PR Girl-Turned-Restaurateur Victoria Sheppard Is A Jeremy King For A New Generation 

It’s an open secret that the food world’s highest ranks are almost entirely male. A breakthrough number of female chefs – Clare Smyth, Hélène Darroze, Sally Abé – are changing that in the kitchen. But owning the restaurant is another matter. Victoria Sheppard, who previously co-founded specialty coffeehouse Queens of Mayfair with her sister, is one of a kind: there are no other female restaurant owners with Michelin stars, she tells me, ‘that are not also chefs – and they are typically backed by hotels as opposed to owning the business’. Sheppard owns Alex Dilling at Hotel Café Royal outright, and the results speak for themselves. With one of the best views in town – of the confluence of Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus – and the talented eponymous chef at the helm, the spot offers a seven-course tasting menu (£215) that won two stars within six months of open. C&TH meets the woman behind the success. 

Interview: Victoria Sheppard

Victoria Sheppard is a shot of blonde ambition. Strikingly young in appearance, she is today in her mid-30s but was only 31 when she launched Queens of Mayfair, an artisan coffee shop that beat the posh café trend to the punch. In 2022, she became one of very few female restaurateurs working at her calibre when she opened Alex Dilling’s eponymous restaurant.

But she nearly chose a much more conventional career. ‘I started in finance,’ she says, ‘as a mortgage advisor, just before the ‘08 crash.’ A move towards marketing eventually landed her in lane at Fortnum & Mason where she headed up hospitality and VIP marketing, focusing on the restaurants. ‘I found it fascinating,’ she says, ‘one in particular had cost millions to open, had a good launch – and then went quiet – I loved digging into the numbers, the market, the menus, to turn that around.’

Dilling, who heads the kitchen and is co-owner (although Sheppard is the majority shareholder) trained under Alain Ducasse before moving onto three starred joints like Hélène Darroze at The Connaught. It is no surprise – and really a prerequisite – that someone of his calibre cares with extreme intensity about the kitchens he works within.

Sheppard and Dilling met in 2018 when they both worked for the same, ultimately doomed restaurant group and she recalls: ‘One morning I remember seeing Alex, who was executive chef of the Greenhouse, carrying Selfridges shopping bags, and he said: “Our fish supplier won’t deliver any more, so I’m having to buy this with my own money to keep the restaurant going, because we’ve got guests tonight.” It was really sad.’ It is clear though that the partnership between these two, both so enamoured of hospitality and subsequently bailing water from the same sinking ship, was inevitable. Though Sheppard left to set up Queens of Mayfair with her sister in 2019 – selling her house to fund the opening – they reunited in 2020 when the lease at Hotel Café Royal came up. 

‘[Dilling] was basically in line to be an exec chef for one of the most famous five-star hotels in Paris, and I’d been approached to take a look at Café Royal,’ she explains, ‘and Alex had always said to me that his dream was to have his name across the door of a five-star hotel restaurant. I called him and said: “I think I have one for you if you’re interested”.’ 

Money was tricky from the outset. ‘I wasn’t sure about investors, so I put the last of my savings and a £25,000 bank loan to it, which paid for basically nothing, and we made it happen,’ Sheppard says. 

© Justin de Souza

You wouldn’t know that it worked with a pinch of a budget, though. The restaurant is located at the confluence of Regent Street and Picadilly Circus, independent from the hotel it resides in. A mirrored glass ceiling reflects the expanse of your food spread as each course arrives, and there are delicate decorative touches throughout that come from sources high and low. Like cutlery from Christofle in Paris, for example – ‘some things Alex absolutely wouldn’t compromise on, which I understand’ – intermingled with candle holders found at H&M home and crystal glasses from BrandAlley that were ‘like, a pound each’.

Sheppard explains that this all felt particularly scary considering the calibre, and scale of budgets, of similar restaurant openings at the time. ‘Like Pavyllon at the Four Seasons,’ she says, ‘where they’re spending around five million pounds.’

It was thus a relief to achieve not one but two Michelin stars within six months of the opening. But it has added pressure – especially in the context of the current economic climate. ‘For the chefs, it’s their life,’ she says, ‘and, as with the hospitality industry as a whole, nearly every single one of our costs – ingredients and suppliers – have doubled in price since we opened the restaurant three and a half years ago. But we’ve not doubled our menu prices, because consumers are so price-sensitive. Staff costs have gone up, too, with shortages across the whole fine dining industry thanks to Brexit.

‘It’s really challenging with the current legislation,’ she continues, ‘the national insurance increase a year ago could have paid for extra staff in our restaurant, but instead it’s an extra tax that we don’t see any benefit from.’

Alex Dilling & Victoria Sheppard

The food hasn’t suffered, though, and Sheppard says they’ve not made any concessions on ingredient provenance. It is also – in spite of economic headwinds – abundantly clear that Dilling is provided ample creative runway. Dilling is American and across a seven-course tasting menu presents playful references to Everything Bagels and pastrami sandwiches, although much more dressed up. He is also notably generous with his time, and presents with very little ego. I collect paper menus – sort of trophies from restaurant visits – signed by the chefs, and this is the first time a chef has ever requested the rest of his kitchen team sign, too. 

Does she aspire to be the next Jeremy King (or his ilk)? Although she admires them, the business heroes she aspires to are generally women; she does not feel she has peers. ‘There weren’t many businesswomen [in general], either’, she says. ‘The only figureheads I had at the start of my career were people like Karen Brady, a much older generation of women.’ Partially she finds it hard to relate to the men running the restaurant world of old because her journey to leadership has been more fraught, impacted as it has by sexism. ‘It’s not every man, but there are some men in hospitality who find the idea of a woman in charge very confusing.’ She feels this is to her benefit, though: ‘I’m fresher, I welcome ideas.’ 

But it has been almost staggering at points. ‘When Grace and I first opened Queens of Mayfair, we met with a kitchen supplier and the guy came in and said, “I’m going to give you a really good price that will impress your boss,” and I said, “Oh no, that’s me.” He said, “But now you can tell him we’re doing you a really good deal”, and I was like, I think you’re misreading this situation.

‘Even at the Michelin awards, when we won two stars, I remember someone asking me if I worked on reception…’ she says. 

It’s all a little Legally Blonde. Perhaps similarly, it’s in spite of a reckoning with how people perceive her that our protagonist – in this case, a restaurateur for a new generation – is thriving.

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