AUDIO: Steve Holmes on why ASK Italian has ‘a right’ to try to become the market-leading Italian restaurant business

17-Jul-2013 - Last updated on 23-May-2023 at 16:30 GMT

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Steve Holmes, managing director of ASK Italian, told the Arena Summer Lunch he believed his transformation strategy was starting to produce the desired results

Steve Holmes, managing director of Gondola Holdings-owned ASK Italian, has said he has recently started to believe his transformation strategy for the business will produce the desired results.

Speaking at the Arena Summer Lunch this week, Holmes said he had decided to take a risk and radically change the business because he believed ASK Italian had ‘a right’ to compete to be the market-leading Italian restaurant chain once again, especially given its past success in helping to shape the industry.

“Just recently I have started to think that what we are doing might be working,” he revealed.

“I nearly fell off my chair when someone I met recently said they had gone to ASK Italian last week – most people haven’t been for five years.

“She said: ‘To be honest, I tried to get into Pizza Express but they were full. It was really good – the food was excellent, the team were natural, the building was inspiring and we couldn’t understand why we had not been for five years’.”

Transforming people

Holmes, who admitted he had been ‘naïve’ about the scale of the task at hand when he took over ASK Italian, said the brand’s high level of recognition among the public had been its ‘biggest ball and chain’ – people had entrenched views of the restaurant group.

“If you need to do something radical with a business that is 20 years old there is no point in going out and doing what everyone else is doing but slightly better,” he said.

One of the key changes was to ASK Italian’s people – the recruitment process has been transformed, staff have been banned from using certain well-worn phrases and waiting teams no longer use any steps of service when dealing with diners.

Excellent food

Founded by the Kaye brothers in the early 1990s, ASK, as it was originally known, was taken over by City Centre Restaurants in 1995 before being sold again in 2004.

Holmes joined the business from fellow Gondola brand Pizza Express three years ago and he helped devise a reinvention strategy for the brand. The restaurateur has has since been promoted to managing director and told guests at the annual Arena lunch that he believed his strategy was now paying dividends.

“There wasn’t really that much wrong with the food,” he said. “When it started 20 years ago it was a lovely business – very modern and contemporary – but nobody was going anymore, everyone had fallen out of love with the business.

“There was no reason not to go but there was just no reason to go either,” he added.

Theo Randall

As well as revolutionising staff and service standards, Holmes brought in Theo Randall to investigate every aspect of the food on offer – the chef will launch his fourth ASK Italian menu in March.

The design of the restaurants has also been significantly altered. The newest venue opened just last week in Birmingham and two of the recently-launched sites have been nominated for Restaurant & Bar Design Awards.

Holmes this week revealed 30 of the brand’s c120 sites had now been refurbished – at a rate of one every week or fortnight, all of the restaurants will be transformed within the next 18 months to two years when the process is expected to start over again.

Questioning ASK Italian – Holmes also revealed that:

No staff member is promoted without the approval of their line manager’s line manager – the Grandfather Principle.
The new ASK Italian wine glass is so popular that 30,000 have been sold in the last year.
Ninety-two per cent of the brand’s chefs have been with the company for longer than a year.
Holmes and several ASK Italian staff will embark on a Grand Tour to visit all the restaurants in a three-week period in order to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity.