D&D London’s Swiss hotel school-trained CEO is a veteran of the upper end of the London restaurant scene having been overseeing big ticket restaurants in the capital for nearly 30 years. Unfailingly polite and dressed in a carefully-tailored suit, it’s not difficult to imagine David Loewi effortlessly gliding across the restaurant floor in his younger days.
Now at the helm of a 30-strong group that is set to turn over close to £150m next year, Loewi's days of dealing with guests may be behind him but, when speaking about topics including staffing, food and service, it quickly becomes clear that he is just as interested in the little details that combine to create a great restaurant experience as he is in the numbers on his spreadsheets.
He has presided over a period of intense change for the group. Over the past year or so Des Gunewardena (the other ‘D’ in D&D) has moved on, 17% of its estate has been shuttered and the business has been sold to private investment companies Calveton and Breal Capital.
The cash injection has been a long time coming and has provided stability in the form of a £40m balance sheet recapitalisation but it has also underscored the tough time the business – and indeed the restaurant sector more generally - has had since the pandemic. In 2022 after being on the market for some time, D&D London was in line to be sold for £100m. When the sale went through at the tail end of last year it achieved £60m.
“The lower value was due to the economic cycle the deal took place in. It’s as simple as that,” Loewi says matter-of-factly. The investment from the two UK-based companies is being billed as ‘patient capital’, meaning that there won’t be nearly as much pressure to expand as there would be in a conventional private equity deal.
“Our buyers understand and respect the DNA of the business,” he continues. “They want to help us invest in the properties where necessary and then carry on the journey of growing both nationally and internationally. This deal is about us getting our mojo back. They realise that this is a time to nurture the business and look after the teams rather than say ‘we need this many new openings by this date’”
A different restaurant landscape
The dozen or so closures are a mixed bag including sites that have been trading for decades and some much newer projects, including Klosterhaus in Bristol, which opened in late 2020, and the group’s huge Alpine-themed restaurant Haugen in Stratford that opened a year later.
Loewi says the sites that have closed were not performing in line with the rest of the D&D London business. "The board was in full agreement about which sites were working and which ones weren’t. There are lots of headwinds at the moment. My view was that if a restaurant was borderline, it was better to focus on the restaurants that are making money and make them even better.”
Many of the closed restaurants – including Klosterhaus and Haugen - are casualties of the pandemic and the lingering aftereffect it has had on eating out. First among these is working from home’s disastrous impact on the corporate market.
“The world has changed. Both those deals were made before Covid. If you stand on Haugen’s rooftop and look into the surrounding office blocks, they are all empty. The social market is still there, but that is not enough for Haugen to succeed. It is too big a restaurant. We never even got to open the first-floor restaurant. It’s sad, I thought it was fab.”
With a few exceptions, the sites that have been closed have been on the smaller end of what D&D London does in terms of number of covers but Loewi says this isn’t something to be read into.
“It’s not about the size. There are a range of reasons including our appetite to invest and performance. We’re not just about big restaurants, although that is one of our strengths. Smaller sites like Launceston Place (the tasting menu-only Kensington restaurant headed by current National Chef of the Year Ben Murphy) brings a lot of kudos to our company.”
He also hints that the group may have made a few missteps when choosing sites. “The past few years have taught us that location is everything. Klosterhaus, for example, was a great restaurant but Cabot Circus (a sprawling outdoor shopping and leisure development in Bristol city centre) was perhaps not the best place for it.”
A restaurant revolution
After attending Swiss hotel school, Loewi cut his teeth at a number of London hotels, most notably Claridge’s. From there he went to work for Hyatt in Asia, the Middle East and London working his way up the ranks to the point where he was launching and overseeing large-scale F&B concepts.
In 1995, he left Hyatt to manage the launch of 700-seat Soho restaurant Mezzo for Terence Conran. The site – which today trades as 100 Wardour Street – was a landmark London restaurant that served up to 2,500 diners per day.
“I believe it was Europe’s biggest restaurant at the time,” Loewi says. “We had both John Torode and Chris Galvin in the kitchen. Initially I turned it down as it all seemed a bit much, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. We had 300 staff. That opening was part of a revolution in restaurants. Conran democratised eating out in this country.”
