless I live there. I’d happily go to somewhere like Ynyshir though because there’s nothing else to do but eat and drink, it’s the only reason I’m there.”
Whether O’Hare can convince people to come to Boston Spa remains to be seen; the early signs are that they can with the restaurant already booked up in advance. It could be a happy ending for a restaurant that sounds anything but.
“Obviously, lamentation is a really sad word,” O’Hare concedes. “It’s bitter sorrow, isn’t it? But I love the idea that from that something beautiful can happen.”
In Lamentation opens on 5 March.