Much at stake for M&B's new steakhouse
A lot rests on the trading success of the Dick Turpin, situated in less-than-inspiring Ilford in Essex. It's a former Beefeater that was converted to a brand-new steakhouse trading format, Miller & Carter, by its new owner Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) just before Christmas. It was one of the 239 Beefeater and Brewer's Fayre outlets M&B acquired during the summer from Whitbread, which had decided that it was ill-equipped to run pub restaurants unless it could build a Premier Travel Inn next door.
M&B plans to spend about £400,000 per site converting pubs such as the Dick Turpin to its own trading formats. The target is to boost sales by 30% from the average weekly per-pub Whitbread take of £16,000 to £22,800. The Dick Turpin has symbolic importance for M&B - it represents the company's exuberant confidence in its ability to develop new food-led concepts that hit the target market with the accuracy of laser-guided missiles. M&B has to rebrand all 53 of the Beefeaters it bought last summer before the end of next month. The plan is to convert a dozen sites to Miller & Carter, a thoroughly modern take on the steakhouse. Two sites opened before Christmas (the second is in Wolverhampton), and 10 more will be completed this month after early lessons are absorbed.
I visited the Dick Turpin on a Saturday lunchtime, having got lost in the grey and dreary suburbs of Ilford a couple of times. The first slight surprise is the degree to which Miller & Carter has catapulted the former Whitbread site upmarket in the working-class environs of Ilford. M&B is aiming, in my estimation, for a per-head spend pretty close its Project S gastropubs - two courses of food and half-a-pint of bitter cost me £20.
Décor is aspirational in the extreme with wooden and slate floors and dark wood on the walls. Zoning has created a very large restaurant area and a much smaller bar area. Seating is largely of the banquette variety, creating high-class diner-style areas. There's no music in the bar but the vocal schmoozing of Frank Sinatra could be heard in the restaurant. It's a steakhouse with a sense of theatre (an open kitchen visible from the restaurant helps) - a special place to go and treat yourself once or twice a week. There are signals that make the place appeal to both make and female customers. In the bar, two smallish inset television screens featured Sky Sports coverage. But a vase of lemons and limes features at the end of a bar which is stylish enough to grace a Mayfair cocktail lounge.
Mitchells & Butlers charges an average of £6 for a main course. Miller & Carter's starters range from £3.50 for chicken soup for the soul to £6.00 for smoked salmon with guacamole. Steaks range from £7.50 for a 6oz minute steak to £15 for an 8oz fillet with sauces at £1.30. Steaks are served with house iceberg salad, jacket potato or skinny chips and a slice of onion loaf. I opted for crumbled blue-cheese topping with chunks of cheese, some the size of dice, broken into the salad. Attention to detail is really excellent: for example, steaks are served using a proper steak knife with a decent cutting blade.
My only negative observation is that items such as the onion bread, sauce and even the steak should have been served warmer. (I think this is an industry-wide problem). But all in all, Miller & Carter is an indication of how versatile and skilled a retailer M&B has become. This is the year it will burst through the 100m-meals-a year mark - and deservedly so.
