Giraffe launches adult-focused Café and quick service train station concepts

The group, which is backed by Risk Capital Partners, will open its first Giraffe Café later this month on the site of its first original Giraffe restaurant in Hampstead, which first launched in 1998.

Designed to appeal to a more cosmopolitan, adult market, the café will open earlier than the Giraffe restaurants serving a more grown up all-day menu, featuring dishes such as open BLTs, pancakes and sausage with scrambled eggs.

The group’s trademark orange branding will be toned down for the café, with a more earthy and natural design with walls featuring original brickwork and maps of the world.

Giraffe intend to launch their second Café in Wimbledon in August, and plan to rebrand many of the group’s original Giraffe restaurants in need of refurbishment in due course.

Juliette Joffe told BigHospitality the brand extension is designed to suit locations with a local customer base.

“The Café will work in local areas that are like little villages where you get locals in all the time,” she said.

“We felt we’d grow the original Giraffe up from where it started 13 years ago and give it a new lease of life. That will most probably happen with a few of the ones we’ve done that have been in the high street a long time.”

Quick-service restaurant​

The Joffes have also acquired a site within King’s Cross station for its first quick-service restaurant concept Stop Giraffe, which they hope will launch in January.

The new brand extension will serve a takeaway menu featuring similar dishes to the original Giraffe concept such as burgers, noodles and soup, but will feature some seating for eating in.

Juliette said: “Stop Giraffe will serve a menu that allows people to come in and go quickly because they’ve got a train to catch. However it will be different to our airport franchises where people have a lot more time to stop and eat.”

The group will continue to seek sites within additional train stations if the concept is successful.

It's conception follows that of Cafe Rouge which earlier this year launched a quick-service format​ of their French bistro brand at Euston station.

Giraffe, which now operates five different brand extensions in addition to the original mainstream brand, including Guerilla Burgers in St. James's, Giraffe Bar and Grill in Soho ​and Giraffe Bath, a more design-led site, aims to have 60 sites across its portfolio by the end of 2012.

It intends to expand the Guerilla Burgers and Bar and Grill brands that both currently only trade from one site each.

“We are now in a position where every time we acquire a site we have the choice of whether it could be a Café, mainstream Giraffe or a Guerrilla Burger. It gives us the flexibility of having a look and decide what will fit there.”

Joffe added that the group, which currently has 45 restaurants in total, did not intend to add any more brand extensions to its portfolio.