In the early 2000s Loewi left what was then called the Conran Restaurant Group (which at the time also included the likes of Pont de la Tour and Quaglino’s) to help open another landmark London restaurant - The Wolseley, no less.
A few years later he sold his stake in the Piccadilly restaurant and returned to the Conran fold. In 2007, he and Gunewardena led a management buyout of Conran Restaurant Group which valued the business at £50m and soon saw the name changed to D&D London.
And then there was one
Gunewardena moving on marks a big shift for the company, but it won't have much of an effect on D&D London’s trajectory, Loewi insists. That said, he acknowledges that there was a difference in opinion over the group’s direction of travel.
“Des and I grew the business together for many years. We have huge respect for each other. He is an amazing entrepreneur and was keen to keep expanding the business. The rest of the board didn’t have the same appetite.”
Gunewardena – who will return to the restaurant scene later this year with a 6,500sq ft site in the City – was certainly the more bullish of the two. In 2021, he announced that he was working on 16 different deals for new D&D London sites as the business ‘moved into an expansive phase’ following Covid and looked to ‘reduce its dependence on the capital’.
Will Loewi now look to change the name? “What to D?” he laughs. “The name is important, but in most cases, people aren't going to a D&D restaurant. They are going to 14 Hills or Launceston Place. It is important for staff and investors, but less so for our customers."
He views D&D London as a collection of individual restaurants rather than a conventional restaurant group. “It’s not a cookie-cutter approach,” he says. “We need to be able to mould and evolve. It’s harder to do that when you have big brands.”
D&D London employs nearly 2,000 staff in total - 1,700 in the UK and 300 or so at its overseas restaurants in Paris and New York (all of the group’s sites outside the UK are fully company-owned). The restaurants are to some extent run as individual businesses but benefit from their parent group’s considerable buying power, 70-strong head office and marketing clout (its ability to cross promote its venues is particularly potent).
A strong festive performance
The new owners will no doubt be buoyed by D&D London's performance since taking it on. The group reported a record-breaking Christmas period with its parties and events business generating more than £5m. Compared to the same period last year, the group says it experienced healthy growth in overall revenue and EBITDA, both exceeding last year and budget. Highlights include record month at German Gymnasium and 14 Hills and Queensyard in New York as well as a record Christmas Day at Quaglino’s and the biggest revenue day in D&D history at Madison on New Year’s Eve.
Expansion was mooted in the comms surrounding the sale of the business towards the end of last year, but Loewi says the focus is on the existing D&D London estate for the time being. That said, he would not rule out a new site opening this year. “We have been looking at possible new sites. I’m being approached by a lot of landlords. It’s just a question of identifying the right opportunity.”
While business in The Square Mile is strong, he views the current estate as overly City-centric and would like to do more in the West End. “We do some destination restaurants, but in general we specialise in large restaurants, and especially those with rooftops. Whether London or the regions, if you look at where we have done well it’s usually a combination of having a great location and a great building.”
Loewi also appears to have an appetite for international expansion, having recently returned from a trip to New York (where D&D already operates two restaurants) that included a number of site visits.
“New York is performing very well indeed. The economy is good and – most importantly for restaurants – working from home is less of a thing. In general people have gone back to work. They are building offices in the city, which has both stimulated the restaurant industry and provided new opportunities for operators. Our new investors are also very interested in us looking at opportunities in the Middle East and Far East.”
Intense competition
D&D London and Conran before it has played a key role in developing and professionalising London’s restaurant scene over the past four decades or so. Not so long ago it was pretty much the only game in town when it came to high-end restaurant groups with scale, but that certainly isn’t the case now thanks to a mix of both homegrown players and the more recent influx of international operators.
“Things have changed completely. When I worked at Claridge’s at the beginning of my career I used to hear the concierge arranging dinners for high-profile people including Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger. There were only a handful of restaurants that people went to. Now London is one of the eating out capitals of the world.”
Yet D&D London’s boss doesn’t seem fazed by the intense levels of competition in London and beyond. “New ideas and new concepts are a good thing. We all benefit from each other being there; I don’t really see the growth of the sector as a threat to us so long as we continue to remain relevant. Fundamentally, people want great food, great service and great energy in the room.”
