Las Iguanas owner to sell £150m bonds September 20, 2015 THE OWNER of restaurant brands Cafe Rouge and Bella Italia, is planning to tap the debt markets as part of a refinancing that would see the group issue around £150m worth of bonds. Casual Dining Group (CDG), which was previously known as Tragus, has undergone a major restructuring since a consortium led by private equity [...]
The Rosebery founder Simon Davis on scrapheaps, sewing, MOTs and Angelina Jolie September 20, 2015 Did you know that Jeff Bezos used to photograph everyone he met so he wouldn't forget who they were? Neither did I, but when Simon Davis interviewed him, Amazon was still a startup – and it's just one of several gems Davis, founder of the London Restaurant Festival (LRF), The Rosebery and former journalist, wheels [...]
Mix it up: There’s more to coffee cocktails than the Espresso Martini September 16, 2015 Today, as you sip your morning coffee, take a moment to ponder London’s great institutions built under the influence of caffeine. During one of this nation’s many peaks – from the mid-1600s to the early 1700s – our streets were awash with thousands of coffee shops. These replaced taverns as the place to meet and [...]
Sir Charles Dunstone’s Freston Road Investment to bring US pizza chain MoD to UK after Five Guys success September 14, 2015 Sir Charles Dunstone has moved from backing burger joints to pizza chains after striking a joint venture agreement to bring US restaurant chain MOD Pizza to Britain. MoD, which stands for Made on Demand, allows customers to pile as many toppings as they want on their artisan-style pizza base for the same fixed price. It [...]
Mayfair Equity Partners leads race for Yo! Sushi in deal worth £100m September 13, 2015 THE RACE for Yo! Sushi is heating up after a new buyout firm run by former head of Lloyds’ private equity arm emerged as a frontrunner to buy the restaurant chain, in a deal valued at around £100m. Mayfair Equity Partners was founded earlier this year by Daniel Sasaki, who previously led Lloyds Banking Group’s [...]
JD Wetherspoon hits out at government’s Living Wage September 11, 2015 Pub chain JD Wetherspoon has become the most recent in a series of companies to hit out at the government’s Living Wage. In the company’s preliminary yearly results, the pub chain said the government is putting pubs under financial strain. Read more: National living wage – All businesses will end up paying it – but [...]
Living Wage: Morrisons boss Dave Potts joins Next, John Lewis and Whitbread in warning of extra staff costs September 10, 2015 The cost of the National Living Wage is stacking up rapidly. Morrisons has today admitted that the introduction of the government-imposed measure next year is going cost the supermarket group “10s of millions of pounds” on top of the costs the business is already battling with to turn itself around. From April next year, businesses [...]
Sports Direct AGM: Mike Ashley can ignore the outraged of Twitter – but in the new world order, he ignores investors at his peril September 10, 2015 Shareholder unrest over corporate governance or transparency is nothing new, but in this age of social media and e-petitions, public outcry over certain business practices is often louder than it once was. Last week, public opinion, along with a dollop of union pressure, forced restaurant chain Pizza Express to change its policy over tipping. [...]
Salt & Honey restaurant review: London’s modern European Bistro is the bees knees September 8, 2015 28 Sussex Pl, W2 2TH Tel: 020 7706 7900 FOOD ★★★★★ VALUE ★★★★★ ATMOSPHERE ★★★☆☆ Cost for two with wine: £100 The internet has done for the food scene what cheap international flights did for travel: it made it accessible. There are no secrets – a new restaurants barely needs to open its doors before an army of [...]
Exploring Oman, the wild west of the east September 7, 2015 Camping always evokes familiar memories: pitching tents at night, muddy fields, the taste of a stodgy pasta meal cooked over a gas stove in the rain, and a chorus of sheep baa-ing at dawn like a congregation of tone-deaf pensioners at a Sunday service. At least it did for me until earlier this year when [...]