Anita Rani interviews Luca restaurant owners about Michelin starred food and meditative music
For the Autumn edition of Morning Wire The Magazine, broadcaster and author Anita Rani interviews Luca and Clove Club founders Johnny Smith and Daniel Willis about making music and falling in love with food
Daniel Willis: So Anita, do you remember how we all met?
Anita Rani: Well, which version are we going to give? The real version or the PG version?
Johnny: Let’s go for the PG version, shall we? We met you through a mutual friend who, if you are in his gang, brings together a lot of interesting people. I remember going to your house for the first time and you fed us all – you were very hospitable and generous.
Anita: We went on a drunken walk afterwards and I said to you that up north we’d be sworn enemies, War of the Roses style, but down here our northernness unites us.
Johnny: Exactly! And Daniel and I obviously come as a Mancunian package – we’ve known each other since we were four years old. Our lives together have basically always been in bands playing music or in restaurants, and those two worlds are constantly crossing over with each other.
Anita: We bonded over music. Music has always been massive in my life, too. When you were doing your thing at the tender age of four, across the Pennines there was a little Asian lass doing her music thing. My moment of really opening up to music was when I went to uni and the drum ‘n’ bass scene was just massive.
Daniel: Was there a big drum ‘n’ bass scene in Bradford?
Anita: There was in Leeds. Huge. It was the first scene I remember that had black kids, brown kids and middle class white kids all together in clubs. It was this amazing escape for me. Growing up in Bradford, my parents listened to a lot of Indian stuff and they had this one Boney M cassette that they listened to over and over again. So I made it my cultural quest to just absorb as much as I could.
Johnny: I think I took for granted growing up in Manchester at that moment in time. I didn’t realise quite how rich and plentiful that culture of music was, with the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses. I grew up listening to Deacon Blue. I knew Portishead’s Dummy by the time I was 12 because my brother and sister were playing it.
Anita: My big inspiration was my dad’s little brother, who was an artist. He went to art college in the 80s, which is really unusual for an Indian man from Bradford. He was my absolute flipping idol. He had the attic in my granny’s terraced house in Bradford, and I’d sit outside his attic room smelling patchouli wafting out from the doorway and listening to The The and The Cure and The Smiths.
Johnny: I remember being a kid and dropping my brother off at the Hacienda at like 11 o’clock on a Friday night, and then knocking on his door at one o’clock on Saturday afternoon and wondering why he was still in bed. I guess I was exposed to that kind of culture early. Manchester really looked after us – we were there till we were 28 and the Northern Quarter had really become home for us. We did have a period living in the Lake District at Daniel’s dad’s house. During the day we would mow the lawns and walk the dogs and rake the dead leaves out the pond. And then at night we had a little space above his garage to make music. We’d drive back to Manchester on Friday nights, play records at Odd Bar and have some fun.
Daniel: We really wanted a career in music but you end up looking to other things to bring in the income. Then the Clove Club happened and the food took the front seat for a while. I started getting back into the studio in 2019 and then the pandemic hit so we started playing together again and that’s where our band Celestial started.
Johnny: It was always the plan to do one little single and see how it goes. Now we have an LP out called I Can Hear the Grass Grow.
Anita: How would you describe your music for the readers if you had to distill it down to one sentence?
Daniel: It’s quite hard to describe, really. Celestial is kind of ambient New Age. I also have another project called Ground that I guess you could call afro futurist pop.
When we first did Clove Club, we had decades of experience of looking after people. That’s the thing that speaks loudest
Johnny: Getting back into the music was easier for you – I was still bitter that I wasn’t a rock star. Me and my mum had been holding out for it, but instead we had a career in restaurants.
The music and food always went hand in hand though, really. You’d go out in Manchester and then you’d head to Rusholme, where it was like the Las Vegas strip but for curry houses. My family used to go to Rusholme every Friday night when I was seven or eight. We’d go to these amazing places with bright colours and new smells, being greeted by these eccentric owners. It was such a formative experience.
Anita: I think that’s what you get when you grow up in the north. It’s different from other places. You get that cultural diversity, even just having access to something as simple as curry. Not everybody has that. If you grew up in Dorset or Devon or Somerset you might have had one curry house in your town. I’ve met people who didn’t have curry until they got to university. You take it for granted, but that tells you something about your palate from a very young age. What about you, Daniel, what were your early foodie experiences?
Daniel: My parents are not good cooks, but there’s this very rich vein of hospitality that runs though my mum’s side. My grandma grew up in Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides and they had this very famous hotel, which was basically the only place that you could buy booze on North and South Uist. It’s on a causeway so basically anyone from the islands could walk there to get a drink and people would risk getting swept away because they were pissed. It was in the Guinness Book of Records for having the longest bar in Scotland and the most sales of whisky because it was the only place you could buy booze.
They used to serve this very simple food – mince and tatties, sausage and onion, that kind of thing – and I stole the recipes. But your mum was always the amazing cook, Johnny. She was growing her own herbs and making her own dressings when my family were still on bottles of Heinz and dried herbs.
Anita: It’s funny how you’re embarrassed about that kind of thing as a kid. I still remember being in school and a little girl asked me what I now realise was a racist question: ‘What do you eat for your dinner on an evening?’ So I said sausage and chips even though I’d never eaten sausage and chips in my life! My mum made fresh curry every single night and it was delicious.
Anyway, it all worked out because we grew up with a real passion for food. You can see that in this place. Luca is such a phenomenal restaurant. The food is exquisite but it’s more than that, it’s all about the two of you and the vibe you bring.
Johnny: When we first did Clove Club in the flat, we didn’t have any formal training. We both worked at St John but we were basically a pair of northern blaggers. What we did have is decades of experience of looking after people, whether it was in restaurants or at house parties. That’s the thing that speaks loudest, and is probably still the most important thing to us.
We’re expanding the business, too. We want to open some great restaurants in London and beyond. We want to bring together amazing people from the world of food and drink and art and music and design. There’s lots of things happening: we have big plans for the future.
Anita: You do all this stuff together – don’t you ever get sick of each other?
Daniel: Friendships and business can be tricky but we’ve always been beyond that, really. We know each other better than members of our family do, you know? It’s something we’re very privileged to have, it’s very special. That’s ultimately why our names are on the door at Luca. It’s about mutual trust and about being able to communicate. It’s a relationship in the truest sense.
Anita’s latest book, Baby Does a Runner, is out now. Check out Celestial LP I Can Hear the Grass Grow on Bandcamp; Book Luca at luca.restaurant
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