Raz Helalat: ‘I don’t like operating in safe mode’

Ahead of our lunch at his latest Brighton restaurant Black Rock Restaurants founder Raz Helalat jokingly advised me not to turn up hungry. Moments from the Royal Pavilion on Marlborough Place, Tutto is recovering from one of the sector’s bumpiest launches in recent memory.

Launched in September​​ with a Sardinian-born chef that had cooked at Padella and Café Murano at the helm, the Italian restaurant traded for about two weeks before closing due to the kitchen team being unable to deliver the menu at the required level (Tutto’s launch chef resigned).

What was supposed to be a fresh start was marred by more problems with staff. Helalat’s temporary head chef and sous chef left for health and personal reasons respectively within days of Tutto reopening plunging the restaurant back into chaos. And then Grace Dent came in for dinner.

“She arrived when we were on our knees trying to pick ourselves back up. The kitchen was being run by three chef de parties. We didn’t stand a chance,” Helalat says ruefully. “It wasn’t right, but we had no choice but to be open. We could not afford to close again.”

While The Guardian critic’s review didn’t pull any punches it doesn’t appear to have done too much damage and its owner – white negroni in hand – looks close to getting over it. Tutto is close to full on a Friday lunchtime and our meal is far better than Grace’s verdict might suggest. Helelat’s restaurants traditionally stand up well to scrutiny from national critics, with Tutto ending a run of half a dozen or so positive reviews for his now five-strong group of premium casual restaurants.

“Things are stabilising but sometimes it’s a case of two steps forward, one step back. We’re still looking for a head chef, but with four other restaurants in the group I’ve been able to parachute good people in. But it has been painful. Tutto has been my biggest test as a restaurateur. We’re still not open for every service and the menu is smaller than it should be. I don’t like operating in safe mode, but we can’t afford another setback.”

Helalat studied finance and economics at university but – to the dismay of his parents – was drawn into Brighton’s vibrant 90s club scene (his restaurant group’s name is a subtle nod to his raving days, with Brighton’s Black Rock a well-known spot for so-called 'free parties'). He worked in a variety of roles including promotion, management, and production, rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names of the era, not least Norman Cook.

“It was a lot of fun but the club scene as it was the was coming to an end. The focus switched to bands and streaming was become popular. It was getting hard to make money from it. I’d recently met my wife Tizzy and it was agreed that it was time for me to do something more stable with fewer late nights. So, I went into restaurants.”

At the coalface​

Black Rock Restaurants was born in 2011 when Helalat opened a steak restaurant in a former pub on Boyce’s Street, which links Brighton’s notorious West Street with the rather more salubrious shopping streets that run into The Lanes. The Coal Shed was among the first UK restaurants to have a Josper grill and was at the time one of only a handful of steak places to specialise in top quality dry-aged beef joining the likes of Hawksmoor and Goodman.

“I was told it wasn’t worth the investment on the Josper and that people in Brighton would not understand properly dry-aged meat,” Helalat recalls. “To some extent they were right. In the early days we had a fair few people tell us our meat was off because it actually tasted of something. But enough people got it.”

Being an early adopter of the Spanish-made charcoal oven wasn’t without its challenges. Having never dealt with one before, the company that fitted the extraction spec’d a system that could not cope with the fierce heat emitted by the unit. “We were burning through fans every six months. In the end we had to put in a completely different system. We made a lot of mistakes in those early days, but it was a lot of fun.”

The Coal Shed certainly seared its mark on Brighton and Hove’s restaurant scene, but its success would be eclipsed by Helalat’s next restaurant project.

A room with a view​

In 2015 Helalat took a gamble on a short lease – just eight years – for the main restaurant at The Hilton Brighton Metropole. Though ideally located on the seafront near several other major hotels and the then upcoming Brighton i360 attraction, it wasn’t an obvious move. Bar 106 was the very definition of a moribund hotel restaurant and with its peeling paint and fly-posters its windswept terrace was one of the seafront’s biggest eyesores.

Hilton originally wanted The Coal Shed but Helalat eventually convinced them a seafood restaurant would be a better fit for the location. With a high-spec fit out that looked quite different from anything else in Brighton & Hove at the time and a focus on whole grilled fish to share The Salt Room was a hit and remains one of the city’s highest grossing restaurants.

The only problem, Helalat says, was that its success did not go unnoticed by London operators. “The Salt Room proved that there was enough demand in the city to make big, premium restaurants of the sort you find in the capital viable.”

