Friday Five: the week's top news
- Gordon Ramsay has quietly opened a pizza restaurant on the ground floor of his Bread Street Kitchen site in London. Street Pizza offers 'bottomless' pizza slices for £15, sides for under £5 and desserts including negroni ice cream. "If there's one thing I believe it's that pizza doesn't need to be complicated," says Ramsay.
- Jamie Oliver's Australian restaurant group has been sold to a new franchise partner after entering voluntary administration. The chef's Jamie's Italian in Canberra shut its doors after it was purchased alongside five other sites by Brisbane-based Hallmark.
- Pret A Manger has had two online adverts pulled for claiming its sandwich bread is "natural" and made without "obscure chemicals", despite containing artificial additives. The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) ruled that since the bread contains three E numbers, one of which is vitamin C, the posts were misleading.
- JD Wetherspoon made a stir on social media after announcing it was closing the Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts for all its 900 pubs. The group says it is concerned over the "trolling" of MPs and the "addictive nature" of social media. "I don't believe that closing these accounts will affect our business whatsoever," says the chain's chairman Tim Martin.
- Famed Taiwanese dumpling restaurant Din Tai Fung is now planning to make its UK debut with two London sites this year, rather than one as originally thought. The group will launch a flagship site in Covent Garden, followed by an opening in Fitzrovia's Centre Point. Din Tai Fung has 135 sites worldwide, and two of its Hong Kong restaurants have previously held Michelin stars.
For more of this week's news, click here.
