The Hoxton Grille

Caterer and Hotel Keeper - 17th January 2007

The Hoxton Grille, The Hoxton Urban Lodge, Great Eastern St EC2.

Ask Sinclair Beecham what he thinks about most hotel restaurants and he doesn’t mince his words. “Name me one time you’ve decided to go to a chain hotel for dinner”, demands the prêt a manger co-founder. “Whenever you go to these places they are often terrible. Would you want to take a date there? I wouldn’t”

It was this belief that led Beecham to outsource his and prêt associate Julian Metcalfe’s restaurant at their new hotel the Hoxton Urban Lodge last September. With the hotel built and everything in place for the restaurant except the furniture – open kitchen, long bar – Beecham turned his attention to finding suitable operators for what he envisaged as an on-site brasserie.

There were numerous offers on the table, but it was Simon Wright and John Pallagi, co-founders of northern based Room Restaurants, who impressed Beecham the most. The two teams had never crossed paths before and agent put them in touch, and, after numerous discussions and secret missions to reconnoitre Room Restaurants, Beecham finally decided that Wright and Pallagi’s brand had the “space, size, feel and food” that he wanted for the Hoxton.

The decision, he admits, wasn’t taken quickly. With customer values at the forefront of Beecham and Metcalfe’s success, there was always a worry that whoever took over the Hoxton Restaurant wouldn’t deliver customer service to the high standard the pair might expect. But Wright and Pallagi’s experience in running busy restaurants assured Beecham that they could suitably handle the dining experience he wanted for the budget boutique hotel.

With a background firmly in hotels before inception of Room, Wright was eager to return to his roots. “I love the buzz of hotels, I love staying in good hotels and I love the chance to order room service that I actually want”. He says. “So the opportunity to get involved in all of that again was fantastic”.

The resulting partnership has seen the two Room owners agree a 20-year lease with Beecham and Metcalfe for the hotels restaurant space, with rent based on turn over figures, which is predicted at £2m for the first year. With the overall structure already dictated by the hotels original design, Wright and Pallagi were responsible for the feel and style of the restaurant with its furniture and décor. The name, it was decided, would be the Hoxton Grille.
According to Wright, the idea of out sourcing a hotel’s restaurant is a no-brainer. “Increasing numbers of hotels of hotels are leasing out their restaurants and doing joint ventures,” he says. “This industry requires a lot of focus; you need to run a restaurant as a stand alone business.”

While many top hotels outsource – for example, many of Gordon Ramsay Holdings Restaurants, Nobu at the Metropolitan, Galvins at Windows – it’s a rare occurrence in the mid-market range. “In the USA this kind of situation is prevalent, but a lot of competitors at this level aren’t looking to go into hotels because of the requirements to do breakfasts and room service. But perversely, for us that’s part of the attraction,” says Wright.

The success of such ventures, Wright admits, is thanks largely to the compatibility of landlord and tenant. “If you don’t bring in like-minded personnel you’re in trouble,” he warns.

“We were fortunate to have someone of Sinclair’s experience and knowledge so, although he gave us a free reign with the restaurant, we brought him in from the start and were keen for his opinion on all aspects.”
Both Wright and Beecham shared one common view. “We all realised from the off that that when you stay in a hotel you rarely want to eat in the restaurant,” says Wright. “So we wanted to make it accessible to a wide range of people, not just to focus on one target audience like the hotel clientele.”

Day-to-day running

Wright and Pallagi were again keen to bring in Beecham for advice on the day-day running of the restaurant, and he was only to happy to oblige “I always have lots of opinions,” says Beecham. “I tell them what I like, what I don’t like, what I think needs changing, what works well. And we sit down and discuss it.”

Beecham’s input goes down to the finest points of the restaurant. “I like cold butter served with bread but the restaurant was serving warm butter as it’s easier to spread,” he says. “We sat down and I aired my opinion and we decided that it was best to serve it cold. On the whole though, I let them get on with it,” he says, re-arranging the bar stools as “they had them in the wrong place”.

It was also clear from the start that it would not be possible to merely place a Room restaurant in the ground floor of the hotel. “Room restaurants are more of an up market venue for an evening,” says Wright. We wanted somewhere that was a brasserie, where business men could have brunch, plus a lively lunch venue where the local music industry people could come and eat, but then also a place for people to come in the evening for a meal and a drink before going elsewhere.” Plus of course Beecham’s all important ingredients. “We wanted it to be somewhere you could also take a date,” adds Wright.

The area lends itself to the format of the Grille, Wright says, with young professionals nearby in Farrington and Liverpool Street and large numbers of drinkers in the evening. “If we’d done the same venture in Mayfair we would have had to reassess how we went about it,” he says.

The food, on first appearance, is as diverse and the clientele. Labelled by Pallagi as “based around classic comfort dishes, with inspiration taken from the French and Americans, but with culinary heritage firmly rooted in Britain”, the food seems to cover all bases without decisively settling on one. Comfort food that’s both French and American in style but also quintessentially British – does that mean a blue steak served with chips and cheese? “We’re aiming to have a French style of brasserie where you can get a croissant and a cup of coffee in the morning, but then we’re serving traditional mealtime dishes like stew and dumplings. Then at the same time we’re fully aware that whatever they may try, steak and chips will still be a best seller on Friday and Saturday nights.”

In substance most dishes are French or American by association, and sit alongside dishes such as Gloucester Old Spot sausage and mash (£10) and fish and chips with mushy peas (£12.50). The menu originated after Wright and Pallagi sat down and listed all their favourite dishes – the kind of meals they would like when staying at a midmarket hotel. This, however, resulted in meaty-heavy, ‘masculine’ menu, and the first re-write, done with the Grille’s chef Sydney Aldridge, introduced lighter seafood dishes.

The idea of DJs playing on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights is based partly on Wright’s own experience at hotels. He admit that when staying at a hotel alone he’s a “grumpy traveller who sits and does his paperwork alone” but recognises that hotel restaurants can be depressing places for those away on business. A buzzing bar and a busy restaurant make for a more convivial location for a single traveller to enjoy a drink, rather than sitting alone at a deserted bar.

With such a wide selection of food styles, DJs playing while diners eat, and a huge and varied clientele, is there a danger that the Grille could become a jack of all trades but a master of none? “Even though the menu is varied we keep it small so we can concentrate on the quality of the dishes,” Wright says. “While there is music we keep the bar and restaurant separate so there’s still a feeling of intimacy. If we ever felt that we were trying too many things at once then we would revert back to our principles of creating good food in a lively atmosphere and assess what had gone wrong. But at the moment the proof that it isn’t going wrong is the number of customers we get in”.

Perfecting the concept

The restaurant has an averaged 250 covers a day since it opened in September, with a fairly even split between lunch and dinner. Even so, Wright admits that in terms of perfecting the concept the team are only 85% towards what where they’d like to be.

Wright wants to expand the Grille brand to other hotels, although they would have to be suited to the restaurants style. Asked when this might happen, Wright will say only that if an opportunity came along in February and the company was nearing 100% in terms of satisfaction with the Hoxton Grille, then it would seriously consider it.

“We’ve always been a very opportunistic company,” Wright says, “But whenever I picture expansion I always see that part of the Generation Game TV show when they’re spinning plates on sticks. You can get six plates up, but the more there are the more you have to tend to them. Then one plate falls down and the rest come tumbling down.”