Inside Track: Thai dining boss is squids in

With competition for property in London at fever pitch, Giggling Squid has far avoided venturing inside the M25.

It’s a position that has worked well for co-founder Andy Laurillard, who has made a habit of opening popular restaurants in Home County towns populated by affluent, well-travelled professionals.

The former marketing man launched the venture with his wife Pranee in Hove in 2009, and from its formative nucleus in Sussex, the group has been shifting its hub to more moneyed Surrey – albeit with outliers in the likes of Norwich and Bath.

The group is expecting to complete on two new sites in the next week, is in construction at Bath, Windsor and Brentwood, recently exchanged on a site Beaconsfield and has a further two in legals.

And after the latest opening in Farnham in a lovingly restored building complete with period features and low door frames, Laurillard is content to stay out of the big cities for now.

“If you look at a map of Surrey there’s about 18 places we could go”, he said. “We wouldn’t go to all 18 towns, but if we can get to 10 or 11 that’s great.

“The biggest factor for our success I think is the number of people who travel abroad, and the number of quality restaurants. You have lot of people in this wealthy swathe around the M25, but they don’t have a lot of places to eat. Wealth has moved out of London but the commercial offering hasn’t caught up.”

Laurillard sees Giggling Squid at the forefront of the second wave of casual dining, focusing on more middle-aged professionals rather than the predominantly Italian family-friendly first wave.

And he takes heart from the huge popularity of chicken tikka masala in paving the way for Thai food, amid a growing preference for fresher, healthier food, particularly among women.

“If people can get their head around chicken tikka masala then they get their head around Thai red curry”, he said. “Curry houses have established a national appetite for chilli, and we’re a healthier, more colourful, lighter and fresher execution of that sort of spice.”

While Giggling Squid has a strong growth record and backing from the British growth Fund (BGF), Laurillard admitted choosing the right locations was an inexact science he had not always perfected.

“We have been surprised when we’ve opened a restaurant thinking it’s a marginal opportunity and been blown away by the response”, he said. “In other places we think it’s definitely going to work and it doesn’t. We haven’t quite mastered the art. We haven’t gone far wrong, but haven’t got a great hit rate of being bang on the numbers.”

As for his peers in the Thai dining space, Laurillard prefers to compare Giggling Squid to the likes of Cote, while he is scathing of the Thai independents he wants to take market share from. 

“They have lower hygiene ratings, lower food quality, poor health and safety, tax avoidance, illegal immigrants – there’s a whole range of sins. As a customer I’d be hesitant to eat at them. I’ve bought a few and seen what’s in the kitchens.

“Corporately we’ve had to differentiate ourselves form a sector that isn’t that salubrious. We’ve invested in things that independents wouldn’t think of doing. It means we’ve got higher costs, such as paying VAT on cash takings, and have to charge more, but we make up by being more attractive to the customer and we get more people through the door.”

Yet while there is unlikely to be any street food dishes appearing on Giggling Squid’s menu, the brand has undergone a gradual evolution.

“The Giggling Squid brand has moved quite a lot”, he said. “Brighton was the stripped back original design, which you can still see echoes of, but the new sites are completely different. There’s a lot more colour and light, a bit more of an Asian look, with flowers everywhere.

“We do an awful lot of new concept development, because things have to move on. We’ve been thinking about how to develop the proposition, and you can see how it has progressed looking at the different sites.”