The Emerald style
New restaurants in London's West End seem to share a common idea: "Bigger is beautiful". Four recent openings have added almost 2,500 seats between them.
Waxy O'Connor's is the latest and most unusual West End restaurant. It seats more than 600, cost in excess of £1m and serves food all day every day from 11am to 11pm (12 noon to 10.30pm on Sunday). But Waxy O'Connor's is an Irish pub, and while the main entrance is only 50 metres from Planet Hollywood, there's nothing tinselly about it, and not a plastic shamrock in sight.
Opening the pub is a bold move on the part of Glendola Leisure, the pub operating division of the Foundation Group, which also operates or owns six Stagecoach Hotels and Inns in the UK and five Carlton Hotels in the Netherlands. Bold, but not rash: Glendola sees several trends which it believes will make Waxy's a huge success.
The "peace dividend" looms large as an inspiration here, with increasing interest in products from Ireland. "Last year the Irish pub phenomenon really took off. Look at the growth in popularity of stout," says operations director Alex Salussolia. Waxy's is the only pub to stock all three stouts - Guinness, Murphy's and Beamish - along with the broadest range of Irish whiskeys available in the UK.
Food is also an important part of the concept. "A good food pub has far greater longevity than just a good wet pub," Salussolia says. Size is important, too. "We're doing a large project because it is harder as a company to get a return on a small pub," he says.
Glendola operates or owns 15 pubs (some with clubs or discos), including the Mitre at Hampton Court and the World's End in Camden - both in Greater London - and has been in the pub business more than 20 years. "We bought the World's End in Camden out of receivership in 1993. It now does 4,000 barrels a year and is reputedly the largest pub in the UK," Salussolia says.
Glendola's initial interest in an Irish pub began just over a year ago. "We had been looking at pub sites in the Midlands for a joint venture with a partner who wanted to go public. The company was going to set up a chain of Irish pubs and Glendola would have been the tenant," says Salussolia. "But the locations in the Midlands were wrong. The site on Rupert Street was just right. It was a good location and size, and joining it to the Wardour Street site was a possibility. We wanted to make it a destination pub."
Once Glendola decided it wanted to open an Irish pub and had an appropriate site, it was able to move quickly - one of the benefits of a "flat" management structure. The beginning of the peace process was the catalyst which spurred the company into action, according to Finlay Tinker, a director and co-founder along with Peter Salussolia (Alex's father).
"We went all over Ireland and spoke to builders and developers to look at pubs and tried to recreate very faithfully some of those we had seen," Tinker says. The pubs they were most impressed with - McSorley's and the Bleeding Heart in Dublin and the Quays in Galway - were all designed by Frank Ennis & Associates, Dublin-based architects and interior designers with 10 years' experience in the leisure industry.
Frank Ennis originated the contemporary traditional pub style, which often features split levels, architectural salvage and good, traditional craftsmanship in a fresh way. Above all else, designs arise out of - and in response to - particular sites. Ennis was given a brief in January and had just a weekend to put a proposal together. "But this was familiar territory to us," he says. "It wasn't like dealing with one of the larger corporations with complex approval processes. Glendola decided to work fast."
The site consisted of basement premises on Wardour Street and a ground floor on Rupert Street. "There were a number of strands we were trying to focus on," Ennis says. "Most of the site was a basement so we wanted to draw people through a series of events, each of which could stand in its own right - from the quasi-traditional Rupert Street ‘chemist's shop' through the ‘tree room'. This makes the transition of levels to the basement as stunning as possible to focus on the interior rather than the physical notion of tramping down a staircase. The other idea was that as the building was relatively deep and narrow, it was preferable not to give an overall view but to entice people deeper into the premises."
The multi-storeyed tree room links the two sites and provides the initial draw to entice customers downstairs. The tree itself is a 250-year-old beech from the Irish Midlands, seven feet in diameter. It was taken apart, kiln-dried and now "grows" through the space. Creating this space involved extensive structural modification to prop up the Rupert Street building.
Tinker assumes responsibility for overall design at Glendola and worked very closely with Ennis on Waxy's. "In the past we used well-known designers who seemed to take the brief, but they were not operationally minded. And I had great fun going around buying this wonderful architectural salvage - it was a very interesting shopping list - two tombstones, a font, a pulpit, a church spire and a chemist's shop."
