At the Bar - CAFÉ Spice Namaste

CAFÉ Spice Namaste is not your usual Indian restaurant. With bare floorboards and walls swathed in bright silks, it is neither the traditional high street Indian with rather tired pink tablecloths, nor the fashionable City eatery in light wood and frosted glass. So it seems the right place to meet someone who’s not your usual lawyer. For a start, Patrice Rembauville-Nicolle is carrying a bag from a rather expensive shop instead of a briefcase. “Perhaps it is not very serious for a lawyer,” he explains with a grin, “But my meeting finished early, so I thought I’d do some shopping.” Seriousness does not rate high on his list of priorities anyway, I discover. “You can do serious work without being too serious yourself,” he tells me. As joint founder of a transport law firm with offices in Paris and Le Havre, this attitude obviously hasn’t done him any harm.

So how did someone who says that, if he could, he would have liked to play saxophone in a jazz club, or maybe been a couturier, become a lawyer in the first place? “When I was twelve, I thought I might rather like to be a judge, because my grandfather was one, and I liked the robes,” Patrice says. “Later on, I was a very lazy student, and because my grandfather was a lawyer and my father worked in maritime reinsurance, maritime law seemed like the easiest option. It wasn’t, but I didn’t know that at the time.”

My potato cakes filled with peas and coconut have arrived by now, along with Patrice’s mendu wadaa. The menu describes them as “lentil doughnuts” which sounds rather odd. But apparently they’re excellent, and conversation slows as we tuck in.

“I like history and politics, so I did wonder about being a diplomat,” Patrice continues, as we settle back to wait for the next course. “But in the end I was much too independent for that, and I don’t like hierarchy.” It was that same dislike of hierarchy that led Patrice to set up his own law firm just eight years into his career, after working at law firms in London, New York and Paris, including four years in the shipping department at Gide, Loyrette Nouel. “In order to get on in a large company, you have to spend more time developing strategies for your own career than in developing strategies for your clients, and I didn’t enjoy that. I realised that I wasn’t made to stay in a big firm, so I started my own,” he says.

At this point I am slightly flustered by the arrival of my pork in yoghurt with whole spices, and Patrice’s oriental chicken. My dish is billed as mild, but, ominously, it comes garnished with a dried red chilli. I can only hope that Patrice is used to incoherent opponents in court, so a journalist gulping at water and doing her best not to go red in the face will not be too much of a distraction.

It certainly doesn’t prevent him from explaining, in very fluent English, the importance of continuing to draft international law in both French and English to prevent the increasing dominance of common law over civil in international legislation. Or from explaining that there are not many major law firms in France prepared to deal with more than one type of transport law, which is, he says “a little frustrating.” On the other hand, Patrice has no ambition to expand his own firm. “Small can be beautiful. Some people say that big clients only want to deal with big full-service law firms, but in my experience that is not true. There is a place for the specialist. Otherwise, how come a small firm like my own has a client like Boeing?”

We settle on espresso, rather than anything from the extensive dessert menu. By now, I have recovered enough to ask what it is that Patrice enjoys most about his work. “I think it is essential to have fun,” he explains. “I enjoy any interesting and complex case, but especially litigation. I like to fight, and of course I like to win, but it is more important to be elegant, fair, and to be able to smile when you lose than it is to be hungry and aggressive.” Although if you are going to be hungry, Café Spice Namaste is a very good place to do it in.

I have to hurry off now, as I have another appointment. Patrice has a meeting to go to as well, but he hopes it won’t take too long. He has important business to attend to at Fortnum & Mason’s. “My wife will kill me if I don’t get a Stilton for Christmas,” he says. A Frenchman who comes to England to buy cheese. Now that is unusual.