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Will Beckett’s first foray in the hospitality industry was a big one – opening cocktail bar Redchurch with his best friend Huw Gott in London’s Shoreditch in 2003. Two more sites followed – a Mexican bar and restaurant and a gastropub – before they opened Hawksmoor, the restaurant group with which they are now synonymous. There are now five Hawksmoors across London and another opening in Manchester. In 2013 the group was snapped up by private equity firm Graphite Capital for a cool £35m, although the duo remain fully in charge.
Xavier Rousset (XR) You’ve seen it all now from many different locations, so what in your opinion as a restaurateur makes a successful restaurant? Some say it’s location – but I can give you 20 restaurants where it’s not about location – others say it’s all about food. Will Beckett (WB) That’s a pretty big question to lead with. London is a funny restaurant market. You can open something really left- field that does one thing amazingly well and somehow you are full on a Monday night. Maybe the answer in London is different from other places. In London, if you know what you do well and you can excel at that and be good enough at the other stuff, then I think that’s fine. As long as you know what it is you are good at and do that well, then you will find people who will like that kind of restaurant.
XR So you don’t target a customer, you target what you are good at? WB We’ve never looked for a gap in the mar- ket – we’ve looked at doing what we love and we know what we do well. We opened Hawks- moor in 2006, and then it wasn’t too difficult to make an impact. Now there are something like five restaurants opening each week and it’s much harder to make a name for yourself. When we opened this we did it on the cheap and we could wait for people to trickle along. Now you have to spend much more money and it’s much more difficult to get going.
XR So the more you spend on a restaurant, the more people will spend in it? WB No. Our first one is a great example. The whole thing was done on eBay. People would come and spend £100 just on a steak and we had a wine list that went up to £1,500 and the average spend on wine was probably around £100 – really, really big money, but in a place where you thought “this doesn’t make any sense at all”. Whereas Brasserie Zedel is totally at the other end of that spectrum – incredible fit-out but you can go in, spend £15 and leave. If you are really good at what you do, you can make it work. There is something with loca- tion: we are near the City, but if we had been further out, it might not have worked.
XR To run a successful restaurant do you need a strong lunch trade? I remember Chris Galvin saying dinner pays the bills, lunch is the profit. WB There’s something in that. Anyone can be busy Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, but what’s it like on a Monday night, on a Wednes- day lunchtime? If you want to do well, then filling out those times is important. One of the best feelings is to walk in on a Monday night at 7pm and every seat is full.
XR Does social media help to fill those gaps? WB There was a time when that was true. There were a few lucky moments with Hawks- moor – opening when we did and getting into Twitter early when it was taking off. Now it feels more like something you’ve just got to do. You’re supposed to be on Twitter. I think the people who do best on it are
www.thecaterer.com 20 March 2015 | The Caterer | 31
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Will Beckett
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