He's one of London’s most famous chefs. So why do so many people say Victor Garvey owes them money?

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”.

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.