Jez Hall’s gut feel for things has generally served him well throughout his career, first as a promoter with the likes of Peter Stringfellow, and then a club/bar owner whose former venues include The Firehouse in South Kensington and Lucky Pig in Fitz-rovia. But there is one particular occasion when it spectacularly failed him.
Many years back, Hall, who now co-owns Earlham Street Clubhouse, a frat-house-theme basement bar serving New York-style pizzas in Covent Garden, Central London, turned down the opportunity to book a female performer for £2,000 because he had never heard of her and when he researched her, he didn’t think she’d go far. The artiste in question? Lady Gaga.
Hall says that particular decision will haunt him forever, but he has no such regrets about his move out of the promotions business. He originally went into that then very small industry instead of becoming a chartered surveyor, having successfully organised events at university when studying valuation and estate management. He had a fantastic time, but ultimately it felt like a very shallow world to him.
“You are always focussed on how much money it is going to make for the club and how viable it is, not what the customer wants,” he explains. He moved into operations with Po Na Na, where he acquired his ongoing fondness for basement venues, and then was able to use his understanding of property to get into ownership, buying into The Firehouse.
Now he gets to combine all his favourite aspects from his working and student lives. Hall is very open about the business plan for himself and his business partners, Tim Entwistle and James Hoole (both of whom he met at the University of West England and who between them co-own the Go Food pizza business) plus a silent partner who is a French rugby player. They want to build a business they can sell in five years’ time.
As he says, they all have wives or partners and children to support. But it’s not all about the money – Hall says they all genuinely love the industry and if and when they sell, they will be looking to do something else; he already has ideas but he is not ready to share them at this stage. He also loves travelling (a tour of South America is on his to do list), having lived in Hong Kong, South Africa and the US as a child thanks to his father’s work, and makes no apologies for copying some of the better ideas he has seen at clubs, bars and restaurants around the world, particularly in the States.
“Anyone who says they are original is lying,” he says. “Everyone picks up a bit here and a bit there and then just merges them in a different way.”
The idea for Earlham Street evolved from the trio’s original plan to do an update on the TGI Friday’s-type concept, featuring burgers and cocktails at a site in King’s Road, Chelsea. The explosion of the quality burger restaurant scene, coupled with the opportunity to acquire the rather outdated Detroit club in Earlham Street from a friend, made them sell the original site and rethink their model. Plan A would have been named Chuck’s Clubhouse, which in retrospect the partners felt would have been too fraternity house.
The Earlham Street site is decked out with quirky features that give a nod to ’80s American films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Animal House, which are often screened on the bar’s screens if they are not playing sport, yet about 65% of its clientele are female. Hall laughs at the memory of being a promoter working so hard, and often fruitlessly, to get groups of girls to come into venues. Here, he says, it happens naturally.
The trio wanted to create a venue that didn’t take itself too seriously and remin-ded them of their own student days (Hall is now 35 and jokes he is trying to recap-ture his youth) but also offered grown-up good quality, competitively-priced food and drink. Hence there are plenty of fun elements like ‘phones on the tables for inter-table communications and a self-serve petrol pump customised to dispense beer, yet all the pizza dough is made fresh by a chef on site every day(albeit the end product is served on paper plates and cutlery is wooden). There are no bouncers, even on Fridays and Saturdays when DJs play music from 9pm. The aim is to get punters to stay for the whole night, and it seems to be working.
Hall says the venue has already paid back the initial £250,000-plus investment and turns over between £25,000 and £35,000 a week based on average spend per head around £16 on weekdays and £25 at weekends. Originally the site was going to close at lunchtimes over the summer from the beginning of May, but strong trading pushed the start date back a couple of months.
Wolf Bars, the Clubhouse’s holding company, only took possession of the site in August 2013 but the trio worked round the clock, getting involved in everything from painting to shifting rubbish, to get it ready in time to capture the Christmas and New Year market. They did, and trading was double what they had expected.
While all the stress of getting the first bar up and running paid off, the firm will take advantage of the fact it can afford to take its time with a second venue. The company lost out on two sites it was looking at in Camden in February, but Hall is hopeful he will have somewhere in Zone Two secured by September. If so he will not rush to get it open for Christmas or New Year. That said, Hall admits he “would love to have 10 sites in the next three years”.
As Earlham Street has proved to be quite a destination venue, Hall is confident the Clubhouse concept will work well outside central London. He has all but ruled out east London as “too cool” for the deliberately style-unconscious concept, believing west London destinations such as Shepherds Bush, Fulham, Hammersmith north-east and north-west London as more suitable. These types of locations will probably be more food-led than the Covent Garden outlet but Hall believes the Earlham Street model could be pretty faithfully replicated as it is in university towns such as Bristol, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle.
Site finders have been instructed and discussions have already taken place with several potential joint venture partners already operating in the industry; potential franchisees (a route that Hoole and Entwistle recently announced they are going down with their Go Foods), and with venture capital firms. Hall says the firm is not in a hurry to jump into bed with anyone as all the existing partners are anxious that the dynamics of the firm remain intact. It is pretty much a three-way split although Hall is the majority shareholder and says his co-owners call him Hitler.
Chatting easily and dressed in a T-shirt with a baseball cap over his buzz-cut and flip-flops on his feet, there’s nothing to hint of a dictator within him. And it’s hard to imagine he ever looked at home in the style bars of his earlier career.