London bound​

Buoyed by the runaway success of The Salt Room, Helalat looked at sites in affluent towns in the southeast and suburban west London but ended up taking a site in Zone 1 within the One Tower Bridge development.

The Coal Shed’s London outpost​​ was within the first wave of venues to open in the area and – in common with the majority of operators there – found things extremely tough. “There was tumble weed. We were sold a dream by the property agent that largely didn’t come true," recalls Helalat. "It was not the next King’s Cross. Things picked up a bit when everyone was up and running, but then Covid hit and closed us for 14 months.”

The large restaurant – 100 covers on the inside and a similar number on the terrace - now finds itself in a very different trading environment to that which was originally promised.

“We’re not doing too badly but it remains underwhelming, he says, candidly. "We’re closed on Mondays because it’s just not worth it. Tuesday to Thursday is busy but Fridays are quiet because so many people choose that day to work from home. We have a brilliant chef there now and the space is great. I just wish we could pick it up and put it somewhere else.”

Entering a new market segment​

Billed as a ‘grown-up, late-night hangout’ that would blur the lines between bar and restaurant, Helalat’s fourth site opened in the summer of 2021. A few streets over from The Coal Shed on the fringes of The Lanes, Burnt Orange​​ looked set to be just as challenging as London but surprised everyone – not least its owner – by being one of the group’s biggest success stories to date.

“As soon as we acquired the site we went straight back into lockdown. I thought to myself ‘I’ve done it again’. Having just about stabilised things at Tower Bridge I’d created another massive headache for myself. It didn’t help that the site needed much more work than initially anticipated. It was shaping up to be a shocker,” says Helalat, who threw himself into the build, dispensing with the expensive national companies he’d used to project manage his last two openings to work with a handful of local contractors on the Middle Street site.

“It took much longer than it should have – about six months – but being so involved with the build gave me a much closer connection to the project and we ended up opening exactly the right concept in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.”

As well as being extremely popular – both locals and visitors to the city responded well to Burnt Orange’s more casual positioning and Fat Boy Slim-curated soundtrack – the restaurant’s small plates menu is far less reliant on pricey beef and fish allowing Helalat and team to offer a more approachable price point and enjoy a healthier margin.

“Serving punchy small plates allows us to make use of lesser cuts of meat, and vegetables and it also means there’s something for everyone, which is not the case at a steak-driven concept like The Coal Shed. It’s also quite personal in the sense that it taps into my Persian heritage more than anything else I’ve done. We use a lot of herbs, spice and chilli.”   

A very full plate​

Tutto’s bumpy launch hasn’t diminished Helalat’s appetite for expansion. Indeed, 2023 looks set to be Black Rock Restaurant’s busiest year to date.​​ He has been looking to move his original The Coal Shed site to a larger and more prominent location for some time and recently acquired a 5,000sq ft former retail site towards the bottom of North Street.

“We’ve been on Boyce’s Street for over 10 years and have now outgrown it. The lease is 25 years so this will hopefully be the restaurant’s home for life. It’s a big site that will enable us to have a bar for 30-50, a much larger dining room and an open kitchen.

"We will use the move as an opportunity to re-evaluate the concept. Jospers and dry-aged beef aren’t a USP anymore. If all goes well, we should be on site in April with a view to launch in September,” says Helalat, who originally intended to move much quicker on the North Street site but was forced to slam the brakes on when it became clear that Tutto would not be an easy birth.

Black Rock Restaurants will retain the former The Coal Shed site for an as-yet undecided concept that will be “a better fit for the location,” an intriguing prospect given the site’s proximity to Brighton’s least savoury run of late-night venues.

As if that wasn’t enough to be getting on with, Black Rock Restaurants is also actively looking at sites for a second Burnt Orange. “We’re looking at a place in Hove. We don’t want to be huge, but if we did do any sort of rollout, it would be Burnt Orange. The price point is approachable, and it gives us good margins. Plus, I don’t think the UK needs another steak or seafood chain.”

Helalat is also planning a complete refit of The Salt Room having recently extended the site’s lease directly with the Hilton Brighton Metropole’s landlord. The extensive works are likely to see the creation of a fully-glazed terrace allowing the area to trade year round.

With up to three sites set to launch in 2023 and a major refit on the horizon, Helalat has certainly served himself a full plate, especially given that Black Rock Restaurants head office has not grown in line with its estate.

“It’s just me sorting most of this stuff out. Our head office is minimal. We have a finance person, a marketing person and a non-exec director. That’s about it. I’ve been trying to employ a decent ops director for years. A proper head office is the next bit. I could do with my phone ringing a bit less often.”