Our first Lussmanns opened as an Eatery in November 2002, just off the Portobello Road in North Kensington. We quickly established ourselves as the locals’ favourite; attracting residents, office workers, builders and B-list celebrities, who would rub shoulders over coffee and croissants.
Having earned a reputation for making great sandwiches and being able to remember our locals’ favourite tipple, our name reached the BBC at White City where David Bowie, unhappy with the food offering on the Jonathon Ross show, had demanded better. Lussmanns had made it big, if only for one night!
We then branched out into ‘food-to-go’ delivered by bicycle and opened a second in-house cafe at (the then) John Brown Citrus Publishing, the current publishers of Waitrose magazine.
Unable to expand further but impatient to build on our early successes, after two years we decided it was time to move and left London for a new home in Hertfordshire in June 2004 to open a real restaurant.
Since then, Lussmanns has grown into an independent, award-winning restaurant group. Our original aim – to make sustainable dining accessible to all – still hasn’t changed.