Oliver Peyton has been told by his wife he has to slow down. He can probably afford to. Over the past six years the 37-year-old Irishman with the film-star good looks has built up a restaurant empire to rival Terence Conran's, though he demurs when I invite the comparison. Terence is a really nice man, he says, little-boy-lost eyes crinkling into a smile defying disbelief.
We're sitting downstairs at Isola, Peyton's newest venture. A bar-restaurant on two floors opposite Harvey Nichols in Knightsbridge, it's the size of a departure lounge, though if airports offered this degree of service, comfort and chrome-and-marble chic, delays would be welcome. The bar, the wonders of which featured in these pages a few months back, offers 64 Italian wines by the glass, 24 cocktails and a raft of unusual beers, including the Japanese Sapporo which Peyton imports and which, along with Absolut Vodka, was the springboard for his involvement in restaurants.
Young women in businesslike black glide like ghosts. Their boss is wearing jeans (new), white shirt, black jacket, no tie. Hair is a James Dean quiff. There's little to distinguish him from the rest of the male clientele. And that's just the point, he says. When he started earning real money from his drink business, there was nowhere to spend it.
"Drinking after 11 p.m. in London was very difficult to do - that's why nightclubs were doing well at the time. If you wanted to drink you had to go to a nightclub or be a member of a club. But people of my generation didn't want to go out to night clubs. I was delivering to all these restaurants and they didn't have a clue. They weren't serving Martinis, they weren't serving proper drinks, the service was awful, the food was average. And if you were wearing jeans . . ." Peyton shakes his head in mock horror.
Unlike Conran, Oliver Peyton is not yet a household name. But there isn't a twentysomething on the up who hasn't heard of the Atlantic Bar and Grill, a subterranean splash of glitz, glamour and grandeur reminiscent of Astaire and Rogers and less than 50 yards from Piccadilly Circus. Luckily for Peyton, it turned out to have an historical 3 a.m. drinking licence, one of only a handful. Since opening six years ago, the Atlantic shows no sign of losing its appeal. Fire regulations allow 500 in at any one time, and heavies on the roped-off entrance have to regulate the flow - it's like a club with no membership restrictions. Last summer even Peyton was stopped as he tried to get in with Alexander McQueen. "We were pretty merry, and there were about six of us, and when I took the rope off, the doorman said `And what do you think you're doing?' "
In 1995 he opened Coast. Carved from a former car-showroom in Mayfair, it retained the Atlantic's scale, but in a modern design context. Indeed, design was so much to the fore that critics were confounded when Coast went on to win the Times Best Restaurant and Time Out Restaurant of the Year awards. Isola - Italian, as its name would suggest - opened in October and there are three more projects in the pipeline, including a club in the City, complete with tailoring service on site and the catering franchise for London's newest museum, Somerset House, which will include a deli.
As for Ireland, Oliver Peyton is "always looking". But, he says, he can only do it when it's right. "And when we go to Dublin we won't open one place, we'll open a number of places." Club, bar-restaurant, country house hotel. The reason it hasn't happened yet? "Because I've found it very difficult to get a deal."
A while back Peyton was involved in a joint venture in Dublin with Paul McGuinness and London's Groucho Club. But no dice. "Dublin is in a way much more competitive than London, much more aggressive. The art of the deal was probably written in Dublin. You've got to get up earlier. But Ireland is a great place and for me and my sisters it's very important that at the first level we establish ourselves in Ireland. It's home."
Oliver Peyton was born in Sligo but he grew up in Swinford, Co Mayo. His mother comes from Knock and it was her cooking, he says, that sparked his love affair with food, because from then on it was downhill. Boarding school at St Mary's in Dundalk was followed by Summerhill in Sligo. The food in both establishments he remembers "was utterly disgusting".
The name Peyton was originally French and his first name has no Cromwellian connotations whatsoever. He laughs out loud at the very suggestion. If I needed any convincing, he says, his three sisters, who all work with him, are called Siobhan, Catriona and Mary. "This is not just a one man show," he insists. "I'm the front man, the chairman. But I've always worked with my family and they have a very very important role and I don't want to downplay their importance."
At 17, with a scholarship from the Confederation of Irish Industries, he went to Leicester Polytechnic. At the time, his mother had a textile business and the plan was to return and inject new ideas and energy. But more than anything Peyton was determined to make money, and he was soon running one-off nightclubs. After Leicester came Brighton where he went into the nightclub business proper. However, he knew the serious money lay in London. Timing was perfect. It was now the 1980s, the City was booming and a new generation was emerging, of people with money in their pockets and who didn't want warm beer in "spitand-sawdust" pubs.
In his clubs he sold a new category, designer beer, which he then began to import. Then came Absolut vodka. Peyton's pitch for the franchise, to rebrand it as a design-led, full-strength spirit, so impressed the Swedish that they dumped 5,000 cases of 37.5 per cent drink destined for working men's clubs.
Oliver Peyton admits to being obsessive about design. But good design means nothing on its own, he insists. "What we try to deliver is cutting edge ideas with substance. And that's always been our philosophy. There's no point having a nicely designed place if you're not doing the business as well. Restaurants are busy if they are good. That's the bottom line."
At the time Oliver Peyton started out in the early 1980s - before the world heard about U2 - Britain wasn't the obvious place for a young Irishman to make his fortune. "There was still a lot of racism towards Irish people. It was a shock to my system and I think that fuelled my ambition. I was part of a new generation of Irish people whose horizons were much broader and I think, I hope, I was part of something that changed Britain's perception of Irish people: I think I have had a hopefully positive effect on how Ireland is perceived in Britain. I don't mean to put myself up, but I'm proud of the fact that I'm Irish and I'm very glad that I'm Irish."
As for taking life easier, Peyton has heeded his wife's advice. He switches his mobile off when he's at home. He walks to work. He's stopped drinking. Though that may have something to do with his proposed Easter break: cycling from Lisbon to Barcelona for charity, 125 miles a day for seven days, he tells me proudly. And with a flourish, he takes another drag on his cigarette.