Côte: ‘We want to make this a beautiful thing’

Anyone who has started a new job during lockdown can surely relate to the strangeness of settling into a new role remotely.

For Jane Holbrook, executive chair at Côte Restaurants, the experience has been “bonkers” since joining with new owner Partners Group in September, her nine months in charge feeling more like three.

The situation has inevitably meant Holbrook’s plans for the French brasserie brand are at a more formative stage than the otherwise would have been.

Though that’s not to suggest the broad vision lacks ambition – it’s just Holbrook and her management team are still working on the detail.

“The ambition for this is huge,” she tells MCA. “We just need to take our time working out what we’re going to do.”

Despite her protestations that the turnaround journey has only just begun, she is remarkably clear and candid on the direction she feels it needs to go.

“What we don’t want to do is kid anyone that we’ve got it to where we need it to be,” she says. “We’re on a journey.”

Holbrook says she turned down the same job at PizzaExpress after Partners Group, the global private equity firm which has $109bn under management, asked her “come and play”.

Partners owned £250m worth of debt in Côte, and in a deal that won the Retailers’ Retailer Award for Deal of the Year, took ownership of the brand in pre-pack acquisition in September of last year.

“I thought, there’s something in this. I could just feel it, I could smell it. I thought, we can do a Wagamama on this one, we can take it from a bit broken, to a beautiful thing that is a force for good.”

During the course of our half hour interview, Holbrook apologises for repeatedly mentioning the ‘W’ word – though for good reason.

She was part of the management team that turned Wagamama into the sector-leading brand it is today, during stints as CFO, COO and CEO.

When she joined, Wagamama was “two minutes away from going bust”, she says. “People forget that, because now it’s glorious.”

The plain-speaking CEO repeatedly cites the now TRG-owned concept, because she sees strong parallels with the opportunity at Côte, a strong brand which she hesitates to say has lost its say.

“We took Waga when it was worth zero and sold it for the best part of £600m five years later,” she says, underlining the potential scale of the opportunity.

While then Wagamama-backer Duke Street Capital were “brilliant,” they did not have level of financial clout as Partners, she says.

Holbrook emphasises the need to “contemporize” Côte, and appeal to a new cohort of consumers.

“We want to make it a bigger part of the eating out marketplace. We’ve got to make it more relevant.”

The restaurant group has become mired in the traditional, heavy, meat and cream section of French cuisine, she says, with little in the way of contemporary, vegan or vegetarian dishes.

“People say there’s no vegetarian food in France, but it’s rubbish. There are more vegan restaurants in Paris than any other city of the world.”

Another key part of the plan is an overhaul of the look and feel, which looks a “bit dated”, with plans to brighten the colour palette up.

“It’s really to take it from where it is, to be an iconic brand again.”

A key member of her new management team is chief marketing officer Erin Roy, formerly of M&S, The White Company and Hush Homeware, who joins for the interview.

Roy says the turnaround piece is about revisiting the origin story, the “secrets of how it all started”, and paying reverence to the brand.

“It’s about unlocking the equity of the brand, making sure that it’s contemporized - and really making sure we’re being as relevant as possible to our guests, to our team, so that Côte means something.”

Upon joining, Holbrook says she was pleasantly surprised, shocked even, by the quality of ingredients at Côte, and sees this heart and provenance as key to its new messaging.

“When you think about French regional cooking, there’s so much in it, but the menu has been dumbed down.

“We want to get more French, more regional, more fun. We have some new values, about ‘living life full of flavour’.”

This sense of fun and flavour will look to celebrate French individuality, not caricature it. “Modern French, not Disneyland. It’s taking the best of what we’ve got and evolving it.”

A major focus during lockdown was market research and learning more about guest perceptions of Côte.

A key takeaway was Côte was seen as second choice for consumers, which emphasised the need to be more special and distinctive – and appeal to a younger consumer.

“The younger members in the team talk about going to Côte with their parents, and it’s something I used to always hear at M&S,” Roy says.

“For us, we say your mum’s welcome, but we want you and your mates here for your brunch on a Saturday too.”

