Whitbread boosted by Premier Inn chain April 29, 2010 Britain’s biggest hotel operator Whitbread reported a rise in full-year pre-tax profit as its Premier Inn hotel chain attracted holidaymakers by offering rooms for as little as £29 a night. Whitbread, which also owns Costa Coffee and the Beefeater and Brewers Fayre pub restaurant chains, introduced new pricing initiatives to lure leisure customers to Premier [...]
Burger King tops Wall St forecasts on good margins April 29, 2010 Burger King reported a quarterly profit that edged past Wall Street’s expectations yesterday, helped by better-than-expected margins. The second-biggest US hamburger chain after McDonald’s had warned in March that bad weather in the central and eastern United States kept diners away during the quarter and it expected lower revenue and restaurant margins for the period. [...]
SUMMER SIZZLER April 28, 2010 AFTER a winter as long, cold and trying as the one we’ve just experienced, any excuse to wave it goodbye and welcome the arrival of warmer times should be celebrated – and there’s no better way of doing that than hauling the old barbecue out of the garden shed and firing it up. Offering a [...]
Markets crave clarity over economic strategy April 25, 2010 SO A LITTLE disappointing but in the end there was something for everyone in Friday’s GDP numbers. We looked for 0.4 per cent for the first quarter and got 0.2 per cent. You’d think that would be bad for Gordon Brown but he revelled in his line that this proved the recovery was fragile and [...]
Rejuvenation and wine in Lombardy April 25, 2010 PLINY the Younger wrote his Tragedia and Comedia in a villa on Lake Como and the lake has continued to attract the best and the richest of society, from Madonna and George Clooney to Gianni Versace, Ronaldinho and Sylvester Stallone. Indeed, the lakes of the northern Italian region of Lombardy – the most famous being [...]
Pick up a slice of European history April 22, 2010 ANYONE buying a Continental holiday home has a choice to make – do you like cutting-edge design and built-to-spec polish, or do you like something steeped in history? A minimalist mansion on an Ibizan hillside is one thing (a very nice thing), but a rambling old farmhouse or converted medieval church comes with a romance [...]
BEST OF THE BROKERS April 21, 2010 THORNTONS Execution Noble has downgraded its rating of Thorntons from “buy” to “sell”. It says the chocolate-maker wavered at the January trading update, when the store sales trend was weaker than expected. It warns that earnings are likely to be volatile making it hard to support a positive investment case. THE RESTAURANT GROUP Seymour Pierce [...]
Blanc goes bland in the Square Mile April 19, 2010 Brasserie Blanc 60 Threadneedle Street, EC2R 8HP Tel: 020 7710 9441 Cost per person without wine: £26 IT has the name Raymond Blanc attached, but don’t be thinking Brasserie Blanc has anything to do with the French celebrity chef’s haute cuisine flagship, Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in Oxfordshire. Brasserie Blanc is a chain of [...]
For babymooners, Brown’s is best April 18, 2010 WHEN I told people that my wife was expecting our first child, a lot of the men who already have kids did this laugh, a sort of bark that seemed to be at once ironic, sardonic and to suggest “you poor, poor fool, you don’t know what you are letting yourself into. No, really, you [...]
Ronson tops out the City’s Heron Tower April 12, 2010 HERON Tower, the tallest building in the City of London, was yesterday “topped out” at a ceremony held by the developer Heron International and construction firm Skanska. The 46-storey development, near Liverpool Street Station, is to be completed in February next year and will add 40,836 square metres of commercial office space to the London [...]