Café Rouge owner raises £13.5m to expand

Tragus Holdings, owner of the Café Rouge and Bella Italia restaurant chains, has raised an extra £13.5m from Barclays Bank to fund expansion.

It plans to open up to 20 new restaurants this financial year and says it already has 10 new sites either signed up or in the advanced stages of negotiation.

The company said the new investment came on the the back of an excellent second year of trading with like-for-like sales up by 10%.

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Bella Italia: rebrand

A new Café Rouge opened in Portsmouth on 10 June and another is set for Bristol next month. The group invested £8m in the last year and says the rebranding of the 63 Bella Pasta restaurants to Bella Italia is now complete. Tragus, which is backed by venture capital firm ECI Partners, was formed as part of a management buy-in of Whitbread's Pelican restaurants division in June 2002. Buy this week's *Caterer* magazine for more industry news and analysis