In the cut-throat world of restaurants, you often only get one shot at making it work. History is full of restaurant owners who have come from overseas to chance their arm in the capital’s competitive eating out sector only to leave with their tails between their legs never to be seen again. In London, you need to make your debut count.
Unless of course you’re Jody Williams, the founder of New York restaurant Buvette. Having expanded her chic ‘gastrothèque’ from New York’s West Village to Paris, Seoul and Tokyo, Williams crossed the pond to open Buvette in Notting Hill in 2020 at a challenging time in the restaurant world to say the least. Dogged by lockdown restrictions and flip-flopping Government policy on what restaurants were and were not allowed to do, the Blenheim Crescent restaurant became another closure statistic, and that should have been the end of Williams’ London dream.
Except it wasn’t. Instead, she is sitting in Buvette’s second London iteration talking to me a day ahead of its grand opening as French accordion music plays in the background. Buvette is back.
“Everything has its moment and timing,” Williams says of her ill-fated first London restaurant, which closed its doors in 2024. “Notting Hill was a wonderful neighbourhood, there’s great people and it was a great building, two doors down from cook shop bookstore (Books for Cooks) but timing wise it was super challenging.
“It was a small corner site. Notting Hill is not a sleepy place, but it is quieter than we are used to and it was challenging to open and close in lockdown, then to become a takeout spot. We are lucky to land in beautiful places, but it was the wrong moment for us.”
Galvanised rather than deterred by the experience, Williams set about finding another location for Buvette. Her talent for landing in beautiful places has led her to an even better spot opposite the new St John in Neals Yard in a long, narrow site that was once home to St John Bakery. The site is perfectly suited to a Buvette, mirroring the narrow, counter-led format of the original New York site, and blending almost seamlessly with the relaxed, all-day vibe of Neal’s Yard.
Was there ever a point when she didn’t think she would reopen in London? “Oh no,” is Williams’ reply, almost shocked by the question. “I learned that we love being here. There are so many Brits in the West Village, the world is so small when connecting Tokyo to New York to London. London is full of people who love food, it’s a great audience of people to cook and eat with. I just want to be here and eat and drink. I was always going to open here again.”
West Village beginnings
This year the original Buvette, located in the heart of New York’s West Village, celebrates its fifteenth birthday. Launched by Williams in 2011 it occupies the site that was once home to soul food restaurant Pink Tea Cup. When Williams learnt it had gone up for sale she wrote a letter to the landlord and I presented her idea of a French restaurant that would operate from sunlight to candlelight.
“They met with me and took a chance,” she says. “It was a narrow site and Buvette has this squeeze in and eat and drink all day kind of vibe. There’s a little terrace at the back with wicker fencing. It shares similarities with this tiny terrace here at Neal’s Yard.”
What beguiled the landlords at the meeting went on to charm New Yorkers, with Buvette now a well-established part of the city’s dining scene. It’s all the more impressive considering that Williams, a self-taught chef, didn’t enter the industry until she was almost 35 years old, having previously studied history and chosen to travel before her love of food and cooking took hold. She went on to spend five years in Italy cooking at “modest and excellent kitchens” where her love for the trade flourished.
I tell people when you make a decision, if you’re nervous and scared, you’re moving in the right direction
“The passion for food, language and culture, I couldn’t escape it,” she says. “If there is a chef inside you, you’re not going to escape it. I thought about how I could take my experiences and do something with them and the idea of Buvette was born.”
Williams has gone on to use her time spent in Italy to help inform her restaurants, opening Via Carota, which is described as an Italian osteria ‘equal parts inventive and nostalgic’ with her wife and fellow chef Rita Sodi in 2014. Sodi had already opened Italian restaurant I Sodi in the neighbourhood in 2008 and the couple together now operate Officina 1397, a family of restaurants that also include morning-till-late Italian spot Bar Pisellino, and early American tavern The Commerce Inn. Yet it was with French cooking that she chose to make her debut with Buvette and which has become the group’s only roll out brand.
“One of the most important things about running restaurants is that the eye must travel,” says Williams, who says she took inspiration for Buvette from the cafes of Paris as well as the bacaros of Venice where, with little more than a small grill, panini press and an espresso machine, delicious but simple food and drinks are served.
“With my chef training I wanted to take big ideas and reduce it down to a bite and drink. Buvette feels a bit unfettered from where a restaurant takes you.”
The Buvette way
The Buvette of Neal’s Yard has stayed true to Williams’ original vision in both the food and its overall vibe. The menu in London is practically identical to what is served at West Village, with breakfast options that include waffles; various croques; and eggs with either bacon, prosciutto and parmesan, goats’ cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, or smoked salmon and creme fraiche. For lunch dishes such as salade nicoise and steak tartare are added, while for dinner there’s a change of pace with more meat and fish dishes - mussels with curry and fries; snails; coq au vin; duck and pork cassoulet. The only discernible difference is the selection of cheeses on offer, Neal’s Yard Dairy being the obvious source for the London restaurant.
