You’re a global superstar. Everything you touch turns to gold: endorse a shoe and they sell like crazy; bring out a perfume and teens want to bathe in it. The next logical step is to open a restaurant – restaurants are cool and you’d like a place to hang out with your celebrity friends beyond the reach of the paparazzi. Plus they’re easy – get some other stars in for opening night, serve some food and watch the money roll in, just like any endorsement, right?

Wrong. As Michael Caine, having been one of the first stars get involved in restaurants – with Langan’s in London back in 1976 – would attest the restaurant industry is famously fickle and challenging. It is rife with bankruptcy and filthy tempers, too: in Europe and the US the closure rate in first year of trading is roughly one in four, rising to one in three within the first three years.

Restaurateurs and highly trained chefs struggle to put their finger on what will guarantee survival. So it’s no surprise that when Britney Spears opened Nyla, a Cajun restaurant, in New York in 2002, she’d pulled out off the deal within six months, with the restaurant closing only weeks later. Jennifer Lopez, otherwise renowned for her business acumen, had a Cuban restaurant, Madre’s, for six years, but it closed in 2008. And in 2009, even Robert De Niro, who has been successfully involved in Nobu worldwide since 1994, drew a line under Ago, his New York Italian before it had been open a year.