Brasseria Family smashes crowdfund for third restaurant

The two-strong Italian restaurant group has raised nearly £1.2m from 66 investors, breaking its £1.05m target, to help fund the building, opening and promotion of a new restaurant on Brompton Road​​ in South Kensington.

The group was founded in 2018 by Andrea and Alberto Fraquelli, who moved to the UK from Italy in the 1950s to set up Spaghetti House. It runs two restaurants in the capital in Marylebone and Westbourne Grove and says it served more than 260,000 customers last year.

Investors in the business include Simon Woodroffe, restaurateur and founder of YO! Sushi.

The new restaurant, to be called Brasseria Brompton, will be led by executive chef Giulio Rossi and general manager Gianluca Camilletti and will serve a menu that will feature several signature Brasseria Family dishes including the cotoletta alla Milanese; hand-made fettuccine della casa with porcini mushrooms and truffle cream; and Dover sole alla mugnaia that’s plated and deboned tableside.

Writing on LinkedIn, Alberto Fraquelli said the crowdfund was a ‘logical step’ for the restaurant group.

“Throughout the journey we have enhanced our shared ownership structure to include employees, suppliers and customers. For example, we could not deliver our 3rd site so well without our exceptional building contractors Nexus (South East). They delivered Brasseria Notting Hill, will deliver Brasseria Brompton and hopefully many more in the future,” he write.

“We cannot succeed alone in this journey. A logical next step was to launch a Crowdfunding campaign, which will add a lot more vested investors to our current pool of co-owners, making our roots and chances of success even stronger.”