Start Up-Kindle Edition by Gilmour David H

Author:Gilmour, David H. [Gilmour, David H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wakaya Perfection LP
Published: 2011-09-17T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

A Marvelous Party

“It is my belief, you cannot deal with the most serious things in the world unless you understand the most amusing.”—Sir Winston Churchill

If ever you get the urge to open a restaurant, my advice is that you lie down until the feeling goes away.

Restaurants are a demanding, nerve-jangling, headache-inspiring, unforgiving business—one that amateurs should keep clear of at all costs. There are less painful, less exhausting, less stressful, and less heart-breaking ways to lose sleep and money.

Even the best chefs and the most experienced owners admit that running a restaurant often takes a terrible toll—on one’s psyche, on one’s physical energies, on one’s ego, as well as on one’s bank account. For a businessman like me, someone who likes to leave nothing to chance, there are just too many variables and too many potential disasters-in-waiting in the restaurant business. If you don’t know what you’re doing, and most people don’t, you’ll probably be happier banging your head against a wall.

There are, however, exceptions that prove every rule. And Drones, the restaurant that some friends and I opened in London in the 1970s, was exactly that. It was a kind of miracle.

I’d had some related experience in this kind of a business before. I was a director of Le Club, America’s first discotheque, in the 1960s. Le Club was in New York City and it was a mecca for international society. It was instructive for me, and enormous fun, to be involved with “the hippest place to be” for the most fascinating people in the world. Still, my experience at Le Club (I later became chairman in the 1980s) was nothing like the hands-on start-up of Drones.

Against all odds it was as much fun to run Drones as we (naively) imagined it would be when we conceived of the idea. From its very first night until the day we sold it ten years later, it was an endlessly amusing adjunct to my London life.

Well, perhaps not endlessly amusing… One of the unexpected results of Drones’ success was that until I got an unlisted number, my phone rang day and night. My low celebrity profile had led hurried journalists to jump to the conclusion that David Gilmour, rock star, was the David Gilmour of Drones.

I have lived in 16 homes since my time in London, but I still keep an unlisted number. As a result, I sleep much better than I used to when the phone rang at all hours. I like to say that it was far too exhausting entertaining all those beautiful young women who wanted to come around in the middle of the night to talk to me about Pink Floyd, but for some reason Jill finds this less amusing than I do.

Drones became an institution—a meeting place of London’s most elegant, most successful, most colourful, and most interesting people. I can see it vividly still in my mind’s eye: the white and black harlequin floor; the hanging, galvanized buckets full of scarlet geraniums, the framed

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