“The customers have aged with the brand, it’s not had younger people coming through,” Holbrook adds. “That’s what we’ve got to do.”

When the acquisition was announced, much was made in the press release about how profitable Côte had been pre-Covid.

Only three restaurants were closed as part of the deal, under the Limeyard and Jackson & Rye brands, with 93 core restaurants staying open.

Long-standing CEO Alex Scrimgeour was initially said to be staying on, but left just over a week after the deal was announced. 

If it was indeed so successful pre-Covid, is there a risk of alienating its core customer-base with the revamp?

“Truly profitable companies rarely go bust,” Holbrook responds. “Let’s put it put it like that.

“Did it go bust because of Covid, or was it heading that way? I’ll leave that to your imagination.

“I think the reality the reality was, Covid might have tipped it over the edge, but it probably would have gotten there anyway.”

One of its problems as Holbrook sees it was relying too heavily on its fixed price menu.

“When you start to rely heavily on discounting, you can only go one way. You’re talking about value all the time, you’ve become a value proposition. Côte was always meant to be good value, but not cheap.”

A new focus is on a core menu that is ‘everyday special’, moving away from the idea of being value for money. “We don’t want to be Lidl, we don’t want to be in a race to the bottom.”

Another issue was customer confusion about what the offer was, with as many as six different menus at Christmas, which is “just overwhelming”.

Having been at one stage positioned at the premium end of casual dining, Roy says there is a commitment to elevating the brand.

“It’s having confidence in the product, confidence in the offering,” she says.

Côte will remain a “democratic” brand, and won’t alienate its customers, but there will be some premium dishes on the menu, as well as more entry-level options.

The brasserie group certainly won’t be going head to head with The Ivy at the glamorous end, Holbrook adds.

“It’s somewhere where you can rock up, have a good time, with decent service and some nice food.

“It’s the top end of the mid-market we’re aiming for.”

Being the category leader, compared to the more crowded Italian casual dining segment, must feel like a good place to be in a competitive market.

By building a “category of one”, when consumers want to eat French food, they will opt for to Côte, Holbrook says.

“That’s why we want to dial up the Frenchness. The menu’s got quite a lot of Italian and some random stuff. Over time we will dial up the regionality.”

That’s not to say there will be frogs’ legs, snails or foie gras on the menu.

“We’re not going to be serving duck tongue. It won’t be stuff that people go, ‘wowzers!’”

With an eye on social media, there will be more Instagramable desserts, and a vegan crème brûlée.

In a contemporary twist on France’s immigrant communities, there will be some harissa and couscous, which will reference the street markets of Marseille.

With plenty of work to do on the brand and offering, Holbrook is at least broadly happy with the remaining property estate.

Going forward, the business will double down on larger footprint restaurants, not smaller.

“It’s exactly what we did at Wags. We’ve got to get bigger restaurants, because then you’ve got the atmosphere, you get really great quality GMs, and you can do great things and more money.”

Outside the core restaurant business, there is also the Côte at Home offering, which was a lockdown success story and trailblazer for eating out brands pivoting.

While volumes have decreased as dine-in has reopened, it continues to reach a new type of customer – in Devon, the Cotswolds, the Scottish Highlands.

Nor is Holbrook deterred by the assumption that French food won’t work for delivery, citing her previous challenges packaging a certain noodle soup.

“We’ve got to find a way of doing it. We’ve got all these opportunities that are just ripe for tapping into.”

The interview was set up to talk about the Deal of the Year award win, and when we return to the subject of the investors, Holbrook is more than happy to eulogize about them. “I think they’re amazing,” she says. 

Having worked with many private equity groups, she describes Partners as a perfect cultural fit, with the same working-class, egalitarian ethos as the management team at Côte.

“They’re very humble, there’s no delusions of grandeur. Their values are genuinely around making the world a better place. It is in their core.

“Every time we’ve said, ‘oh no, we’re closing again’, or we we’ve just shaved £2m off the P&L, they say, fine, we knew this would be hard, we’re in this for the long term, we want to make this a beautiful thing.”