City diary

Learning by trial and PR

When you've got a big new concept you're trialling and want to keep under wraps, it's not always easy. Spare a thought for a sizeable managed chain whose new concept City Diary has agreed to keep under its duvet - despite a public relations firm, hired for local publicity, shouting from the rooftops about it on its website.

If your name's not on the list

I remember when door staff - or bouncers as they used to be called - used to sign their names in a book when they came on duty. Now I hear JD Wetherspoon is trialling a web-based security system, the Trinity, across 150 sites that allows the chain to automatically check that door staff have full Security Industry Authority (SIA) accreditation, ensuring that the right numbers of senior staff are on duty at all times. It works by logging in door staff reporting to work. The system runs an automatic check to ensure they have a valid and current SIA badge, meaning they have completed relevant training programmes and undergone criminal record checks. If they haven't got the right paperwork, presumably staff can call on their door staff to deal with the situation. Or is that where it gets complicated...?

From a position of effluence

You may have read our story last week about Punch being fined £4,000, plus being ordered to pay costs of £1,685, after its George pub in Finchdean, Hampshire, started churning out "suspended solids" into a nearby ditch at "twice the authorised level". The story followed reports of Punch's new community support fund. At least two web-posting wags simply couldn't resist. "The suspended solids hit the fan," said one. "They're giving more back to the community than yesterday's story alluded to then!" said another. Thankfully, we're all way too old for this kind of toilet humour.

A shot in the wallet

I think I might have found the most expensive cocktail in London. The Renaissance Chancery Court Hotel is charging £150 for the "Money No Object Martini", containing Louis XIII Cognac, Vanilla vodka and lime juice. Whose round is it?

This isn't just gastropub food...

You'll know that those blighters at Marks & Spencers (M&S) started muscling in on gastropub territory by launching a gastropub range a few years ago. I hear that Whitbread has launched a counter raid and recruited the M&S executive in charge of launching the gastropub range, Janine Wills, as its new food development director. Managing director of Whitbread pub restaurants Mark Phillips, above, tells me the move was about recruiting the best staff for its beefed-up food development team in Dunstable. In rugby terms, Wills' recruitment is turnover ball, isn't it?

Model employee behaviour

Mark Derry was sketching out the rise and rise of his Loch Fyne Restaurants, the chain sold to Greene King for £70m in June, to a City audience at a Berwin Leighton Paisner seminar last week. The self-deprecating Derry, who took over the reins at Loch Fyne in 1998, admitted his account contained "healthy doses of post-rationalisation" on the basis that he didn't want to "come across as a complete numpty". But how was he finding working for Greene King, where he is on a retention? "I've always been an employee," he said, before adding, "Of course, I don't behave like that."

Soft skills of the 1990s

It's not easy holding a job down nowadays when you're given to irrational outbursts and anger management issues. But some employers are more understanding than others. I hear that one company boss, who spent time with some of the sector's whizziest and most thrusting leaders-to-be in the rarefied world of high finance in the 1990s, can be a little, er, unpredictable at times. But his employer back in the 1990s was keen to help with a little professional counselling. The outcome? Our man was given a card to take to meetings that bore the following words: "You are starting to annoy me."

Queuing up for a cut

The crush at the carvery is getting worse. New arrivals in the carvery market in recent times have included Marston's, Herald Inns, Orchid Group and more latterly Greene King, which is trialling a Giant's Plate carvery offer. Now I hear even Whitbread has shipped in carvery decks across the week at five Brewers Fayres in a trial. "I'm amazed by the renaissance of the carvery," says pub restaurant boss Mark Phillips.

Does exactly what it says on the sign

And talking of carveries, word reaches me that a Mitchells & Butlers Pub & Carvery, the Astley Arms in Seaton Sluice, Whitley Bay, has smashed all records by chalking up just short of 5,400 covers in a single week. At a conservative blended average of around, say, £4.00 a cover (this is Pub & Carvery, after all), that's a take of £21,600 on food. No wonder Pub & Carvery expansion is set to go into overdrive. Who'd bet against it being given a better brand name as well some time soon?

A year out of Provence

It's just over a year since the discredited pub company Provence bit the dust. I was pleased to hear from one of the company's former tenants, Bill Haynes, who is still running the Goldmine, in Newbridge, albeit under a new owner. "Provence nearly killed us," he reports, "but now we've got a new 21-year free-of-tie lease. I was left with 12.5% of the machine income under Provence, but now get to keep all of it which is around £350-a-week - very helpful. I'm even off my medication." What a difference a year makes.

A right royal example

JD Wetherspoon founder Tim Martin, below, has criticised the current crackdown on underage drinking in pubs as wrong-headed. The broader cultural issues needed addressing, not least the media's glamorisation of binge-drinking. Now Martin has returned to the subject. "The correct approach is not to impose wildly excessive penalties on pubs, when under-18s slip through the net, but to focus on the cultural problems themselves which make photographs of the future king and his brother, falling out of posh nightclubs, required fodder for the press.

"In modern Britain, you don't need much of an excuse for a tax rise, so responsible pub drinkers had better watch out, lest they become scapegoats for those who cannot behave with restraint, tipping out of poncy nightclubs at 4am in the morning." He's hard to argue with at times.