“I had what I thought – at the time – was a very clever name," says chef Robin Gill, grinning, "We were going to call it Earth, Grain and Fire.
“Then I was walking around the restaurant as an empty space, looking for inspiration, and I could hear my Dad on my shoulder saying, 'Earth, Grain and f***ing what?!'"
Gill is sat at the the counter of the restaurant he, along with wife and business partner Sarah, opened this week, now called Darby’s. It is named for his late father.
“I lost my Dad three years ago, and he was a big part of my life. He was a lover of life, he had an incredible life and he had great taste. He hated any sort of faff and bulls***. He was black and white person, but loved the finer things in life as well.”
Irish-born Earl – Darby was a nickname – was a professional musician from the age of 14, and spent the late 50s and early 60s touring the States with his band.
“He was big lover of shellfish,” Gill adds. “He was the guy who you’d have to look out for after gigs, because he would go missing and you’d find him in the fridge scoffing prawns. He was mischievous, you know?”
Darby’s sits on the ground floor of Embassy Gardens, one of the shiny new towers in Battersea’s Nine Elms. Just over the way is the new £1 billion US Embassy – complete with gun-toting guards.
The Gills boast a string of successful, if significantly smaller, restaurants in nearby Clapham: critically acclaimed The Dairy, Italian restaurant Sorella (formerly The Manor) and snack bar Counter Culture. They were brought to Nine Elms for their knack of creating buzzy neighbourhood hangouts, of which the area – in its state of mid-regeneration – is currently in sore need. Darby’s is the only decent restaurant, bar or cafe for a good 10 minute walk through a culturally barren zone of residential buildings and construction sites.
“I was scared s***less,” he says, on the decidedly untested location. “I did take a risk, massively. There’s a lot of pressure there.”
“But there are a lot of residential [buildings] here. A lot more than I expected actually. There are a lot of people saying ‘oh thank god you’re here, there’s nothing else.’”
That must make for a captive audience?
“Literally. I can kind of kidnap them and they can’t go anywhere else,” he laughs.
Darby's has only just finished a fortnight's soft launch, but Gill already feels like it's holding onto regulars. He says he wants the place to feel “more like a club but without the membership fee, and without the snobbery behind it”.
An all-day venue – “like Groucho, business during the day, but as soon as night time comes, it’s a party” – Darby’s is at once a bar, a restaurant, a bakery, a coffee shop and a butchery, chopping up whole animals and making its own charcuterie. Gill also hopes the venue will host events and workshops – Penguin Random House publishers are moving in next door, and Gill gestures to an imaginary Stephen Fry giving a talk in the lounge area.
“There’s a lot to talk about, it’s really hard. I’ve had a couple of telephone interviews, where I just describe it, and I get a bit tongue-tied because there is so much,” he explains excitedly, eyes darting around the nearly 6000 sq ft space. He’s busy then? “I’m handcuffed to the place for a while, but I’m enjoying it.”
It’s not the first time Gill has dabbled beyond straight-up restaurants. “We used to have a delicatessen by The Dairy,” he explains. “We learnt a lot from it, but it just wasn’t very clever. It was a really bad business idea because I wanted to create everything in-house.”
Perhaps predictably, the deli is no more – it was, however, one of its economically unsound products that got him to the opportunity at Embassy Gardens.
“There was a sandwich that went up on Instagram that loads of people were going crazy about,” he says. An acquaintance from Dublin passed it onto the team from Embassy Gardens, extolling the chef's talents.
“All the stuff I’ve done over the years – and it was a ham sandwich that got me the gig.”
What a gig it is. “I was asked to come along and have a look at the site,” he says, “and asked ‘if I could do anything I wanted, what would I do?’”
Being involved in the project since the site was still under construction has allowed him to tailor the restaurant build to his vision. One of his touches is the extraction vents, which float the scent of freshly baked bread out onto the pavement. Another is the central bar, which puts draught Guinness and Italian-style cocktails within arms' reach of most tables.
There's one striking feature of the build that wasn't Gill’s design. The restaurant will service London’s first “sky pool”, a 25-metre long, glass-bottomed swimming tank opening at the end of the year, suspended 115 feet above ground between Embassy Gardens’ two residential towers.
The restaurant will run a large outdoor grill poolside, and also deliver dishes from the kitchens below to sunbathers braving the heights on the 10th floor.
“To be honest, it made me a lot more comfortable with the whole venture,” says Gill, of the potentially daunting addition to Darby’s. “Once the Sky Pool goes in, people are going to want to go see it. It’s another reason to come here – it’s going to be this Instagram moment, isn’t it?”
Gill laments that only residents (and their guests) of Embassy Gardens – where flats are priced between £960,000 and £2 million – will officially be able to take a dip in London’s latest lofty tourist attraction, but hints at possible exceptions. He references the “Goodfellas Experience” among the “Chance Cards” he’s looking to offer – vouchers that gift anything from a champagne and oysters at the bar, to a full Sunday roast.
The rest of the vision has largely been based on his father’s experiences gigging in New York. “I started thinking about him, and the music, and its timelessness and I thought, you know what, this is a place he’d love.”
He stresses that Darby’s is not an Irish restaurant, more a riff on big American institutions and their take on Irish culture. “I think, outside of Ireland, New York does the best Irish bars,” he says. “I wanted to bring a little bit of that in.”
There’s an oyster bar, for which Gill has chosen to move out of the kitchen and manage personally, gleefully shucking shellfish for uncertain first-timers. “I feel a bit like a drug pusher, you know what I mean? The first one’s free and then afterwards you pay.”
The front-of-house role also allows him to keep a pub landlord-like eye on his regulars’ likes and dislikes. Bar the attempt to convert oyster-sceptics, the menu is designed to be a comforting roster that appeals to all occasions and palates, with pasta by the plenty and steak by the gram.
“I’m not trying to be different anymore,” explains Gill, whose fine dining background includes stints at Noma and Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir aux Quat Saisons.
“I’m just trying to think of things I really like. I wanted to write a menu and cook food that everybody wants – unless you have a shellfish allergy.”
Beyond shellfish and cutting out the “bulls**t”, the elder Gill’s love of music is a cornerstone of Darby’s, a passion he passed onto his son. “I love music,” explains Robin. “If I wasn’t cooking, I would have got into music. It’s one of my biggest regrets – I’ve kind of bunked off music, compared to when I was a kid.”
Making up for lost time, Darby’s has a spot designated for live performances, and a great deal has been invested in a sound system, humming a playlist that morphs from Neil Young to old school rockabilly to funk and soul throughout the day and night.
Gill also rushes to show me the “Reserved” signs they’ve had made. Gill handed a branding company a scrapbook his Dad kept throughout his career. The brass plaques that Gill returns with are printed with a black and white photo of a group of men in suits, brandishing instruments. “That’s my dad’s band in the 50s,” he says. “He’d be the one with the trumpet, that’s him there.”
It is clear that, far from being a step-up to the flashier echelons of the London restaurant scene, Darby’s is arguably Gill’s most intimate project to date.
“It’s extremely personal,” Gill says. “I think, in other restaurants I’ve opened, I’ve kind of been a little bit more relaxed.
“I’m still calm, but it has to be perfect. I’ve put myself under an awful lot of pressure, calling it after my old man.”
