As nice as pie

Under the railway arches at Elephant & Castle in south London, a team of chefs is making pie fillings in a preparation kitchen. The fillings, enough for 150 pies, are packed into vats and loaded into a refrigerated van. Their destination is Porters in Covent Garden, where between 2,500 and 3,500 customers are served each week.

Pies have been the unique selling point of Porters traditional English restaurant for the past 18 years. Now the owner, Richard, Earl of Bradford, has something else in store for the capital with the newly opened Porters Bar.

Although always a cautious man, he felt the restaurant was stronger than ever and ready for expansion. Net turnover to the end of September last year was just over £1.5m, with a 16% profit margin. "I wanted the business to be strong and it is now," he says. "The management is the best we've had, the quality of food has improved beyond recognition and we've got money in the bank."

With most of London's restaurateurs looking for locations, Bradford was fortunate in acquiring the site next door to Porters for the bar. The £300,000 investment in opening the new venue, which can accommodate 140 people, is competitive. Bradford has put all the contractors on fixed-price agreements so he knows in advance what everything will cost.

A further saving has been made because Porters Bar does not need a kitchen, relying instead on the one next door. A hatch has been opened between the two premises, which has the additional benefit of bringing currently under-utilised space into action.

Food at the bar is more informal than that at the restaurant. On the restaurant menu, soups are treated as starters and cost £2.95. In the bar, they are served in pint-sized bowls and are meals in their own right, costing £3.50. Also offered are kebabs and a range of open, toasted sandwiches, such as smoked salmon and steak, for around £5. "These will be the equivalent of Porters' pies," says Bradford.

Porters Bar, though an English bar concept, aims for a different target market and product than the restaurant. "The whole concept of the bar next door is comfort," says Bradford. "It's not smoky or raucous. The tables are well placed. The idea is that people will be so comfortable they won't want to move."

The bar is indicative of how the earl is moving with the times. What started with pies 18 years ago has come a long way.

Bradford plumped for the English concept having found that he could eat reasonably good food from other national cuisines in London, but not from England. "I asked what we could do that was English and reasonably priced," he says. "Pies seemed the obvious choice."

At the time, market research showed that he couldn't just do pies, so he put other dishes on the menu, such as potted fish and casseroles, as well as some desserts. But although the sweets sold reasonably well, the pies were the biggest seller.

When the Covent Garden market reopened four years after Porters started trading, Bradford had to instigate some changes, since the restaurant's kitchen did not have the space to cope with the influx of new business.

At first, he decided to contract out the making of pie fillings, but he soon reckoned it would be more profitable to set up the preparation kitchen as a separate profit centre. His hunch paid off, as the kitchen made £20,000 profit in its first year. The benefit, says Bradford, is: "It has freed up space in the restaurant and enables us to keep independent control of quality."

To this day, pies remain the biggest seller, with steak and mushroom the hot favourite, only being displaced during the initial stages of the BSE crisis. Despite this, recent additions to the menu of non-pie dishes include grills such as sirloin steak, pork chops and lamb steak.

"Three months ago we didn't own a salamander grill. The philosophy is giving people the choice," says Bradford.

Soups were introduced a year ago. At £2.95, they achieve a better margin for the restaurant than desserts. However, any varieties which don't sell are removed from the menu after six months. Says Neil Wornham, general manager and a director of Porters: "When we introduced soups, I watched sales very closely and desserts fell off, but you make more from soups."

By keeping a careful eye on things over the years, Bradford has managed to make a profit every year since opening, except one, and that was because the restaurant closed for 13 weeks for refurbishment.

But it's not only through the preparation kitchen and careful menu tweaking that Porters stays ahead of the game, it's ahead of many restaurants in technology as well. For example, for more than three years, all menus and promotional material have been printed on site, which gives the restaurant flexibility and makes a further saving.

It is measures such as this which have earned Bradford the cash to open Porters Bar. He did consider opening another Porters instead, but felt it was too great a risk. "It would cost £1m to £1.5m to create another Porters," he says.

Even so, expansion will not stop at the bar. Bradford has been talking to brewing groups, and feels the concept would work well in a pub. The margins are high, there's no cover charge and Porters offers good value. "It's the sort of food you want to find in a pub but don't, and it costs little more than pub prices," he says.

Picking up on his earlier discarded notion of a second Porters, Bradford has also been negotiating with a hotel group about opening such a venue on a London site. "It's in an area which doesn't affect existing business," he says. "I want to look much more at joint ventures - that's the way we should move forward."