13
Cité limits
The October opening of Bob Bob Ricard City was met with much fanfare, with several publications covering this gleaming ‘new’ restaurant in the Leadenhall Building. This confused Hedgehog, who recalls the opening of a strikingly similar establishment, Bob Bob Cité, on the same site in 2019. So what’s going on? ‘It is a new restaurant, to all intents and purposes,’ restaurateur Leonid Shutov reassures me. ‘We have made some dramatic changes – most of the decorative elements have been changed. A lot of the infrastructure was brand new, so there was no need to change that but, aesthetically, it feels a different restaurant even to the people who have been there before and have come back.’ The previous incarnation was ‘very loosely a sister restaurant’ of Shutov’s original Bob Bob Ricard in Soho, which opened in 2006 and became famous for its ‘press for champagne’ buttons at every table. The new Square Mile Bob Bob is a full Ricard sibling, Shutov says, built ‘on everything we know and we already do well there’ but ‘at greater scale’. As if to make the point, he plans to open his third Bob Bob Ricard, in Tokyo, in 2023. At least, on a different continent, there won’t be any ambiguity there.
The new Marylebone?
To St Petersburgh Place in Bayswater, to join an A-list crowd at a party thrown by upmarket property developer Finchatton to unveil its transformation of the old Whiteleys building. Arriving just in time to
catch Jessie J’s (inset) fi rst live gig since the start of the pandemic (with an audience that included Lottie Moss, Clara Paget and Jade Parfi tt), Hedgehog admired the revamped building, which, thanks to an audacious £1 billion Foster + Partners treatment, is being transformed into 110 luxurious apartments and
Designed by Shayne Brady, the interior of Bob Bob Ricard City is inspired by the Royal Yacht Britannia and modern superyachts
will duly house London’s fi rst Six Senses hotel and spa, opening next year. ‘I am very excited,’ said Finchatton co-founder Alex Michelin, shouting over the top of guest DJ Amber Le Bon’s beats. ‘The idea is to transform Queensway into the next Marylebone.’ Sounds ambitious? I gather the apartments start at around £10 million.
AFTER A DECADE in which the most eye-catching company valuations have
often been driven by the promise
of money that might be made somewhere, some time in the future, are things about to change? Could doughty, dependable ‘value’ stocks – powered by infl ation – be about to overshadow the fl ashy ‘growth’ stocks that have had it so good? One person who believes less glamorous fi rms – such as carmakers, banks, airlines and mining companies – could be about to have a moment in the sun is Russ Mould, investment director at stockbroker AJ Bell.
‘We have seen “value” outperform “growth” globally since summer 2020, despite the ongoing rise of Apple and so on,’ he observes. Looking ahead, Mould predicts we will ‘see “value” and “jam-today” outperforming “growth” and “jam-tomorrow”... cyclicals outperforming tech’. That doesn’t mean tech stocks are about to crater. ‘But why would you have to pay a premium for their growth when there’s growth lying around in the street at a much lower multiple?’ In other words, don’t be surprised if there’s a reordering at the top of the FTSE 100.
IS WFH OR ‘HYBRID’ working the answer to the UK’s much-maligned productivity problem? Not according to the economist Ruth Lea, economic adviser to Arbuthnot Latham. ‘Staff don’t get the sort of synergy when they’re working from home,’ Lea tells me. ‘They don’t get the creativity, the mixture of ideas. Zoom, Microsoft Teams... it ain’t the same. You don’t pick up on things, and actually people miss people – even the ones they hate.’ S
PAUL WINCH FURNESS
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