What did the early days of Brindisa Tapas teach you about the restaurant business?
Food is central. One of the biggest lessons is knowing that food leads everything in a restaurant. It’s the biggest percentage of the sales and it’s what defines you. We used the same brand on the tapas bar as the food supplier business to perpetuate the heritage of the name. And while the food isn’t exclusively Spanish, because we use British poultry and fruit and vegetables, the iconic Spanish ingredients are present, and that makes a huge difference in terms of the credibility of the menu and the creativity we can exercise.
How has the menu evolved?
We’ve got some dishes that we’ve never been able to take off as we’d get a lot of unhappy customers. There’s about half a dozen created by Josep Carbonell and José Pizarro [Brindisa’s early executive chefs] that stay on the menu. They include the Gordal olives with orange; and the monte enebro cheese. When we began to expand, we initially tried to make each site a little bit different, one had more of a grill focus and another had more rice dishes, but it didn’t really work. Customers didn’t get it, and so now all our restaurants are aligned. We’ve played around with doing larger dishes, but that’s a struggle when you’re understood to be a tapas restaurant. You can’t move too far from small plates.
What’s the secret to Brindisa’s longevity?
Having a strong leadership team is key. You put off having a head office team when you first launch as it’s so expensive, but it really paid off once we built our team. It brought training, marketing, messaging, and disciplines on cost control and behaviour management, and we’ve really honed that as we’ve grown. Obviously, you go through ups and downs, every restaurant group does, but at the moment we’re really strong. Keeping the business privately owned and the growth within the confines of our own generation of income is something I’ve always insisted on too. It works and has helped keep us genuine.
You launched spin-off brand Bar Kroketa in 2022, where did the idea for that come from?
The idea has always been there. I love those little bars in Spain where you can pop in for a drink and a snack. We wanted a smaller concept that wasn’t so reliant on having a fully kitted out kitchen, and the changes to the use class system for high street properties [which came in 2020 and make it easier to convert between commercial, business, and service uses without planning permission] made it possible. The inspiration came out of the croquetas, really. We modelled it to go into small sites that may not have been restaurants before, and so we needed to make sure the menu was easier to execute than Brindisa.
Do you plan to open more Bar Kroketa sites?
Absolutely. We have two sites now and the ambition is to do a few more. Like Brindisa, we don’t want to go outside of the business for money, we just do things as we succeed. Site two now has a nice pace, and we have site three and site four in our view, which we expect to open next year. Bar Kroketa is a much lower outlay, partly because it’s drinks led and the menu is shorter, so the investment at every level is lower risk.
What about your expansion plans for Brindisa?
None of us are in a hurry. We can grow, but right now we’re quite enjoying focusing on making sure what we are doing is being done really well. That includes making sure we have the right people in place. You need to have strategic leaders across all sections of the business, and we’ve slightly overstretched ourselves in the past, so now we’re pacing much more realistically. We have noticed that we get landlords approaching us a lot more, though, which is new, but I feel very strongly that growth for vanity is a total waste of time - it’s about quality over quantity, and I really don’t want to be someone’s guinea pig. We have done that with a couple of sites before and then ended up not carrying on, like our restaurant in Shoreditch [which closed in 2022].
You’ve spoken about the challenges of Brexit on the wider Brindisa business. How much does it continue to impact your operation?
Things have got easier because we’ve got on top of it. We have an amazing buying team, and they really work with our suppliers. We don’t want to lose diversity among our ingredients and suppliers and Brexit is designed to undermine that and put power into fewer hands. We’re celebrating small artisans more and more and trying to make sure we can still pick and select products that are affordable in the new environment in which we’re working. But it’s increased the cost a lot. Our Brexit costs across Brindisa and our suppliers is half a million - we didn’t have to spend that before and everything worked perfectly well. We must hire more people and pay a lot more in costs, and much of that is passed on to the customer as we have to protect the business and our staff. It’s not a popular decision as far as we’re concerned.