“Our bar is the engine,” Williams says of the narrow restaurant. “It’s tight but we do a lot of things. People are eating in many different ways and there are lots of travellers in London who need a place and who are not always tied to a breakfast, lunch or dinner, which really suits where we are and how we work. When I go to restaurants, I really want to order all the sides or have two salads. It feels like a no-no in some places and I don’t like that. Here you can have whatever you want and come whenever you want.”
London is full of people who love food, it’s a great audience of people to cook and eat with
This ethos carries on into the service style of Buvette, which Williams says is more comparable to that of a pub than a restaurant. Tables aren’t set, but rather plates are stacked and cutlery bunched together on each. Diners are expected to pour their own water and wine.
“You hang up your own coats, you reach across and grab your plates, you pour your own water. People are required to organise themselves. It’s like going to a pub, you don’t wait to be seated, you go right in and sit down. I love that. We have purposeful engagement with everybody, but what makes us unique are those are rituals that define you. The pressure for businesses to conform is tough.”
International expansion
What all this amounts to is a confidence - not to be confused with arrogance - in what Buvette is. It also demonstrates the joy Williams has in serving people the way she likes and creating spaces that are true to herself. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her decision to open a Buvette in Paris in 2013, which is rather like taking coals to Newcastle.
While the Paris restaurant closed in December after almost 13 years, it showed Buvette’s ability to become one with its surrounds and Williams’ propensity to take a risk.
“I thought my French cooking would get better,” says Williams of the move. “They have the best ingredients [in France], and I would learn a lot so of course that’s what I should do. It was to become a better chef and creator. [Expansion] is always a little self-serving thing. It wasn’t about whether I would succeed or not.”
That said, she was under no illusions at the time that an American coming over to cook French food in Europe’s gastronomic capital would not be without its challenges. “You make decisions to go and do big hard things because it’s exciting and you learn,” she says. “I just go in the direction that feels not safe, but which seems interesting. It’s good for me and the people around me.
“It may be terribly foolish, but I’m OK to fail. I tell people when you make a decision, if you’re nervous and scared, you’re moving in the right direction. I’m more about how we are going to enjoy it along the way.”
Buvette has become something of an accidental brand, with Williams now also operating restaurants in Tokyo, which opened in 2018, and Seoul (2022).
“For 17 years my wife and I have been making restaurants where we want to spend our time,” she says. “We’ve realised that we’ve built brands, but we never set out to do it. I set out to make a great tarte tatin and to learn how to cook.”
Buvette’s trajectory is in stark contrast to that of another recent New York import - Carbone. While both started out as popular neighbourhood restaurants, Carbone has expanded in scale and ambition with every new location, with its latest huge and glitzy site in Mayfair a far cry from the Brooklyn original. In Buvette’s case, every restaurant is similar in size and style - each has its trademark tin ceiling, a nod to New York - and feel, with Williams saying she has a personal connection with the location of every Buvette.
“I totally admire and am inspired by all these big players,” says Williams when I point this out. “Carbone’s tomato sauce [being worth $100m] is an unbelievably beautiful story. Just to know that’s out there and you can do that is inspiring. But it’s comparing apples and oranges with how we’re doing it.”
Each Buvette does have its own personality though, and Williams says there is no one specific red colour that is used for each site, or one design rule set in stone. “We bring with us a lot of character and principles that are important to us and that manifests itself into every single detail, but it’s important that it doesn’t have to match.”
We’ve realised that we’ve built brands, but we never set out to do it. I set out to make a great tarte tatin and to learn how to cook
She also doesn’t believe in perfection, pointing to the ‘B’ in Buvette’s hand painted logo that resembles more an ‘l’. “It doesn’t even look like a B,” she says with a casual wave of the hand. “Oops. The Japanese would call that wabi-sabi (a view centred on finding beauty in imperfection). It’s important to have that human element and to let it be.”
Maybe this attitude, more than anything, explains Williams’ calm yet indomitable nature. Notting Hill may have been another oops moment but one that had its place in the story of Buvette, and which is part of its tenacious charm. Williams knows first-hand that London can be tough, but one feels she knows she can be tougher.
“None of my restaurant have happened overnight, we’ve really worked hard and struggled to get or places full with the right people so we just have to do that here,” she says of the task ahead.
“You need patience and you hone your technique along the way, and we just have to do that. We want people to discover us. If we put our heads down, do the job and really own it and it will happen.”