Introducing Restaurant People, a new series about the people who open restaurants, and everything they decide before you ever sit down.

Every restaurant is a list of decisions. What colour the woodwork gets painted. Which table goes to the couple who booked six weeks ago. What plays when the first guests arrive, and what plays when the last ones won't leave. You feel all of it and notice almost none of it. Restaurant People is where we ask the people who made those calls to talk us through them - the building, the room, the menu, the wine list, the record that opens the night.

We're starting with Cassette, which opens to the public tomorrow at 42 Maiden Lane.

Mark Gurney and Matthew Bushnell have spent two decades in South London, Salon in Brixton, then Levan in Peckham since 2018, and have resisted going central for most of it. Cassette is the first time they've said yes: 56 covers inside, 20 on a terrace on a quiet pedestrianised street, in a building where Turner was born and Voltaire spent a year in exile, and which spent the 19th century as a furniture and stained glass workshop. It is French, deliberately and unfashionably so. Deep aubergine woodwork, art from Kempton Market, a 360-degree curtain, and a pair of Grundig Audiorama 8000 speakers playing disco. Essa Fakhry is in the kitchen, Madeleine Fawcett is front of house, and there is a serious commitment to calvados.

Mark talked us through all of it.