Stephen Bull

Stephen Bull is a devilishly clever chap. In a notoriously precarious trade, he is one of the few restaurateurs I know never to have made a loss – not from the day of opening each of the five restaurants he has owned. Indeed, there appear to be only two moments in his life when he has made a fool of himself. The first was at Oxford when he sat before a grave panel of dons at his viva in 1965. By the end of the interview, his left leg had gone to sleep and when he got up to leave, he fell over. The second embarrassment came a few years later when he was lunching a client of his advertising agency at San Frediano – a fashionable Chelsea haunt of media types and Sloanes in the Seventies. He ordered an artichoke vinaigrette and attempted to eat the leaves.