Pubs for the
Saxon Inns does sound a bit like a chain of olde worlde pubs, and that's exactly what managing director John Connell is afraid of. "It's very inappropriate," he frets. "I'm totally against us being seen as just another boring pub company."
Together with some institutional investors, he founded Saxon Inns six years ago. Despite what he calls his impeccably bad timing, the company now has a mix of 30 tenancy and managed sites and made a profit last year of £250,000.
The old-fashioned pub has no future, Connell believes. He says Saxon Inns are about creativity, energy and spontaneity; places where people are relaxed and a lone woman will not feel uncomfortable.
Three years with Scottish & Newcastle in the mid-1970s and subsequent experience developing restaurant chains left him with a tremendous resistance to uniformity and what he calls the safety of branded units. "I wanted something creative and inconsistent," he insists.
Tall and lanky, with a dry Northern Irish wit, he tempers this creativity with good business sense. "There are certain basics. If you go to a hotel, you want to know that the telephone works, that you are going to get hot water. With pubs, you must have good beer, good service and good food. But within those parameters, you can be original."
On the Liverpool Road in London's as-yet unfashionable Stoke Newington, Minogues is the nearest thing to a Dublin pub outside the Emerald Isle. Warm and welcoming, with a wooden floor and lots of natural surfaces, it serves freshly cooked traditional Irish dishes in the pretty restaurant area and packs them in with live music.
BBC supremo John Birt was in one evening, calmly walking past a bicycle left inside the door. Connell relishes this. "This is a man who could have gone to Le Gavroche or the Ritz," he says. "What I am trying to say is that this is not a bourgeois environment."
As Minogues is authentically Irish, so Bar Lorca is the real Spanish thing - a vibrant, attractive bar with Continental beers, salsa and flamenco dancing, tapas and an à la carte Spanish menu.
Connell did his research in Madrid for this venture. But, he says, coming back full of ideas is not enough. "You can research and conceptualise till you are blue in the face," he warns. "But you need the right people to run the venture."
Staff are centrally appointed, but once taken on, Connell cherishes them. "Most breweries are highly centralised," he notes. "The guy running the retail outlet is the lowest form of life at the bottom of the heap. I have tried to clear all that out and improve the quality of the unit manager, give him the capacity to make decisions for himself - within certain boundaries."
The sites are run as individual profit centres. Connell greets all his managers by name with a warm handshake and shares all their trials and triumphs, helping them with marriages, mortgages, girlfriends - and girlfriends' fathers, too. "How far we can go as a company depends on the quality of management," he says simply.
He thinks there may be room for another 30 of Saxon Inns' "Bohemian-style bars", even if it is a daunting prospect. "It is incredibly intellectually demanding to be thinking constantly about new ideas," he confesses.
The process also means taking risks, as with the most recently opened unit, Greenland Place. A Louisiana café-cum-bar-cum-restaurant in a former car showroom, almost hidden by Camden Town's ferocious one-way system, it took an intensive marketing effort to get it off the ground and gave Connell a few nail-biting moments.
Why make things so hard for himself? "A very good question," he says drily. "I guess I'm just a lunatic."
