Welcome to The Londoner, a brand-new magazine all about the capital. Sign up to our mailing list to get two completely free editions of The Londoner every week: a Monday briefing, full of everything you need to know about that’s going on in the city; and a high-quality, in-depth weekend long-read.
No fluff, no gimmicks: just click the button below and get our unique brand of local journalism straight to your inbox.
Fancy a bargain? We're gifting you 50% off, making a Londoner subscription just £4.95 a month for your first three months. Supporting us means you're at the forefront of a new form of journalism for the capital, as well as gaining access to all of our members-only content. Act fast though, it can't stay forever.
It was only a few minutes after the Michelin man left that Victor Garvey decided to pull his pants down. It was late afternoon on 25 February 2021 and Garvey, a renowned London chef, was on top of the world. Sola, his flagship restaurant in Soho, where a set 11-course meal is £159 per person, had just been awarded a Michelin star.
Barely 1% of the capital’s thousands of restaurants receive the honour, and that afternoon they were celebrating the arrival of the official plaque. It was a coming together of staff and collaborators, and, as with all good celebrations, there was booze. Supposedly inspired by Michelin’s prompt for its award-winning chefs to be creative with their plaques, Garvey had the brilliant idea to pose for an impromptu photoshoot with his pants down and the plaque covering his genitals — all in front of the on-looking crowd. It’s a scene that feels so perfectly drawn from a scurrilous, Kitchen Confidential-style exposé that it borders on cliché.
The award propelled Garvey into becoming one of most renowned chefs in London, one of Europe’s biggest and most hotly competitive culinary battlefields. His restaurants have since received glowing endorsements in national newspapers, with The Times restaurant critic Giles Coren calling Garvey a “wonderful guy… big-hearted, full of love and enthusiasm for the game”. In February this year, he opened an eponymous restaurant in the illustrious Midland Grand dining room at St Pancras Hotel, with The Financial Times gushing that it was the “start of something spectacular”.
But earlier this year, something changed. One morning, before the start of lunch service, Victor Garvey at the Midland Grand shut. It was open less than five months. After receiving a tip off from a reader, we’ve spent the last two months speaking to former staff, suppliers, friends and investors to find out just what happened. The story they told was one of angry bailiffs, mid-restaurant confrontations and Warhammer 40k enthusiasts who say they've lost tens of thousands of pounds to Garvey. Now former associates are calling for Sola to be stripped of its Michelin Star. So where did things go so wrong for Giles Coren’s “favourite kind of chef”?
“A total enthusiast”
In a culinary capital like London, standing out is nigh on impossible for chefs. But what was happening at Sola was nothing short of remarkable — and Garvey was seen as a true pioneer. It was and is the only American restaurant in London to hold a Michelin star, and is beloved by customers and food critics alike: The Financial Times’ Tim Hayward called Sola the kind of place where any and all cynics “will be converted in the end by solidly brilliant cooking from someone who turns out to be that most important and rare thing in a chef . . . a total enthusiast”. Garvey’s later appointment to run the restaurant at the Midland Grand puts him in the same category as some of the country’s most famous chefs, including Patrick Powell and Marcus Wareing.
While Sola, Garvey’s Soho flagship, opened in 2017 (as a Catalan restaurant called Rambla), the Spanish-American chef’s story truly began in 2014, when he burst onto the London culinary scene after reportedly working in some of the world’s most famous restaurants — like Noma in Copenhagen and the French Laundry in California. After helming a string of restaurants in east London, he opened Sibarita and Duende (later renamed Encant), two now-shuttered restaurants in Covent Garden, to positive reviews from outlets like the Evening Standard and the Infatuation.
It was during this time that Carole Bryon first met Garvey. With cropped brown hair and a soft French accent that glides over her vowels, even as she describes some of the most stressful experiences of her life, she spends two hours struggling to summarise her ordeal with Garvey to me. They had met through her husband: the two men were both devoted fans of Warhammer 40k — a tabletop game where armies of miniatures from a dystopian universe fight it out — and they met at a shop where enthusiasts go to challenge likeminded strangers to battles. Eventually, she would accompany them to their after-hours matches in one of Garvey’s Covent Garden restaurants. Bryon and her husband even introduced one of their Warhammer playing friends to Garvey, as he had wanted to help start a Warhammer cafe together using tens of thousands of pounds the friend had inherited.
