Moveable feast: how to relocate a restaurant… and take your regulars with you
Historically, restaurants rarely relocated. The magic created in a dining room tended to be seen as indivisible from that specific setting: the room’s design, the character of the surrounding building and that of the local area. Consequently, restaurants stayed put. Owners who successfully relocated, such as Claude Bosi, who moved Hibiscus from Ludlow to London in 2007, or meat-free pioneers Vanilla Black, who left York for London the following year, were outliers.
In 2024, in contrast, the restaurant is a moveable feast. The reasons why restaurants might want or have to move are many and varied. But where in the past owners would usually draw a line under that previous business and move on – opting for a new name, space and vibe, elsewhere – it is now common to take an existing restaurant from one location to another, confident it can be both preserved and enhanced in the process.
In London, Nest and Manteca, Adejoké Bakare’s Chishuru, Cyrus Todiwala’s Café Spice Namaste and Honey & Co, are high-profile examples of this new mobility. In Somerset, Michelin-starred Osip recently moved to a new site outside Bruton and, in December, Sheffield’s JÖRO will leave Krynkl, its shipping container home since 2016, and move to the village of Oughtibridge, five miles from the city-centre. That new location will include a re-born JÖRO and, due in phases into 2025, seven bedrooms, a separate bar serving a small plates menu and an outdoor terrace and BBQ kitchen.
JÖRO already operates bedrooms at House of JÖRO near Krynkl, and a casual dining concept, KONJÖ. But its move to Oughtibridge Mill, the public focal point of a residential development, will be a significant evolution for the brand. At the new JÖRO, for example, chefs will help serve dishes directly to guests from five islands sections in a bespoke, fully open kitchen.
“Naturally, wherever you are located,
it’s always going to be us”
Changing JÖRO’s name was discussed. “It was a pros and cons exercise,” says Stacey Sherwood-French, who runs JÖRO with chef husband Luke French. The couple felt enough will remain familiar about the new JÖRO – and not just in the innate nature of Luke’s food - that retaining this “strong brand” was sensible. The restaurant will still be intimate, with covers capped at 40; service will continue to be friendly and relaxed; hip music will be played; and, in new forms, JÖRO’s ‘dark and moody’ interior aesthetic will persist.
Keeping the name JÖRO is not solely a matter of retaining brand recognition, valuable as that is. It goes deeper than that, say Sherwood-French. The JÖRO brand is a “personal” expression of Stacey and Luke’s personalities, in food and design: “Naturally, wherever you are located, it’s always going to be us.” To put it another way: “We are the brand. It represents us as a couple and as a team.”
Reinvention not required
This, perhaps, gets to the nub of why so many (of our better) restaurants are now so disinclined to rip it up and start again – even when, like chef Rodney Wages, they are moving a restaurant 5000 miles from San Francisco to Edinburgh. In May, Wages re-opened Avery, which held a Michelin star in the US, in chic, boho Stockbridge.
In an international city like Edinburgh, which has some of US-born residents and many American visitors, Avery’s name carries a certain weight and, from a marketing angle, the story of the restaurant’s relocation – which included shipping bespoke art, cutlery, glasses and crockery over from the original site - is an interesting point of difference. But Wages’ rationale in creating this second Avery was, fundamentally, a creative one.
It would have been pointless and self-defeating to try to reinvent his approach, he says. “It’s like redesigning your whole new concept and restaurant without it being a copycat of Avery. It wouldn’t have hit the same way.”
Wages has spent almost a decade evolving a specific aesthetic at the restaurant and in his cooking. “Avery is a pretty unique experience,” he says. “I don’t think it was necessary for a full rebrand.”
Wages’ signature dish of tortellini filled with a cultured butter and shitake broth has transferred from San Fran, as has Avery’s focus on sake. Other core dish ideas – a take on pecan pie, now using Loch Arthur cheddar; or his Danish æbleskiver (pancake batter spheres), filled with, for example, spider crab, grilled Swiss chard and roasted garlic – have been reimagined to reflect the Scottish larder. Wages recently developed a pigeon haggis dish and is keenly anticipating how foraging and Scotland’s dramatic seasonal shifts in produce availability will change his food.
But it will remain his food. Avery’s cooking will retain an identifiable, as Wages puts it, “cadence”, in the way he combines flavours or, for example, his love of seafood, live-fire cooking and Japanese ingredients.
Recognisable anywhere
This is another key reason restaurant concepts are now so transferable. Ambitious modern chefs aim to create a distinctive signature in their cooking, their dishes and their use of flavours, that would be recognisable anywhere.
It is too much to say any chef is the restaurant. A restaurant has too many moving parts for that to be true. But equally, the best chefs build worlds, primarily with their food, but also in their design aesthetic and preferred service style, music choices or menu writing. Doing that enables them to carry an audience through different locations.