"But if I don't have the right staff I've wasted every cent," Tinker says. To start out right the company recruited Neal Keniry as manager from Slattery's, a Dublin pub famous for traditional music, which had gone into a decline. Keniry had turned it around and expanded its operations. He also had management experience at several London hotels. He was recruited before construction began and was involved in decision making.
"This is the first real attempt at an Irish pub in England. All the others are just spit and sawdust places," Keniry says. "Irish pubs are not just a variation of English pubs, they have numerous small snugs where people can have an intimate conversation. The Irish theme at Waxy's follows through well with friendly Irish service, and good Irish food and drink. After all, what makes an Irish pub if not a warm welcome, some Irish customers, music, fireplaces? That has to be supported by the whole concept. We're in business to provide the best authentic Irish experience you can get in London."
Salussolia sees Waxy's appealing to the type of customers who go to Pitcher and Piano, Slug & Lettuce and the Atlantic Bar and Grill. Great emphasis is put on stylish presentation. "We don't want to insult people, especially the Irish, by doing things badly," he says. "We want to be the heart of the Irish community in London. Anything that's going on, we want to be a part of it. We mean to become a landmark business."
Good food is part of the overall picture for Waxy's and is part of the strategy to attract the right clientele and improve the business. "Most Irish pubs here serve pub grub," Salussolia says, "but that's not representative of what is eaten in Ireland." A lot of the responsibility for devising the menu was handed over to Keniry, who also sourced good suppliers of Irish produce.
They found suppliers with help from the Irish Food Board and sampled products on trips to Ireland. Ballyamloe Products is supplying pickles and relishes, Rossmore oysters are from Atlantic Shellfish in County Cork, cheeses are from Anthony Rowcliffe & Son (agent in London for the Irish Farmhouse Cheesemakers Association), soda bread from the Irish Brown Bread Company in London and mussels and smoked fish from the Lisdoonvarna Fish Company in County Clare.
The basic menu is short, with just 10 items: half-a-dozen oysters; a crock of mussels; smoked fish plate; cheese plate; warm chicken salad; seafood salad; a range of open sandwiches on soda bread; and a pot of chips (to go with mussels). There will be specials on every day. With the smoked fish plate having the highest price of £6.50, Glendola is not out to make a killing on food. "We're using it to make a name for Waxy's," Salussolia says.
Gross profit on food is only 45% to 55% so that the pub can keep prices down and still offer the best quality. "We expect to do 250 covers a day to start and expect to do a good mix of daytime and evening trade. I believe we'll do £45,000 a week at least to begin with, but it could be up to £70,000. We expect that 30% of that will be food, but at the beginning food might be only 20%. Draught will be big business and we'll have a good wine and spirit offering," Salussolia says.
There are well over a dozen Irish whiskeys on their list - as well as a good selection of Scotch whiskies - along with the three stouts and six wines all served by the glass or bottle.
Waxy's offers a good chance to play the foreign currency market as it accepts both sterling and Irish punts. And, as a promotional exercise, Waxy O'Connor's coins are being issued to staff of hotels, restaurants and car parks in the West End.
This would all come to nought without the right staff, properly trained. On the training side, Glendola uses Investors In People standards and expects to achieve IIP status this month. "People that don't invest in training will fall far behind," Salussolia says.
Staff recruitment involved extensive interviewing. Keniry says several hundred people have been interviewed for the 25 full-time positions. "This is not a simple matter of pulling pints and being able to use the till," Keniry says. "Pub work is a serious industry at home. We want staff to feel proud of what they're doing. We are looking for people we can mould into the operation, people who are not trained in a lot of bad habits. A lot of staff are coming from Ireland. We started training today and over the next week and a half we'll take them through the concept."
There will be no split shifts and all staff work four full days and have four days off. Staff also have the option of working overtime. "We want to keep staff happy," Keniry says. "We could cut our wages by 25% if we used casuals, but they wouldn't deliver the same level of service because we just couldn't train them so thoroughly." To keep staff happy, there will also be incentives for exceeding targets, such as bringing a member of staff's family over from Ireland for a weekend.
Glendola has plans for two or three other Irish pubs, but they won't be Waxy's. "But then, if someone wanted one in Brussels, where there are already several Irish pubs, then that would be different," Salussolia says. All would be done to the same high standard.
"We looked long and hard at how we could achieve quality every day. It's difficult to achieve continuity of standards and at Waxy's we're trying to break that mould," Salussolia says. "We're there to see that people remember being at Waxy's," Keniry says. "We want them to go out and say: ‘Wow!'"