Those facts may seem quite at odds: alpha male chefs and typically nerdy pastimes like Warhammer don’t usually mix. It’s just one way in which those I spoke to struggled to explain Garvey’s character; the sense, as one person put it, that he could be a “different person every time you see him”.
Have a tip for us? Let us know using the anonymous form below or email our editor.
In December 2016, Bryon’s mother died, and she wanted to use her inheritance to realise a long-term dream: to open a wine bar. And their restaurateur friend was keen to help — as Garvey had chosen to shutter Encant, he could sublet the lease to her. It seemed a perfect solution, one that would let her sidestep London’s temperamental commercial property market that had been causing problems for the previous year. She accepted his offer, and turned the site into the Lady of The Grapes, which opened in the summer of 2018, a cosy natural wine bar with a focus on female winemakers, with rent to be paid quarterly to Garvey.
But almost immediately after she moved in, the problems started. On a weekly basis, she recalls, gruff-looking bailiffs would turn up outside the restaurant looking for Garvey. “I was scared they would take everything,” she told me. “I had to show them invoices for everything from the wine to the furniture to prove it was ours.”
The lengths Garvey would go to sidestep debtors often bordered on the absurd. When his other nearby restaurant — Sibarita — closed after the landlord filed for eviction, the eviction notice was plastered over with a note saying the restaurant would reopen soon. When the landlord removed that note, leaving the eviction notice on show again, Garvey asked Bryon to hurriedly re-plaster over it, as he was about to visit the site with new investors and didn’t want them to know.
The eviction notice at Sibarita before and after being covered (Image by Carole Bryon)
It was around this time alarm bells started to ring: they had also found out the friend they introduced to Garvey was worried that, despite making his investment, the Warhammer cafe was never going to materialise. To date, only some of that money has been reimbursed.
Then came 10 April 2019. Bryon came to the Lady of the Grapes, ready to set up for the evening’s service, only to find the door padlocked and an eviction notice plastered on the window addressed to Victor’s company, Aula London. It turned out the rent money they’d been paying Garvey every three months for the sublet had not been sent on to the building’s landlord. (Garvey’s lawyers claim that the move was actually the result of Bryon failing to pay money they owed on the lease and that the site was sublet at a rate far below the one Garvey was paying, something contested by Bryon). It took a flood of panicked messages, meetings and money, over the next week, to counter the eviction and wrestle control of the lease. The whole saga almost cost them their lifelong dream, not to mention the over £220,000 they spent on the affair in rent, legal costs and settling outstanding debts.
Enjoying this edition? You can get two totally free editions of The Londoner every week by signing up to our regular mailing list. Just click the button below. No cost. Just old school local journalism.
Liquidators for the now insolvent Aula London — Garvey’s firm that sublet the property to Bryon — noted in their eventual report into Aula in 2021 that they had “identified a number of payments which appear to be of a personal nature concerning Mr Garvey”, but that it was not worth pursuing him for the money as he had “no known assets” (Garvey argues these related to expenses he was legitimately owed).
Sola, the star, and the £1.5mn insolvency
But despite the private discord, in public Garvey’s star continued to rise. In 2019, he opened his current flagship Sola, which quickly became a popular, if pricey, spot for London foodies. Not long after, in December 2019, chef Dimitrios Vogiazinos started working there, and over the ensuing years he slowly worked his way up the ranks, before becoming the sous chef — one of a fine dining kitchen’s most prestigious roles. Vogiazinos was an integral part of the small team at Sola that won the restaurant a Michelin Star in 2021. But in January 2023, the company running Sola — MBS Rapidez — went insolvent.
For many companies, that would be the end of their story. A fast succession of insolvency, closed doors and surrendered Michelin stars. But this was far from new for Garvey.
Sorry to interrupt. We just wanted to take you behind the scenes. Journalism of this kind is old-fashioned, boots on the ground stuff. We send our writers out into the city, away from their laptops, to be where the events they're covering are actually happening.
This sort of in-depth journalism doesn't come cheap. This is why it's getting rarer. A lot of media companies have given up on it, instead churning out clickbait articles that have little connection to local areas. But we believe people are still willing to pay for deep dive, properly reported work.
Already, nearly 900 of you have signed up as paying members to prove us right. But now we have a big target: 1,000 members. We've made it easy too: with our summer discount, a Londoner membership is just £1.25 a week. That's less than a daily coffee.
