Friday Five: the week's top news
- Wagamama founder Alan Yau is to launch a restaurant and retail concept selling plant-based ramen. Building on the success of the Japanese-inspired casual dining concept he founded in 1992, Yau said he was inspired to develop a ‘Wagamama 2.0’ for retail, due to the capital-intensive nature of running restaurants in the UK. The restaurateur, who now lives in Barcelona, but regularly travels to London, Dubai, Istanbul and Las Vegas, plans to launch a proof-of-concept site next year inspired by Apple stores, which will be part retail unit, part restaurant, with noodles produced on-site. The venue, which won’t feature Yau’s name above the door, will have a noodle restaurant at the back and a retail component at the front.
- Jeremy King has signed to open a restaurant in the new Park Modern building near London’s Kensington Palace Gardens next spring. The Park will be in the grand cafés and brasseries mould that The Wolseley co-founder is known for but will be ‘very much of the early 21st Century rather than 20th’. Writing in an email, King says he is ‘getting back in the saddle – or perhaps more precisely getting the hacking jacket tailored and building the stable’.
- Plymouth has topped a list of the best UK locations to open a restaurant in 2023, according to new research. The West Country town came out top in a list of the best 20 locations to launch a business, ahead of Dundee in second place and Sunderland in third. The list was compiled by asset finance brokerage Approved Business Finance (ABF), which assessed the current market by taking the UK’s top 50 most populated cities and analysed the current commercial retail listings from Rightmove. It considered five data points including average price of rent, cost per square foot, footfall recovery score from the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the number of closed banks and empty commercial spaces to reveal the cities that are most promising for new businesses in 2023.
- Edinburgh-based chef Stuart Ralston will launch a seafood-focused tasting menu restaurant on the former site of the late Paul Kitching’s 21212 this October. The 28-cover Lyla will be an ‘oad to produce from the Scottish Isles’, focusing on ‘ingredients from the coastline and earth’. Kitching’s wife and business partner Katie O’Brien will continue to operate the Royal Terrace site’s four high-end bedrooms.
- Restaurants and cafés across the UK are going insolvent at a pace not seen for more than a decade, new research shows. A total of 3,347 eateries have been unable to pay their debts in the past two years to March 2023, according to data from the Insolvency Service. During the first three months of 2023, an average of six restaurants were affected every day. Of those restaurant declared insolvent, 98% of cases have ended with the business being shut down.
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