This week's exclusive City Diary includes Butlin's embracing premium dining; pub bosses back at uni; Rooney Anand on Sky; rents at Canary Wharf; and why black is the new black.
Butlin's goes gastro
It’s time to review any remaining prejudice about Butlin’s food quality - at least in Bognor Regis. The site in the south coast holiday resort saw the opening of a sushi restaurant a while back. Now celebrity chef Brian Turner is to open a restaurant there. It will be “a showcase for classic British cooking with a generous sprinkling of Butlins-style fun twists” and will be “lively and informal”. The menu features dishes like shepherd’s pie with a Wensleydale cheese topping, Norfolk chicken, avocado and cherry tomato salad and marmalade bread and butter pudding. For anyone still not convinced about expiunging their snootiness, head chef is Nigel Davis, formerly head chef at the Ivy.
Domino's takes a smaller slice
Domino’s pizza boss Chris Moore was in sparky form at the Numis Securities leisure conference last week. He pointed out that the company split the overall profit pie one-third in its favour and two-thirds in favour of franchisees. The tenanted pub sector is the “other way around”, he noted. “Maybe that’s what happened with the pub industry,” he added
Heat turned down on pubcos
Who knows how big a bite the politicians will take out of the tenanted companies later this year when the investigation in the pubco/tenant relationship resumes. Mergers and acquisitions expert Peter Hansen, of Sapient Corporate Finance, told the Numis Conference that the on-going reduction in the size of the large pubcos might have a bearing. “I don’t see it being the white hot issue of two years ago.”
Rooney misses goal on Sky
Greene King boss Rooney Anand proceeded Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) strategy director Adam Martin on the speaker schedule at last week’s Numis Conference. Was it M&B, though, that he had in mind when he began his presentation with these words: “We’ve had a good credit crunch in the last three years. We went into 2007 with a strong set of cards - and played them quite well.” There was one battle he admitted that he’d lost though. He recounted how he thought Greene King could punish Rupert Murdoch for his pricing by withdrawing Sky from some of his pubs. “There was no impact on his business, quite a big impact on our business.”
M&B: business as usual at the coal face
Mitchells & Butlers strategy and marketing Adam Marin was asked about the corpororate soap opera that is its board at the Numis event. And his answer? “There are two executive directors on the board - the rest of us are not on it. We just slog on with it. The board’s issues have been about financing. There’s not been much of a challenge to operational execution - that (keeps us busy) 25 hours a day.”
Flower power in the pub trade
You know how Christian names can suddenly shoot up in the popularity stakes? Looks like there’s a growing trend towards calling pubs “the Botanist”. There was a Botanist in Kew for many years before ETM Group opened the Botanist in London’s Sloane Square. Now Mitchells & Butlers has opened a new Premium Country Dining (PCD) site in Bristol. It’s another of its new city centre openings for PCD - following on from Oxford and Richmond - and it’s called, you guessed it, the Botanist.
Administration down under
Here’s a very familiar story - a pub operator has collapsed into administration under a mountain of debt. This time, though, it’s an Australian story. Perth pub owner Compass Hotel Group has gone the way of all flesh with a debt burden in excess of $100 million. The listed company operates a portfolio of 12 licensed premises in Western Australia. The company had been in breach of its loan covenants after buying a slew of Perth pubs at the height of the market. Diary thinks there might be a few bob to be made by anyone who can provide an early warning that the “height of the market” being in view next time around.
Wet led bars aren't dead
Two small pieces of evidence that the wet-led offer is far from dead. Revolution vodka bar operator Inventive Leisure is trialing a second brand centered on rum. And it opened a Revolution on Brighton’s West Street drinking circuit last year in a site pased over from sister company TCG. Diary hears the venue, which has six bars and trades opposite an Oceania, trade at up to £75,000 per week during the summer. Nice.
Pub chiefs on campus
The lure of academe is proving too much for a series of senior pub compsany executives. Francis Patton, former head of customer services at Punch, is ensconsed at Leed University while Chris Edgar, former head of human resources at Mitchells & Butlers, has a perch at Birmingham University. Now Rob Jones, a director at Lincolnshire brewer and retailer Batemans, has left to take on the top job at the commercial side of the University of Lincoln.
Back to black
A Winchester restaurateur is taking leaf out of the Rolling Stone songbook at looking to “Paint it Black”. David Nicholson owns the Black Boy pub in the city and his Black Rat restaurant was awarded a Michelin star last month. Now he’s won planning to turn a bar called the View into a new bar focused on wine (they called them wine bars in the 1980s). It will be called, wait for it, The Black Bottle and include up to five ‘wine rooms’.
Rents bounce back
Looks like rental inflation has returned in one spot you’d have guessed it would return first - Canary Wharf. Nigel Wright, boss of TCG, the 107-strong bar operator owned by private equity outfit Alchemy, reports a rental hit at two sites there. The company failed at arbitration to stop rent rises at its Bar 38 and Via sites on the Wharf . He tells Diary: “From our perspective, rentals have been forced up because of new competition coming in and paying more for their sites, and that creates a precedent. “You could argue that competition is forcing rents up in sought-after locations. If you go back two years when Lehman Brothers closed, there were empty (licensed retail) units down there.”
