Mark Wingett talks to Camino founder Richard Bigg about the next stage of development for the Business Growth Fund-backed Spanish restaurant and bar concept:
Camino founder Richard Bigg is finally going to get to do something he wanted to do with his Spanish restaurant and bar brand in the first place this month, open a tapas bar, which, seeing his business is eight years old, begs the question, what has taken him so long? He explains: “Plan A was always to open a tapas bar, but this place (King’s Cross) became available and we turned it into a restaurant.”
The figures from the group’s first opening in King’s Cross back up Bigg’s decision. At the time of our meeting, the site had just generated weekly sales of £86,000 versus £35,000 when it first opened. Restaurants in Mincing Lane, Blackfriars and Canary Wharf (now closed) have followed that original site, but it is this month’s launch of a smaller, less-informal and more bar-focused model at Bankside that could prove crucial for the company and backers, the Business Growth Fund.
Bigg says: “It will be a Camino with no restaurant. In Spain, you don’t serve tapas at a restaurant, you have bars that serve tapas, but to make it clear, here we will call our openings tapas bars. Small dishes being shared, coupled with informality and fun is vital. We are going back to the simpler format. It cuts down on labour, deformalises the concept and is simpler to understand. There will be very limited reservations at lunch and dinner time.
“I have a pretty warm feeling about the format and it is what I would prefer to concentrate on, unless we came upon the right site in the right area where it would be crazy not to do a restaurant. One good thing in going for a slightly smaller site is that you are not in competition with a vast amount of operators looking at that 4,000sq ft-sized site and above. The London market is absolutely bonkers and is why people like Iberica are looking outside for further growth.”
The launch of a new format comes at a time when the company has strong momentum behind it. Like-for-like sales are 18% up on last year and 13% up on the budget, which Bigg admits was “reasonably punchy to start with”. The company is on track to post full-year turnover of c£8.2m, which is allowing for a quiet start at Bankside. Bigg says: “I would like to be hitting £10m as soon as we can and it would take only another modestly sized site to do that. For example, Mincing Lane recently posted weekly turnover of £60,000, and that is a Monday to Friday operation.
“I am really pleased with how all the sites are performing. That has happened by looking at the details of the entire operation. It’s like the Kaizen theory, where you improve every little thing by a tiny little bit and it has an impact on the bottom line. We have been concentrating on the menu, tweaking that more, ramping up training and how we structure it, improving the drinks offering. We are comfortable with who we are, what we are as a business and not pretending to be anything we are not.”
BGF invested £3m in the business in 2012 with an initial plan to grow to an estate of 10 sites by the end of this year. That timetable has slipped, not helped by teething problems at the group’s Blackfriars site, which have since been overcome. However, as Bigg points out, BGF continues to play a supportive role. He says: “They want to see us get Bankside open and how that models works without a restaurant. It ought to be more efficient and profitable because we will cut out layers of operational functions. Two key advantages of the new format are, (a) being a touch smaller it will spend more of its time being full and there will be lower operating costs, and (b) people’s perception; there are higher expectations in a restaurant, but you will see a drop with this format against the same level of quality in the bar format.”
