About 15 years ago, Tigrane Seydoux and his friend Victor Lugger found themselves knocking on the door of Lorenzo Bagatto in San Daniele, Northern Italy, a town built on the fortunes of one product in particular. Prosciutto.
Seeing two strange Frenchmen at his door, he did what any of us would. He closed it again. He would soon find that they were made of sterner stuff, though what they were proposing was absurd. They were refusing to leave until they got what they wanted – an agreement to provide the best ham in Italy for a restaurant in Paris that they hadn’t even opened yet.
They came back the next day. And the next. The night after, they slept on his doorstep. By the end of the week, he invited them in, likely out of a combination of pity and admiration.
“We just didn’t want to work with anyone else,” Tigrane laughs now, sitting inside restaurant number 29: Circolo Popolare – roughly translated as ‘the trendy circle’, or ‘cool crowd’ – which is about to open in Manchester at the foot of Gary Neville’s new St Michael’s development off Deansgate. Now Tigrane, Victor and Lorenzo are great friends, and speak at least once a month.
It’s that same single-minded devotion – not to mention an old fashioned dose of romanticism – that’s fuelled the success of Big Mamma Group, the maximalist restaurant collective Seydoux and Lugger co-founded and that now spans seven countries, employs over 2,500 people, and serves up heart-on-its-sleeve Italian hospitality with an unapologetic flair for the theatrical.
Born in Monaco, Tigrane’s obsession with Italy was sealed early. “10 kilometres from the border to Italy,” he notes about his home town. “That’s probably the reason why I’m so passionate about the culture.” He’s the youngest of six siblings, meaning big family meals, lots of energy, laughter, and no doubt a bit of chaos.
Hospitality is unsurprisingly in the blood. His father Jacques was the managing director of Société des Bains de Mer de Monaco, which translates as the ‘Monaco Sea Bathing Society’, a name which quaintly belies the fact that it presides over an enviable estate of hotels, palaces and casinos. It is the oldest hospitality management company in the world, established in 1863 by Charles III of Monaco.
After going to business school in Paris, he landed a job with Stéphane Courbit, a noted French entrepreneur involved in everything from luxury hotels to entertainment who became something of a mentor. “That taught me about attention to detail,” Tigrane says.
Soon after, the kernel of an idea for Big Mamma began to germinate. It was to build restaurants with the soul of a trattoria, the aesthetics of a movie set, and the produce of a Michelin-starred kitchen – but all for a price that feels fair. “We wanted to create the best quality-to-price experience possible,” he says.
This shared journey began with a map of Italy and a rental car. Tigrane and Victor, who had become friends at business school, spent more than a year driving through every region of the country, knocking on doors of small producers.
“Mostly cooperatives, family-run farms, artisans,” Tigrane explains. “We wanted the best ingredients, like Michelin-starred places use – but with prices regular people could afford.” That trip became the backbone of what Big Mamma is today. They started with 80 producers; they now work with more than 300 across Italy. Everything in the restaurants – bread, pizza, pasta, desserts, gelati – is made fresh, in-house, daily. And none of it relies on central production.
“It’s kind of stupid business-wise,” he admits. “But it’s the way we keep quality and passion alive. Each restaurant runs like it’s the only one.” Even their HR department is in Italy, not France, meaning they have access to Italian staff as well as direct lines to the country’s best culinary schools.
It took more than two years to open that first restaurant – East Mamma, in Paris, in April 2015. But when it landed, it quickly blew up. “We were 15 staff. Within two weeks, there were queues and queues.” he says. “It was crazy. Good crazy.” Every night was full. They had to hire new team members on the fly.
From there, things accelerated further. Six more Paris restaurants followed in quick succession, each designed in-house and filled with found objects. Then came London, where Big Mamma introduced itself with a bang: Gloria in Shoreditch, a maximalist Neapolitan fever dream with tiger print seats and a burrata the size of a baby’s head. Then Circolo Popolare in Fitzrovia, decorated in its alcoves with 20,000 bottles of booze.
There are now outposts in Berlin, Madrid, Hamburg, Munich, Marseille, Barcelona, Lyon and even Milan, a move which felt like coals to Newcastle, but has become one of its most successful sites.
“We never want to copy and paste,” Tigrane says. “The day we think we have a ‘concept’, we’re dead. There is no secret recipe to what we’re doing. Every place is different.”
Instead, each space is approached as a blank canvas. Their in-house design studio, led by Victor’s wife Apolline, travels across Europe sourcing antique furniture, ceramics and curios from flea markets and artisans. “Some of the pieces we’ve held onto, stored for years,” Tigrane says, until the right project came along. “It has to feel real. So they’re all authentic pieces. We don’t create them for the restaurant. I think if you did that, people would see through it.”
Circolo Popolare Manchester is no exception. While it echoes its London cousin in name and spirit, it’s a different beast – an extravagant homage to a Sicilian ‘festa’. The dishes are huge, unashamedly generous. The interiors are grand but playful. It doesn’t feel like a theme park or a pastiche, a tightrope to walk when decor is this in-your-face.
Does it get any easier after opening 28 restaurants?
“No!” he laughs. “I wish I could tell you that [it did].” He likens it to having children – he has three – so with more joy come a few more problems too. Or shall we say complications. He still loves creating a new restaurant, nonetheless, and the buzz of the launch. So it might not be easier. But it’s fun.
“At every opening, the best part is watching the team form,” he says. “They didn’t know each other two weeks ago, and now they’re a family running a restaurant together. That’s what gives the place a soul.”
Soul appears abundantly on the plates too. From the truffle pasta served tableside and finished in a huge wheel of pecorino, to small, delectable fried snacks, to the now internet-famous lemon tart, which comes topped with a fluffy, wobbly mass of meringue that stands a good 10-inches off the plate.
From mithering artisans to a turnover of €200 million a year, Big Mamma restaurants are now a staple of instagram feeds Europe-wide.
But more than the towering desserts and the wildness on the walls, there’s the belief that food, joy and design, done right, can really make your day.
Circolo Popolare Manchester opens on 6 June – get booked in here.
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