Launches continue despite hard times at Peyton's places

Restaurateur Oliver Peyton has closed his 150-seat Coast Restaurant in London's Mayfair, the third restaurant he has shut this year.

But Peyton intends to keep the building and will reopen it on 5 October as a Mash restaurant.

Peyton said the restaurant had not been making money. He added that when Coast opened in 1995 there were few other restaurants in the area. "Now there are lots, all doing the same thing."

The £400,000 revamp will turn the site into the second Mash restaurant in London.

Peyton said: "It's going to have the same feel as Mash [in Great Portland Street] but will be slightly more Mayfair. For example, it will have more salads to cater for ladies who lunch."

Maddalena Bonino, senior head chef at the other Mash restaurant, will oversee the new restaurant.

News of Coast's demise came just a few weeks after Peyton announced that he was closing his Mash bar-restaurant in Manchester because of lack of business.

That closure came a just a few months after Peyton had closed Air, in the same building in Manchester as Mash, because it too was failing to attract enough customers.

There has also been speculation that Isola, his 100-seat restaurant in Knightsbridge, west London, has been failing to attract enough custom.

Peyton admitted in June that lunchtime trade at Isola has been "difficult".

But he insisted that Isola is one of the best restaurants he has created and said he would stand by the venture.

And the recent spate of closures did not stop Peyton from opening another new London restaurant this summer, the Admiralty, in Somerset House in the Strand.

by Rosalind Mullen