Yummy Pubs, the venture led by Tim Foster and Anthony Pender, hopes to secure a new site every three months and is focusing on its supper club concept Ssshh for a rollout that could extend to 20 sites.
It follows a successful series of six Ssshh events at Yummy’s Somers Town House near Euston Station in London, which opened earlier this year.
Foster told M&C Report that the company has also completed on a fifth unnamed site that he hopes to be trading by the end of 2012.
“It will be our first step towards opening a site every three months. That’s what we’re trying to achieve.”
The Ssshh concept sees customer sign up for a three-course meal with strangers. It’s aimed at people who don’t have a network of friends when they come to the city.
Sssshh currently operates in the top section of Somers Town House and Foster said that a rollout would focus on retail units rather than pubs.
“We are giving it another two weeks to see if can stack up as a stand alone model then will see if we can roll out to retail,” he said.
The supper club at Somers Town House is accessible via a concealed entrance disguised as a bookshelf. The plan for retail sites is to have a fake frontage, for example a shoe shop or a barber's shop, and to change the design every three months.
Yummy also aims to negotiate to buy the freeholds of its pubs, Foster said,
He said “20-plus” sites is a target for Yummy, although he stressed that there was “no aspiration” about time scale. “Sky’s the limit really. It’s just about how we can build a model around [Ssshh].”
He said that one advantage of the supper club concept is the smaller in-going and maintenance costs and lower staff costs. The company will know attendance in advance for Ssshh events and can deploy staff accordingly, unlike in pubs.
Foster said Yummy has “no interest’ in private equity and said the company has good support from its bank, HSBC.
