Adding to its Mayfair site with an 80-cover restaurant just doors away from luxury department store Harrods in Knightsbridge, owner Pete Taylor discusses the challenges and successes of opening a second Mayfair Chippy in London
In the past you have said Mayfair Chippy is one of London’s busiest restaurants, is that still the case?
Yes, I think revenue per square foot, it must be. We do about 700 covers a day in Mayfair and it’s got 42 covers so that’s15 turns. We’ve always got a queue outside and what we’ve done for the past year now that’s been interesting is open in the mornings at 10.30 for sit-down fish and chips. And it’s busy with tourists from China and the Far East because they eat really early and love tempura and deep-fried food. We also get a lot of people who arrive straight from a flight into Heathrow. We can do 50 covers just between 10.30 and 12 o’clock.
Is your trade predominately tourists?
No, not at all. We are a third residents, a third tourists and a third commercial businesses. We got our report back the other day from Square, our EPOS provider, and last year, 40% of our customers were repeat customers, which is really good. I think people do sometimes see the queue outside for 45 minutes and think this is just a tourist trap. Well, it’s not because we are doing repeat customers. That’s reassuring and makes us work even harder to maintain our standards because we know these people are returning to us.
How has trade been at Knightsbridge since opening?
We had a really strong December, but unfortunately, trade was affected by the fact we opened in November rather than in the summer, which is when we intended to. Had we opened in the summer, we would have built up enough trade to have that reputation for December. But when you open in November, everyone has already booked their Christmas parties. But we still did really well so we’re not complaining.
What caused the delay in opening?
There was a problem with the licensing. When we opened Mayfair, we originally opened it as a British restaurant, and then we changed it to a fish and chip concept. When we registered Knightsbridge, we naturally registered it as a fish and chip restaurant. In central London, that triggers the smell and the odour police and we had to do all sorts of odour tests and submit reports to the council.
Did that delay cost you?
It didn’t actually because we offset the lease signing dates until we got the licensing over the line. Had I had less experience, maybe I would have signed a lease first and then applied for licensing, and then I would have had four months’ rent to pay.
What have you been able to do at Knightsbridge that you haven’t at Mayfair?
We’ve opened a British gin bar and offer cocktails now. In Mayfair, we work with a brand called Moth Cocktails, which are really good cocktails in a can, but now we’ve got a proper bar team serving cocktails so we’ve got classics, retro ones with a twist, and dessert cocktails. That helps push up that spend on the drinks side. Also, people can stay and have after-dinner drinks, or they might come before a reservation and have a drink in the bar. We’ve also got counter dining at the bar and we’ve introduced bar snacks. It’s capturing all those different elements, not just people that want sit down for fish and chips.
Talking of fish and chips, have you changed the menu at all?
No, not really. We’ve tried to add a few more options but I think as a fish and chip restaurant, we’ve already enhanced fish and chips and to a point we are really happy with it. If we were to enhance it even more, it would mean more skill levels in the kitchen. Instead, we tend to put some seasonal dishes on twice a year, but cold ones, so we’ll do a beetroot salad in the winter and then a heritage tomato salad in the summer months.
Did you put your prices up when you opened Knightsbridge?
No, but we will have to in the coming months in both venues because costs keep going up. The increase in minimum wage doesn’t really affect us as we pay our staff above minimum wage anyway. We’ve always been quite generous to our staff, for example, we were one of the first restaurants to give our staff 100% of their tips – and that was a year and a half before the legislation came in making it legal to do so. But the extra two and a half per cent in National Insurance Contributions will hit us so we are going to have to slightly tweak prices, not too much, 5p here, 10p there. Little bits where we have to.
How much are your fish and chips?
At the moment we are £23 for our Mayfair classic, and for that customers get fish, chips, mushy peas, curry sauce, tartare sauce and HP gravy. I think it’s about right for London. Even if you go to a decent gastro pub in London you’ll pay £20 just for fish and chips. We are quite lucky, we attract a lot of tourists. Fish and chips is like a bucket list to do when coming to London, but also fish and chips is one of those concepts where, although it’s never going to be the trendiest concept, it will never go out of fashion either.
What do you see as the biggest opportunity for growing your business?
For us, it’s finding those niche areas where the rent may be a bit higher – like Mayfair and Knightsbridge – however, you’ve got that mixture of tourism, local residents and also commercial businesses. Investing that little bit more in rent is worth it rather than relying on a cheaper site where you’ve just got local residents.
It sounds like there might be more Mayfair Chippies in the pipeline?
We’d like one more site in a high-volume footfall area in central London. What we don’t want to do is have six restaurants and three do well and the other three don’t because all they are doing then is propping each other up. We want to have three that can stand on their own two feet.
