Legal and Ownership

Peter Newman and Alan Murchison co-founded the restaurant as is in 2001, Peter as the Owner and financier Alan as the head chef.

In 1991 Peter formed a company, which he called Ç-Dilla. This company focused solely on providing software tools to help electronic publishers stop the CDs that they produced from being copied or used in any way other than what they had sold them for. At that time not many CD-ROMs were being published, nor had many people heard of the new publishing format. Also many people weren't concerned about CDs being copied. The company had started doing something way ahead of its time and found the going hard at first.

During the next few years the company perfected the technique of manufacturing CDs, which could not be copied and found a ready market in the PC games arena, in which by 1998 CD piracy had become rife. This technology came to the attention of a company called Macrovision. They had perfected a means of stopping videocassettes from being copied and were being used by most of the Hollywood film industries to stop films being copied when they went to video cassettes. Macrovision were looking for a technology that could cope with a disc format, they had become successful on the cassette format, so C-Dilla was a natural fit and was sold to Macrovision (A Nasdaq listed company) in 1999. The combined company was very sucessful taking about 90% of the market share for games protection within the next 12 months and achieved sales in excess of $100million per annum.

Peter used the proceeds of this sale to buy the L'Ortolan building from John Burton Race, who had moved to London the year before, and set about finding a new head chef, and a team of people.

Luckily he was was introduced to Alan Murchison by a mutual friend and together they set about refurbishing the building and recruited a team to run it. They re-opened l’ortolan in September 2001 and gradually regained its reputation as a destination dining experience par excellence, culminating in the revered one star award from the Michelin Red Guide early in 2003.

During this period Alan also found time to get married and become father of a baby daughter which prompted his decision to find a new challenge closer to his home and family in Southampton. Alan then had the task of finding someone who could continue to maintain and build on the l'ortolan name and reputation at the same rate as Alan had initiated. After some searching the services of Daniel Galmiche were secured.

Then in Feb 2004, the restaurant was closed for several months during which infrastructure services were renewed and two new private dining rooms were added on the first floor. In September 2004 the restaurant was reopened with Alan once again at the helm, and has gone from strength to strength ever since, winning many awards on the way.