Friday five: the week's top hospitality stories
- D&D London has closed its contemporary French-style restaurant Plateau in London’s Canary Wharf. It is the sixth restaurant in D&D’s portfolio to shut its doors this year. Back in January it was revealed that its Avenue and Radici restaurants in London had closed alongside East 59th in Leeds and Klosterhaus in Bristol as part of a strategic review of the group’s portfolio. D&D acquired the Plateau site in 2006.
- Belgian bakery and coffee chain Le Pain Quotidien has gone into administration with all but one if it sites closed. The brand, which is operated by Brunchco UK, has closed seven of its stores across London, including on Marylebone High Street, Covent Garden, South Kensington, Mayfair, and Hyde Park. Just one site in St Pancras, which is operated by SPQ Holdings, remains open.
- All-day restaurant group will open its largest venue to date later this year in Covent Garden. The new restaurant will be located in the Grainhouse development on Drury Lane that was also formerly a grain and seed store, and will feature terrace dining wrapping around the site, a lower ground floor for all day bar and dining, and the Green Room, the group’s largest private hire and events space to date. It will be Caravan’s eighth restaurant, following on from the opening of a site in Canary Wharf in 2022.
- Restaurant closures reached the highest quarterly figure in a decade in the first quarter of the year. Figures from accountancy firm Price Bailey reveal that 569 restaurant businesses entered insolvency in Q1 2023 and that a total of 2,028 business went insolvent over the past 12 months - a 55% increase on 2021/22 when 1,303 entered insolvency. An average 5.6 restaurant businesses are going bust per day, up from 3.1 per day in 2021, many of which are restaurants.
- Mireille Hayek's Beirut-born Em Sherif group is to open a second London site in Mayfair. Located on the corner of Albemarle Street and Stafford Street, the new restaurant will be the group's first high street location in the capital and sit alongside its debut London outpost, which opened on the second floor of Harrods in February last year. The original Beirut restaurant was named as one of the top nine female-led restaurants to watch in 2021 by The World's 50 Best Group, and features on The World's 50 Best Discovery database.
