Restaurant agents could improve their service to operators by taking more care to match their concepts with the right property, according to a restaurateur considering expansion.
Steven Tozer, co-founder of Le Bab, located in upmarket London food hub Kingly Court, W1, said agents could make themselves valuable to restaurant owners by taking a more nuanced approach to their requirements.
He said: “Property is the single biggest obstacle to any aspiring or expanding restaurateur, and there is a real matchmaking exercise to be done to make sure operators are distributed to the right sights. What you don’t want is an agent that just says ‘oh here’s a property, come and trade in it’. It’s more complex, more nuanced than that. They should be asking ‘would your concept work here? Is the population right for your concept? Is the price point right?’.”
Restaurateurs are being increasingly opportunistic about finding the right space, and for London-based owners, the idea of rolling out “carbon copy versions of the same restaurant”, or putting themselves into the market with a specific brief, is on the decline as diners are “spoilt for choice”, Tozer added.
“There are so many amazing restaurants opening up and the idea of duplicating themselves is going out of fashion. From the conversations I’ve had people are increasingly tweaking their concepts to match sites.
“We’ve always got half an eye out for properties because we have different versions of the Le Bab concept we can put out there. But we’re looking at the properties available and thinking about exciting things we could do with them.”
Who is the Property Chef champion?
For Ed Brunet, co-founder of celebrated London kebab restaurant Le Bab, soft hand-made flatbread, encasing a layer-cake of Turkish-inspired spiced minced lamb, chips, pickles, lashings of harissa mayonnaise and tomato and date relish, is the best version of Britain’s favourite alcohol-absorbing snack he could ever conceive for himself.
So when it came to judging the kebab-compiling skills of 20 restaurant agents in the annual Davis Coffer Lyons Property Chef competition, could anything have come close?
Fortunately, close enough was good enough for the former chef of Michelin-starred establishments, who put a plain round of soft bread and array of toppings before the two finalists and left them to create a masterpiece.
Taylor Gershon and Jessica Carlyle-Clarke of Charles Benjamin Associates, and Kiren Dhesi and Abi Thompson of CDG Leisure, had rolled chip cones, mixed Le Bab’s signature cocktail, and flame grilled a lamb adana better than their competitors to reach the showdown round.
But it was team Charles Benjamin Associates that followed through for the win, taking this year’s Property Chef crown for the event supported by EG.
The competition was hosted in the small, blue and white tiled Soho restaurant of Le Bab. The Davis Coffer Lyons client is the concept of university friends Burnet and Steven Tozer, who, considering food “deeply misrepresented” in the UK, set up their gourmet kebab concept, first in street food markets, then in their restaurant in 2015, with a cluster of highly experienced chefs.
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