Reilley: Fears of ‘economic armageddon’ over-egged, Brightside to open

Loungers, which operates more than 200 sites under its Lounge and Cosy Club brands, is opening Brightside on the A38 opposite Exeter Racecourse, Devon, in a bid to reinvigorate UK roadside dining on Friday (10 February).

The business has more Brightside venues lined up with another on the A38 near Saltash, Cornwall, to open in April and a third site on the A303 near Honiton, Devon, with an expected opening date of June.

“There’s quite a lot of construction work involved and the other two so they’re a bit behind the first one, which was just a fairly straightforward refurbishment,” Reilley said.

Contracts have been exchanged on a fourth site in Rutland at the Ram Jam services on the A1.

The aim of Brightside is to reinvent the idea of roadside dining where the rush is taken out of driving via a sit-down meal in a licenced restaurant.

It has a breakfast menu that runs from 8am until midday and an all-day menu from then on, and being fully licensed, there are bottled beers and ciders, a small selection of cocktails, wines and a range of low and no alcohol beers – driven by the fact such products are improving all the time.

Destination site

It will also have electric charging points which means drivers will have to stop if driving such vehicles and this will only increase in the future.

Reilley said: “We will not be encouraging people to come and have a right old knees-up and get back in their car but there’s options for drivers and their passengers, and it’s very much designed to appeal to people that live locally who want to use it as a destination.

“It’s a modern 21st century interpretation of ultimately what Little Chef used to do before they disappeared.”

On current trade for Loungers, Reilley said: “It’s very much continued as it is. It’s slightly weird that we’ve been on tenterhooks wondering when, and if, this economic armageddon that was being forecast is going to hit us and it’s either the longest phoney war imaginable, or actually, the sort of sense of distress that was being predicted has been rather over-egged.

“I feels more like the latter, actually, while there clearly is a cost-of-living crisis that everybody can feel and people are being more cash-constrained because of rising costs of utilities, etc, I think people are very committed to spending money and on food and drink, and going out and eating in restaurants, or drinking in bars, pubs and coffee shops.”

He added big-ticket items such as cars, fitness equipment or things that are discretionary are hitting hard times while day-to-day needs such as going to their local pub or restaurant shows little signs of people reining in their spending.

“There’s less of a need to feel pessimistic than there perhaps was and our outlook on this has always been fairly optimistic – we’re going to open 30-plus sites this year. That’s more sites than we’ve ever opened,” Reilley said.

Fabulous opportunities

He continued: “We don’t see any reason at all at the moment to ponder whether we should be growing as aggressively as we actually are because there’s some fabulous opportunities available to us.

“It’s strange times but it’s not as dark and desperate as perhaps the media was hyping it up to potentially be.”

Reilley said there have, of course, been businesses that have faltered as soon as they came out of the pandemic therefore removing some of the supply and although that’s not great to see, it has given survivors a more captive audience.

However, he said businesses expected to face real exposure in September after the summer holidays but many fared well and looked towards getting through to the new year and now he is hearing trade has held up well in January and “long may that continue”.

On what he wants the Government to do to help hospitality, Reilley said: “We keep on getting smashed over the head with a sledgehammer by things that are out of our control, be that energy costs, the rise in national living wage, which is sizable this year, and the Government has to realise there’s only so much we can absorb.

“Some would say, ‘well that’s your challenge’ but we’ve had so much catastrophe, chaos, distress and everything that happened in the pandemic and the subsequent fallout of that so we just want 12 months to be quite dull with no real sort of drama and no real new cost challenges.

“But suddenly, we’re faced with all these additional challenges. We cannot pass on the level of uplifts we’re facing to our customers because it would be too expensive.”