We don't rely on billionaire oligarchs, or huge companies to fund us. We just need the people of London and beyond. If you like what we're doing, please consider supporting us.
Sola, which is still open today, has been operated by three different companies since opening in 2019. Unlike previous endeavours — almost a dozen of which Garvey was a director of, according to Companies House (most are dissolved or insolvent) — the restaurant’s controlling businesses were directed alternatively by Garvey’s partner Ashley Yates or another associate, Andrew Grant. Garvey, under the title of “chef patron”, claims to serve solely as an employee with no control of management or finances, something former staff and suppliers contested. (We reached out to Grant and Yates for comment but received no on record response).
The conveyor belt of company closures has sparked fears these businesses are involved in “phoenixing”: the legal but controversial practice of having the same business trading through a series of companies that then liquidate, leaving debts unpaid. (A claim that is heavily denied by Garvey and the directors of the companies that run Sola).
For staff and suppliers, this meant spending months or years trying to collect the money they were owed, only for those debts to disappear once the insolvency went through. In reporting this story, I hear numerous stories of the extreme measures people have taken to try and collect that debt when they allegedly faced stonewalling from employees and silence from Garvey: bailiffs, storming into restaurants, following him around at the end of service.
If they ever cornered the elusive chef, those I spoke to said he would always have an explanation for where their money was. “He’d tell me that he’d sent the money, but ‘there was a problem with your bank’. I used to work for a bank for 12 years; it's not a problem with my fucking bank,” says Richard Ellison, a wine supplier who used to work with Sola but was left tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket. “If you send it by Faster Payments [the main service used for bank transfers], it's guaranteed in 24 hours, and it normally arrives within 10 seconds. So it's not a problem with my bank. My bank's fine; you just haven't sent the money.”
When MBS Rapidez went bankrupt, it did so with over £1.5mn of debt, according to liquidation reports seen by The Londoner, despite only operating for just over three years. The biggest chunk of that — some £499,000 — was to HMRC for unpaid taxes, while the rest was made up of suppliers, landlords and lenders.
According to Company’s House, after the liquidation Sola’s next management company was Sola Fine Dining Ltd, whose sole director was Yates. Vogiazinos, the former sous chef, says the insolvency passed without notice: the restaurant never closed or publicised its changed ownership. The only difference, he recalls, was that he stopped getting payslips every month. It began to grate on him, particularly as he needed proof of income to enrol his child in a nursery. In the end, he resigned in protest at the lack of payslips. “Victor begged Dimitri to stay,” recalls Efkleia Kesidou, Vogiazinos’ wife, who did most of the talking in my interview with the duo. “He said: ‘Please stay. We’re like family here.’” Eventually Garvey sent him a payslip. It wasn’t much — an amateur breakdown of his income and tax deductions made in an excel spreadsheet — but it was enough to convince Vogiazinos to stay. Three months later, he was fired.
The formal letter given to Vogiazinos said it was due to “poor performance”, but he claims he was told the real reason was that they couldn’t afford his wages. (Through his lawyers, Garvey suggested that he had actually been fired for serious misconduct, an entirely new claim not reflected in the Employment Tribunal documents.) But before he received his P45, he was told he needed to sign a document in order to get his last paycheck. Just a few lines long, it made him pledge to release his ex-boss from all liability and any money it may owe to him for any “past, present or future work”, as well as preventing any legal action. “It was an absurd document,” says Kesidou. “We just thought: ‘Wait a second, something very dodgy is happening here behind our backs.’” (Garvey’s lawyers claimed it was just a normal release form.) Vogiazinos refused to sign.
At this point, you might wonder why suppliers or staff would work with Garvey for so long, especially if they had concerns. But there were certainly positives to working for Garvey — in particular, the chance to work for a truly talented chef. He also gives significant amounts of money to LGBTQ+ charities every year and, to hear my interviewees tell it, is able to be disarmingly charming. Multi-lingual and voraciously chatty, he can give you the kind of hyper-attention that feels like a spotlight. “You either feel like you're the centre of the universe,” says Ellison, “or that you’re totally ignored.”
