A second London site could be on the cards for Mowgli, but it “must make economic sense”, founder Nisha Katona told MCA’s Restaurant Conference.
Katona held off opening her first site in the capital for several years due to the rent levels, with Mowgli’s Charlotte Street location opening last October.
“What you have to make to even compare to a Mowgli in Sheffield or Leicester – it’s ludicrous!” she said in relation to London rents. “The pressure on you to fill that restaurant all the time… I would end up with an ulcer.”
However, the fallout from the pandemic meant that we got “a great land deal on a street that I love and know very well”. Katona said she was “absolutely love to do another one”, but it might be in a more suburban location.
“I am tight – these are my purse strings. It’s all predicated on what the land deal is. It’s got to not keep me up at night if we have a quiet Tuesday lunch. That’s really important. This job has got to be a joy,” she said.
With her sites in the North West and the Midlands, for example, she said the rent levels mean that on a quiet day she can “breathe out”. “It means you don’t have to do an a-board with discounts on. We don’t have to do any takeaway and delivery – it’s working as it is, but I have to keep such as grip on my own reins to say: ‘Don’t go for those big expensive sites, no matter how much you want them’.”
Katona also told delegates that she was moving back to the original, smaller scale Mowgli model for future sites, rather than “big gold and glasses boxes”. “I’ve opened a few glass boxes, and done a few schemes, and now the model I’m going after is that first bowl street food model, like Charlotte Street. A tiny, beckoning little gold thing.”
She still designs every site and is keen that the restaurants are thought of as independents rather than a chain. She is also not a fan of big-scale launches. “I have brought the signage right down, so you have to really squint at it,” she said.
“It’s all about going humbly into a town, choosing a little location, hoping you are not crap and that they don’t hate you and having organic growth from that.
“We don’t do marketing, or PR, it’s just social media and it’s about trying to get a little bit of a following before you go there and then it’s that organic growth,” Katona explained.
“I think for the medium and long-term that’s better than crescendo going into a town with the bunting out… so we don’t have opening parties – we just slink open.”
