Bay delivers 'double bubble'

Bay Restaurants emerged from the pre-pack administration of Laurel Pub Company 15 months ago. The PMA Team met chief exective Paul Symonds.

Better value and improved quality have proved to be the twin pillars on which Bay Restaurants has built success. And in the course of this approach, the company has epitomised the blurring of lines be-tween traditional managed pubcos and out-and-out restaurant operators — running three brands that straddle the two arenas.

Its La Tasca operation, acquired in 2007 by former owner R20 for £123m including debt, has a 65% female clientele and sits firmly in the fast-

casual dining bracket. The much smaller ha ha brand, which has 24 sites, is just completing a refurbishment programme that, significantly, sees the brand formerly tagged ha ha bar & canteen changing its name to ha ha bar & grill in recognition of its repositioning as a foodier proposition, moving it much closer to La Tasca in terms of wet-dry split.

And then there's Slug & Lettuce, one of the sturdier brands to emerge from the high-street revolution of the 1990s. Currently trading from 82 venues, it's performed well through a series of owners, and now sits in the top-end of the bar market.

The word is both companies that emerged from Laurel's administration, Bay and Town & City Pubs, are performing well this year. For interested observers, though, this year appears to be a significant one for Bay in particular as major operators engage in ferocious competition to attract customer spend. Operators are falling over themselves to offer customers startling offers in the form of two-for-one vouchers and straightforward discounts. Anyone popping in for a casual munch at a swathe of casual dining operators is likely to be clutching a voucher or two.

A different kind of value-driven mindset holds sway among customers made apprehensive by a daily dose of economic bad news. It's an entirely new landscape and for those companies that can rise to the challenge there's volume to be had, albeit at reduced margin.

Laurel Pub Company chief executive Paul Symonds says: "The industry has reinvented itself to offer a better deal to customers. The challenge is to have operating systems that offer the experience at the price that customers are prepared to pay.

"We have to work harder, but not

at the expense of quality. There's been a shift in the past six to nine months with an embattled con-sumer looking for greater value for money. The market is more competitive than I've ever known it, but this is the new reality and as the economy gets better and people go out more each month we will see even more volume growth."

It really has been a kind of double bubble for bargain-hungry customers, as alongside the offer of ever-greater value many operators have moved to invest in menu quality and innovation. At La Tasca there's been plenty of activity on both key customer-wowing areas. Some of the offers are, put simply, fantastic value: five tapas for £10, 50% off food bills at certain times of the day. But Symonds and his executive team have been pushing the menu development levers pretty hard as well.

The company closed La Tasca's central kitchen down in February to refocus on ensuring every item, including a host of new dishes, is prepared on the premises, a move that was a whole year in the planning.

Symonds orders a range of tapas when I meet him for lunch at his Victoria La Tasca to show me a selection of the dishes now on offer; a delicious fresh salmon dish, a cracking made-to-order paella, great Spanish meatballs and a tasty chorizo sausage in red wine dish deserve special mention. Symonds says La Tasca delivers a "pure restaurant experience", a cut or two above the "systemised" de-skilled approach that most pubs kitchens follow.

The sharing nature of tapas is a major element in what makes La Tasca so popular with its female clientele — and tapas has become very accessible given the popularity of Spain as a holiday destination.

Some still wonder whether R20 boss Robert Tchenguiz paid too much for La Tasca in a bidding war with Café Rouge operator Tragus during the still-heady days of early 2007. What's not in doubt is that La Tasca

is a brand with longevity — it was founded more than two decades ago in the north-west and has withstood the rigours of a national rollout.

The history of ha ha has been a little more patchy. There was a period, acknowledged by Symonds, when it seemed to be losing its way and competing directly for the wandering circuit audience at weekends in particular. I remember the Brighton ha ha installing DJ decks at the weekend, cranking up the volume and dimming the lights to make conversation for diners impossible without lip-reading skills.

The Bay plan has been to ensure ha ha makes a kind of return to its

roots, becoming what

Symonds' calls a "a restaurant with a great bar". The conversion of the last tranche of "Canteens" into "Grills" is underway and will be completed by the end of the year. "Grill" menus offer a range of items that are aimed at impressing the more discerning kind of nosher — 21-day aged British steaks and fresh fish items, for example.

The brand, as you might expect, is also competing in the value wars — an email arrived as I was writing this feature offering me £10 off my next meal. Symonds says sales performance at ha ha is very strong — converted sites become wholly different businesses centred around a much-improved food trade.

The Slug & Lettuce brand has also seen its share of development centred around what Symonds calls "premium quality food and drinks". There are also bargains to be found for quieter trading days like Mondays when all food is 50% off.

It's hard to think of a more female-friendly bar brand (the Hove site close to my former flat sits opposite a JD Wetherspoon and there were times you'd be forgiven for thinking someone had imposed a kind of gender apartheid). Some of the offers such as the £9.95 Wednesday wine deal are clearly targeted at the brand's female demographic. One key to the development of Bay's three main brands was a decision taken a few years back to appoint a managing director for each brand — Steve Rogers runs ha ha, Mary Wilcock is in charge of Slug & Lettuce and Peter Murdoch oversees La Tasca.

The very sensible thinking was that without a brand having an individual in charge there would be convergence between the brands or else a lack of the focus each brand needs for the necessary organic development over time.

The traumatic events of last year involving Laurel's pre-pack administration were never about trading issues within the part of the business that's become Bay. La Tasca (which was placed with a separate company to the rest of Tchenguiz's managed assets), ha ha and Slug were Robert Tchenguiz's crown jewels. They are benefiting from being run separately from other Laurel assets in their current stabling (the same seems to be true of the pubs and bars business) — companies can get too big, have too many brands.

"These are three quality brands with great growth potential," says Symonds.