Rossopomodoro, the Italian restaurant chain backed by Change Capital Partners (CCP), is planning an initial £4m investment over the next eight months on the opening of five new sites in UK and a redesign of the group’s image.
The group, which is led in the UK by Handley Amos, will open its largest site so far, a 150-cover restaurant, tomorrow in Camden. This will be followed in June by a 70-cover restaurant in Hoxton, plus further openings in Watford (September 2012), Wandsworth (January 2013) and Swiss Cottage (January 2013). Additional sites will be announced in the coming weeks.
The new restaurants, which will create 150 new jobs, will bring the number of UK sites for the group to nine, including three existing outlets in London and one in Birmingham. David Toubian of Richard Susskind advises Rossopomodoro.
The expansion is part of the company’s wider development plans in the UK, Italy, the USA and additional territories.
Amos has also undertaken a re-style of Rossopomodoro’s logo, menu design and interiors to convey more strongly the “Neapolitan heritage at the heart of the company”, using a raft of imagery and objects sourced by his team in Naples. The designs for the new-look UK restaurants will be gradually rolled out across the group globally.
Amos said: “The redesign helps us to better demonstrate what lies at the heart of Rossopomodoro which is the authentic, Neapolitan cuisine. No one in the UK prepares pizza and pasta using ingredients sourced solely from farms and businesses in and around Naples itself – the heartland of Italian pizza.
“We continue to raise the bar for high quality pizza and pasta. And it is an enormous honour that the UK should be leading the group in a new style for the restaurants with a simpler, brighter look that leaves no-one in any doubt this is a restaurant born in Naples.”
Amos has also introduced a new Rossopomodoro ‘app’, which can be used for booking & location and can be scanned for members of the group’s new card-based loyalty scheme
CCP was created in January 2004 by Luc Vandevelde, former chairman of both Carrefour and Marks & Spencer, together with a dedicated team of professionals with complementary retail and private-equity experience, including Roger Holmes, former chief executive of Marks and Spencer, who is working closely with the Rossopomodoro team.
Holmes said: “We came together with the founding management of Rossopomodoro to help realise its international potential and we are delighted to see the UK expansion gather pace with a design and concept which brings the authenticity of Italy’s favourite pizza restaurant brand to a broader international audience.”
