How to be successful in the current hospitality climate

There is no getting away from it, 2024 has been an incredibly tough year for the hospitality industry in the UK.

Many of the challenges faced this year are set to continue into 2025, such as the costs of staffing, energy, rents, taxes and food itself, with many more restaurants expected to have to close their doors.

But for some, this has been a year of opportunity for growth.

To get a more positive outlook on success stories in the industry, we spoke with some people who have made the market work for them.

After a successful 2024, modern-Indian restaurant group Kricket are set to expand and open their fifth site in London in March 2025.

Originally starting out in a shipping container in Brixton a decade ago, friends Rik Campbell and Will Bowlby now run a thriving restaurant and takeaway business.

Asked how he has mitigated against the challenges the industry has been facing, Rik told The Staff Canteen: “Things change as you get bigger. We’ve streamlined various things. We now have a new central production kitchen down in Sydenham, part of Karma Kitchen.

“We're producing some of our key sauces there, which we’ve not done before. We can't continue necessarily to make the same sauce in 10 different locations each day. And when we’re getting squeezed on staff costs and squeezed everywhere, we've had to centralise a few things, which has helped improve consistency, quality and margins as well. But just generally trying to push in every line of the P&L.

“We always want to stay innovative with the food, so people keep coming back to us. But equally you've got to look at every cost line and work with your suppliers, keeping your margins where there should be.”

He added: “It’s been a tougher year than we thought it was going to be, but I think when it's tough, there's always opportunities.

“We believe in what we're doing and want to be in a strong position for next year, when things come a bit better. So we're taking advantage of good property deals and expanding.

“Whilst we are doing okay, it feels a little bit risky, but we believe in what we're doing and trade is fine, it's fair. It's good. It could always be better, but we’re doing pretty well.”

'HUMBLE BEGINNINGS'

Reflecting on Kricket’s journey, Rik said: “We started in Brixton in a shipping container, now we've actually got the permanent site on Atlantic Road.

“I don't miss those days, but we came from humble beginnings, and I think it was a really great place to start, in a sort of semi-permanent site, it cost us relatively nothing in what was a quite high traffic, popular area for mid-20-year-olds.

“At the time, we didn't really think too far ahead about what we were going to do. We just wanted to open a pop-up restaurant and it kind of escalated.

“With COVID and the cost-of-living crisis, four or five years have been crisis management/coming out of crisis management. And the business has changed a lot.

“Pre-COVID, we were three restaurants and post-COVID we were three restaurants, a bar and a delivery network, so we’ve kind of got sort of three revenue streams. So it's been a bit of a journey.”

He added: “I never even worked in a restaurant before I opened the pop up.

“With me as an ex-accountant and Will as a chef, it’s a pretty good combo I think for a restaurant. But we’re still both learning a lot as we go.”

'BISTRO BOOM'

Someone else who has thrived in 2024 is Dom Hamdy of HAM Restaurants, which includes Bistro Freddie, Bar Crispin, Crispin and Crispin at Studio Voltaire.

Bistro Freddie recently passed its one-year anniversary, with Dom admitting things had gone “much better than expected” so far at the site, helped by a “bistro boom” in London.

Discussing the restaurant group’s success, Dom told The Staff Canteen: “As we've grown, we've been able to add support staff to our senior management team. We’ve got lots of systems in place that we didn't necessarily have before.

“There's certainly a thread that runs through all of the restaurants and we’ve started being able to attract talent that we didn't necessarily attract beforehand.

“I think hospitality businesses and restaurants are recruitment businesses at the end of the day and it's about bringing together a group of people that share the same ethos and are all travelling in the same direction. I think now that we have four sites, it's really starting to reap the benefits of a slightly beefed out team.”

He added: “I think ultimately the whole industry are fighting for the same talent pool that is reducing in number, particularly post-Brexit. So we're all trying to understand how to be better companies, regardless of the industry that we're actually in.

“I think as we improve as businesses and as companies for our teams to work for, retention goes up. And that shared vision becomes more shared I suppose.

“We're always looking at trying to provide the best value for our guests and people certainly are feeling the pinch a little bit.

“I think the size of the sites we're at, if we do have a quieter a couple of days coming up, we have the agility to slim down slightly, whereas restaurants that are four or five times the size of ours, you really struggle to do that. I think agility of a small and very focused group of people that are looking at all of the tiny details, every day, just gives us that ability to look forward and pre-plan, rather than being reactionary.”

PROFITS DROP

Recent research into the UK’s biggest 100 restaurant groups showed turnover in 2024 had risen by 21 per cent, yet profit had dropped by one per cent.

“Being honest, that resonates quite well,” said Rik.

“When the government are putting your staff costs up 10 per cent every year as well, how did you offset that? We want to remain affordable and accessible. But when everything is going up 10 per cent a year, what are we supposed to do?

“The problem is, you keep putting your price, you end up alienating customers and I’d rather keep the prices down and do volume.”

Dom added: “We do have the same struggles as all other restaurants and it's not completely rosy every day.

“For us to maintain the product standards that we have set for ourselves and the product standards that our guests expect, we can't just drop the quality in what we're doing, so we need to be creative in other ways.

“Having a high return custom rate and having an engaged audience that are wanting to maybe pay slightly above the odds for a consistent product is our direction.

“There was an interesting talk from Will Beckett at OpenTable recently who was saying pre-pandemic and pre-Brexit, if there were five relatively arbitrary things that make up a great restaurant, you could be excelling at three of them and not doing so well at two of them and you'd be fine.

“We're now in an environment where actually you need to be excelling at all five of them because the competition's high.

“We're all fighting for a smaller pool of people that have x amount of disposable income every month. So there’s very little patience for poor service, bad restaurant design or bad acoustics.

“We're guilty of some of these things. But the market is just much less forgiving of some things than it previously would’ve been.

“I think the times of trying to please everyone and all types of customer is fading slightly and actually focusing on customers that you already have is more important than ever.”

(Pictures: James Ratief, Rebecca Hope and Marcus Brown)