THE founder of the Pret a Manger chain has revealed how an old flame told him he had a secret daughter – but she was the one who took the news the worst.
Julian Metcalfe, now 64, has opened up about how he found out he was the father to a teenager girl he previously had no idea about.
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Metcalfe co-founded the high street sandwich chain Pret in 1984 with his college pal Sinclair Beecham and went on to sell it for £364million before starting up the Japanese fast food chain Itsu.
He told the Dragons’ Den star Steven Bartlett on his Diary of a CEO series he learned the news 15 years ago after getting a phone call out of the blue from his former flame Camilla Ravenshear.
The pair had a brief fling in the mid 1980s, with Ravenshear keeping details of who her daughter’s real father was a secret for almost 20 years.
She died in 2017 at the age of 57.
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Their daughter Celeste Tobias, who is now on the board of his company, grew up thinking she was the youngest child of Oliver Tobias, a film and TV star most famous for appearing in the 1978 film The Stud, alongside Joan Collins.
Ravenshear and Tobias divorced in 1991.
She had two other daughters, Angelica and Dahlia.
Metcalfe tells in the episode how Ravenshear broke the news to him about their daughter, who was at the time a student at Bristol University.
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Metcalfe told the YouTube show: “I had absolutely no idea that her daughter was my daughter.
“I’d never met her I’d had no idea and her mother asked to see me so I said yes and we met in the King’s Road and she told me.
Pret A Manger customer locked in for the night by bungling staff
“I wasn’t suspicious, I thought maybe she needed help but she was kind of cool.”
He added: “I remembered her very fondly, I hadn’t seen her in ages.
“She just told me there and then.”
He described Ravenshear as being a “cool, intelligent, rather wonderful, eccentric, brilliant woman”.
The entrepreneur already had two children, Billy and Meisha, with his ex-wife Melanie.
According to Metcalfe, Ravenshear told him: “I have a daughter and she’s your daughter”.
He then asked her how long Celeste had known and she replied she had told her daughter just a fortnight previously.
I have a brilliant, beautiful and thoughtful 19-year-old daughter. I reckon I’m the luckiest man ever.
Julian Metcalfe
Metcalfe added: “’I asked her ‘when did you tell her and how did it go down?’ She replied: ‘I told her two weeks ago and not well’.”
It is thought the first time the three of them met was at posh Babington House, near to where Celeste was studying at the time.
In the wake of the news breaking, Metcalfe said: “I have a brilliant, beautiful and thoughtful 19-year-old daughter. I reckon I’m the luckiest man ever.”
Celeste told the Evening Standard in 2012: “I was told just before I went to university in Bristol. I think my mother believed that I’d always known I wasn’t Oliver’s, but of course I didn’t.
“How can you know something like that? I had no idea.”
Metcalfe, who currently lives in South Oxfordshire with his wife Brooke Douglass de Ocampo, said he is now close to his daughter, having built up a relationship as an adult.
‘SHE’S SO STRONG’
He said: “She’s fantastic and she’s really close to my children and my other two and you know it could be much worse.
“I feel this is not an easy thing to go through for her.
“So she’s strong.”
He has three children and became a grandfather when Celeste gave birth to a daughter, Tiger-Lily, in 2019.
Metcalfe started his first business, a wine shop in Fulham, while he was working as a chartered surveyor.
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His Japanese fast food chain Itsu has become increasingly popular in recent years and now has 77 branches across the UK.
Itsu, the Japanese word for ‘whenever’, started life in 1997 with a £1million restaurant in Chelsea, West London.
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