Napoleon said that “an army marches on its stomach”, and if that’s also true of Rothschild & Co employees, then its chefs are the most important people in the firm.
Alumnus Daniel Birn was Sous Chef (i.e. the number two) at New Court in London for seven years from 2018 to 2025. The kitchen team of eight prepared breakfasts, lunches and dinners in the main dining room and all the client dining rooms. Pre-Covid they served about 750 meals a week, rising to 1,000 meals a week after the successful push to encourage people back into the office following Covid and the opening-up of the main dining room to a wider group of colleagues.
Daniel cooked from childhood, helping his mother, and wanted to be either a chef or a rugby player. “But I wasn’t good enough for top-level rugby, so I donned a white jacket instead”, he explains. He won a scholarship to the prestigious Royal Academy of Culinary Arts in Bournemouth, which trains just 30 chefs a year (of whom only about half finish) over a three-year course.
As a foretaste of what was to come, Daniel’s final exams were judged by Derek Quelch, one of London’s most respected chefs, who’d worked at The Goring Hotel near Buckingham Palace (where the future Princess of Wales and her family stayed, before her wedding to Prince William) and Savoy Hotel, one of the oldest and most famous hotels in London. We’ll hear more of Derek later.
Daniel moved to Pennyhill Park Hotel, near Windsor, and then found himself at the world-famous Michelin-starred The Ritz London. “My head chef was John Williams MBE one of the great gods of fine dining, and hotel world. The hotel offered elegance, opulence and fine dining. I joined as Sous Chef. The scale was big: 65 chefs cooking perhaps 1,500 meals a day, all to the very highest standard.”
Daniel is very discreet when I ask which famous people he’s cooked for, but will admit (as it’s public knowledge) that he cooked for the late Queen Elizabeth II, not once, but three times. “It was quite scary, and I was full of nerves, because you want to get it perfect, don’t you?” he recalls. “We submitted the menus in advance to the Royal Household, and Her Majesty seemed to enjoy what we’d prepared for her”.
The Ritz was hard work: perhaps 90 hours a week in a hot, fast-moving, time-critical environment. Daniel was 28, had just met his future wife, they wanted to return to London, and he wanted a better work-life balance. And guess who was then Rothschild & Co’s Head Chef in London? The very same Derek Quelch who had judged Daniel’s exams a decade previously.
“To me, Rothschild & Co was the epitome of not just serving food, but making it the very essence of its client offering. I was attracted by the idea that our food could help a banker build a new client relationship or close a deal: that’s a very positive outcome from the kitchen’s efforts”.
After a positive interview, Derek offered Daniel the job, and they worked together to gently modernise Rothschild & Co’s food offering. “At client dinners we often cooked beef, so it could be accompanied by some of the great Rothschild clarets, but we could just as easily produce an entirely vegetarian meal if that was what was required”.
For client dinners, the most in-demand pudding was, of course, Omelette à la Rothschild, which is sweet despite its name hinting at a savoury taste. It was originally created for the family and made famous by chef brothers Michel and Albert Roux of La Gavroche in London.
But times change and careers move on. After seven and a half very happy and highly successful years, and with two young children now at home, Daniel was ready for a Head Chef role, and moved across London to the Royal Automobile Club (RAC), in Pall Mall, a stone’s throw away from St. James’s Palace. As a full circle moment, this is where Daniel had his graduation ceremony from college some 16 years earlier.
He’s now Head Chef in its most prestigious dining room, the Great Gallery, an opulent room designed by architects Charles Mewes and Arthur Davies and similar in style to the main dining room of the Ritz close by. The RAC is a private members’ club with a modern outlook, with many members being businessmen and women, bankers (many from Rothschild & Co) and from the corporate world. As well as dining, it offers bars, meeting rooms, business facilities, a gym, accommodation and perhaps the most beautiful swimming pool in London.
The Club showcases a different historic car in its foyer every week. When I interviewed Daniel, it was a 1910 Benz ‘Prinz Heinrich Wagen’, a beautiful dark green pioneer of engineering and a competitor in many early races. I ask Daniel what he drives. He laughs, “an old Fiat 500 and a Nissan Qashqai but that’s not to say I’m getting inspiration from some of the cars I am seeing”. I think his focus is on the kitchen rather than the racetrack!
- Interview by Francis Burkitt.