Vogiazinos was told by HMRC in the weeks after leaving that he wasn’t registered as paying any taxes since MBS Rapidez’s insolvency in January, despite that money being deducted from his wages each month (lawyers for Garvey claim this was to a lag between the company’s registration and when its first HMRC payments were due). Where that money went, he still doesn’t know. To try and claw back unpaid holiday pay, redundancy pay and wages, he decided to take Garvey to an employment tribunal, which was heard in July last year. Throughout the case, there was no response from his employer, until Garvey dramatically, and unexpectedly, turned up on the day of the trial. The judge ruled in Vogiazinos’ favour and awarded him nearly £16,000 (a ruling still contested by Sola Fine Dining, the company that replaced MBS Rapidez). But just days later, Sola Fine Dining declared insolvency, despite operating for just a year (the process allegedly began before the tribunal ruling). The end result for Vogiazinos was that he would never see any of that £16,000. And he’s not the only former staff member that was left out of pocket.
The Midland Grand confrontation
Just a few weeks before the closure of Garvey’s Midland Grand restaurant, Maria Wstepien was excited to get a seat. But she had no plans on eating in the luxurious St Pancras dining room. Three months previously, she had started work as a chef in Sola. The shifts were long, and the restaurant was chaotic. The other staff were angry at late wage payments and missing payslips, she claims, and within a few weeks of her arrival, people started quitting. After just over a month in the job, she joined them. But after leaving, she never received her wages, leaving her thousands of pounds out of pocket. Things were getting desperate; without any income, she was facing eviction.
She decided to go face to face with Garvey. She marched into the Midland Grand, sat down at the table and asked a server to see either Garvey or his general manager, Jonathan Dennis. After five minutes, the server returned, claiming neither of them were in work that day and that they couldn’t be located. After some curt threats from Wstepien to call the police, Dennis did appear. An argument ensued. “It was packed full of clients, and everyone could see that there was something going on,” recalls Wstepien. Later that week, she was sent most of those wages.
Most of the former investors, friends and staff we spoke to had tried to get HMRC or the police to investigate Garvey, to no avail. In Bryon’s case, they went to the police, and at first things seemed to go their way. A case was opened by a Met detective — the germanely named Paul Allgood. As it turned out, Allgood was then arrested himself, and later convicted, for downloading indecent images of children and filming a teenage schoolgirl in an upskirting incident. After years of hearing nothing from the force, Bryon was eventually told their case had been closed as it was deemed a “civil matter” by the force. When we shared our findings with HMRC, they curtly replied that they “neither confirm nor deny investigations”.
But for others, it felt like there was a more obvious avenue for accountability: Sola’s star. Many of the people I’ve spoken to have cited how, when other Michelin star-winning restaurants have had to close — even temporarily, as in the case of the Ledbury — they have surrendered their stars. Some argued the same rule should be applied to Sola, thanks to the slew of insolvencies that have shuttered its operating companies (though it would be an unprecedented step — and one vehemently opposed by Garvey — given Sola itself never shuttered).
Throughout the process, all my interviewees, often midstream through an anecdote about disappearing wages or investments, wanted to make clear that — in spite of everything — they believe Garvey is an unbelievably talented chef. But for many former friends and ex-staff, it feels like that talent has allowed other problems to go unnoticed. Vogiazinos tells me that after his treatment, and the months of ultimately wasted work that went into his tribunal, the once magnetic appeal of the sector — and the city that he and his wife were building their life around — dissipated. He and his wife ended up leaving the UK after nine years and moving back to their native Greece. Vogiazinos has also vowed to never work in the hospitality sector again. “We gave up our whole life in Greece to go to the UK because we thought the UK system is the most reliable; that they will defend you if there's something wrong,” Kesidou explains. “But what happened with Victor got to us… We did everything right, and still this happened.”
Editorial Note 27/09: This article was amended to correct the date of the death of Carole Bryon's mother and clarify the events around the Sibarita eviction.
If you enjoyed Andrew's story and want to get sent similar investigations on the city's future, why not join up as a Londoner member today? This means you'll get weekend long reads like our piece on the strange death of east London's radical bookshop and Monday briefings like our deep dive on the unsafe children's home in a property belonging to Labour MP Jas Athwal delivered straight to your inbox.
No ads, no gimmicks: just click the button below and get two high-quality pieces of local journalism each week, all for free.
Comments
How to comment:
If you are already a member,
click here to sign in
and leave a comment.
If you aren't a member,
sign up here
to be able to leave a comment.
To add your photo, click here to create a profile on Gravatar.