It helps that the way restaurant concepts gestate and become established has changed, too. Many emerge through a pop-up or residency route that habituates fans to the idea that the (latest, temporary) location is (almost) incidental to the experience. Fallow is a good example. Initially operating as a prolonged residency at rotating pop-restaurant 10 Heddon Street in Mayfair, its subsequent move to St James’s Market proved even more popular among customers.
The appeal of such roving concepts lies, instead, in viral dishes (in Fallow’s case its sriracha cod’s head), the atmosphere created at events, and how they convey a certain style or attitude on social media and in branding.
“Your community is now online. It’s everywhere. Your presence is as much virtual as it is bricks and mortar,” as Honey & Co’s Itamar Srulovich rightly observes. In that environment, and with owners navigating an, at times, unpredictable property market, it seems sensible for new chef-owners to create nimble concepts that are easily relocated.
“Your community is now online. Your presence
is as much virtual as it is bricks and mortar”
For all that, moving an established, much-loved restaurant remains a delicate business. Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer’s Honey & Co spent a decade at its original Warren Street site; a location that always felt more like a cosy neighbourhood café than the renowned Middle Eastern restaurant it had become. “We had this absurd situation that it had that feel you could just walk-in but, because it was so small and so popular, you had to book three months in advance,” says Srulovich.
Nonetheless, when Honey & Co’s lease ended in 2022 and it became necessary to move, it was a wrench. “People were really emotionally invested in that place,” as were Packer and Srulovich: “It was our first place – the heart of the whole thing.” Finding a new home, which Honey & Co did a mile across London in Bloomsbury, was a balancing act. The duo wanted a larger restaurant (not least, to accommodate walk-ins), but they also wanted to retain a homely feel.
The site chosen on Lamb’s Conduit Street was far bigger (60 covers inside, 20 out), but it could be sub-divided into four smaller, more intimate spaces. Dressed with house plants, art, produce and cookbooks (some racked on shelves from Srulovich and Packer’s own home), and with many of the existing Honey & Co staff moving to the new site, it maintained a familiar easy warmth. “The top-line [to designers, Studio Found] was ‘this should not feel designed, this should feel organic, pleasant and welcoming’,” says Srulovich. “It was important to us to keep the décor domestic, very homey. We didn’t want to be flash. It felt correct for the street, for us and the site.”
Similarly, the food underwent a gentle evolution. Continuing to serve breakfast was a given, and certain classics (fig and goat’s cheese salad, falafel, feta and honey cheesecake), needed to be on the menu - which, initially, was an 80% continuation of Honey & Co’s seasonal repertoire.
“We knew that, to make the transition, the food had to be the food people expect from us. But we had a brand new custom-made kitchen so, suddenly, it opened a lot of options for us. We had to restrain ourselves. We knew we had to meet those expectations and give [the menu] a slight refresh. Play with our new toy a little bit.”
Naturally, not everyone will embrace change, no matter how sensitively it is handled. For example, the current Harden’s listing for Honey & Co includes one diner-reviewer’s take that, in the move, the restaurant lost its, “‘special’ ambience”.
Srulovich understands that attachment to the original restaurant: “There’s nothing I can do about it. We tried really hard to keep what we thought were the essentials. Also, we’re not ones to look back. We’re not nostalgic. If we lose people on the way, look, in 10 years, you will, there’s no two ways about it. Because you have to change, and you have to make sure you’re happy with what you do.”
This is a fundamental point - it is important owners enjoy their new restaurant. Enthusiasm is contagious and most moves are an opportunity to finesse the guest experience in positive ways. Be it easier car-parking or, finally, having a bar area for pre-dinner drinks, Sherwood-French hopes the transference to the new JÖRO will feel “seamless”.
In Somerset, Merlin Labron-Johnson is confident moving Osip to a more rural location, in Brewham, is a natural evolution for a farm-to-fork restaurant that grows much of its own produce on nearby land. There are plans to bring greenhouses of propagating vegetables to the new restaurant site itself. In the meantime, as diners eat, they look out through the open, glass-walled kitchen onto a field of cows.
“With a concept like ours, there’s an amount of storytelling,” he says. “It has to make sense in the location. I hope Osip feels like a reflection of the landscape, that you get a sense of place. I don’t think you could necessarily put Osip in a city, for example.”
Informally, the new restaurant was dubbed Osip 2.0 in communications with diners. “As the dust settles,” says Labron-Johnson, the 2.0 will drop away. “But it was really important that it felt like a clear, obvious evolution. You can sense the new ambition when you’re in the space.”
Back at Honey & Co, relocation was a rare opportunity for Srulovich and Packer to take all of their experience and build their ideal restaurant. “We knew what this kitchen needs to perform efficiently and produce consistently delicious food,” says Srulovich. “We can do the same things much better than we did in the old place.”
Some will always pine for the original Honey & Co. Not Srulovich: “I do think our second iteration is much, much better.”
