Tim Bacon, the entrepreneur behind Living Ventures, will open four new businesses during 2011, including a new coffee deli concept in Manchester and second sites for his Red Door and Alchemist formats.
The new casual dining coffee and tea house plus deli, which is developed under the working title of “Marmalade” will be based in a unit in Spinningfields, near to the entrepreneur’s Australasia concept, a Pacific Rim Pan Asian, casual fine dining restaurant and bar, which will open in May.
Paul Greening, Young Australian Chef of the Year in 2004, will oversee the food offer at Australasia, which will feature a 150-cover restaurant and a 150-cover bar.
Bacon, who is opening both businesses under his New World Bar Company vehicle, told M&C Report: “I have been wanting to do a coffee/deli format for a very long time and i am very excited about this new business, which we hope to open near the end of this year.”
The entrepreneur is also set to open a second site for his Red Door Neighbourhood Bar & Kitchen concept, which has been described as “a bar take on a traditional pub”.
Bacon reunited with former business partner David Hinds to open the first Red door in the West Kirby district of the Wirral. The second Red Door is expected to open this summer in Chester.
Only opened last December in the Deansgate area of Manchester, the original Alchemist, the group’s cocktail bar with full-service restaurant, has already won plaudits locally and will be joined by a sister site in the city centre later in the year.
Of the five restaurants, Living Ventures acquired out of the restaurant portfolio of chef-restaurateur Paul Heathcote late last year, the two Grado sites in Alderley Edge and Manchester have come under the group’s Blackhouse Grill portfolio and renamed The Grill on the Edge and The Grill on New York Street respectively.
Bacon hopes to convert the Olive Press site in Cheadle Hulme into an Italian restaurant either under the group’s Gusto brand or to a yet to be decided new name.
The two remaining Olive Press units in Liverpool and Manchester will continue to operate as they are for the time being.
Bacon, said that the Living Ventures,in which The Restaurant Group has a 37% stake, had experienced a 14% increase in sales in January, with sales up 6% in the first two weeks of this month.
The entrepreneur currently operates 23 sites in total.
