Image Restaurants, which owns such chichi West End eateries as The Avenue and Circus, has seen a 23.8% surge in operating profits over the year to June 2005. Despite selling its East@West restaurant for a higher-than-expected £1.05m, the group took a writedown of nearly £770,000 on the sale. That caused Image to post an overall pretax loss of £941,000, more than double last year's figure. The Sunday Times 08/01/06 (Business) page 3.12