City Diary — 14 May
A hard rain of conditions
Fall foul of the licensing authority and you can truly expect a hard rain of new licensing conditions. Take the Walkabout in Middlesbrough, which has been caught serving a couple of under-age drinkers (among other things). The licensing authority, which acknowledges a problem-free couple of months now, still curtailed opening hours, insisted on polycarbonates after 6pm, slashed capacity from 900 to 730 and now insists on door supervisors being employed at peak times at a ratio of two for the first 100 customers and one more per 100 more. So, when the bar is expecting to be full, no fewer than eight door staff are on. Sounds very expensive.
Waving, not drowning
Premiums on leased pubs are increasingly hard to obtain. Take Paul Hedley's Riverside pub, at the Mill Dam, in South Shields.
Hedley says: "I put the remainder of the lease up for sale almost two years ago for £950,000, reduced it in stages due to lack of interest, and have recently taken it off the market.
"Now I am looking for someone to take the lease for free."
He insists, though, that it's a sound investment: "Some pubs are not trading well, but that's not the case with the Riverside."
Anyone interested will need to be able to show landlord Greene King that they have £20,000 in liquid assets.
Contact business development manager Joe Smith from Greene King on 0797 4132670.
Snee turns up the heat
Orchid's head of food, Dean Snee, left the company a couple of months ago by mutual consent.
But Snee hasn't been dragging his feet in new-job terms — he's now working as a development chef for Imperial Catering Equipment.
Snee will perform cooking demonstrations — and help pubs choose island suites that suit them.
JDW aims for June jackpot
Excitement is mounting about the introduction of £70 jackpot fruit machines in pubs in early June.
City Diary hears that JD Wetherspoon supplier Essex Leisure is planning to replace all eight (yes, eight) machines at JDW's top machine-take pub, Hamilton Hall, in London's Liverpool Street at midnight, to ensure they're up and running when the pub opens at 7am on the day when the new machines go live.
"No other pub has eight machines," a contact says.
"JDW's second-busiest machine pub, at Victoria station, has a take of half as much as Hamilton Hall."
War on causes of M&B's grime
Mitchells & Butlers is having a less-than-brilliant run with food hygiene offences. It's been slapped with a £7,700 bill after its Leeds O'Neill's was cautioned over the filthy state of its kitchens. Grease, dirt and food debris were found stuck to the kitchens' floors and walls at O'Neills on Great George Street in the city centre.
The grime had attracted insects, some of which had laid eggs. And a microwave oven was found to contain hardened deposits of old food.
The local newspaper said: "The squalor was discovered following three visits by an environmental health officer in 2008."
Enterprise host goes too far
Nice try, but it won't really wash time. Enterprise Inns lessee Alex Smithyman is on the way out after being fined £5k for being naughty with his beer supply.
Smithyman was switching the beer supplies to his second Enterprise pub, the St Leger, where he was getting bigger discounts, to his first Enterprise pub, the White Swan in Maltby.
Chris Jones, the pub company's regional director, said: "Mr Smithyman knew the terms of the lease when he took on the White Swan.
"The deal for the St Leger was made because it is in a small village and we wanted to get it open again."
Top-up tips ban 'adds pressure'
Who will be hardest hit by Government insistence that, from 1 October, restaurant and pub owners will be banned from using tips to top up minimum wages?
Numis analyst Douglas Jack has a view: "This is good for quoted pub operators and The Restaurant Group, which are already compliant, as it adds pressure on numerous private restaurateurs such as Carluccio's and Prezzo (which are not compliant), who will have to sacrifice margins or increase prices."
JDW steps up recycling plan
JD Wetherspoon now expects to open 38 pubs for the full year, up from a previous estimate of 35, as the company recycles sites that have been discarded by other managed operators.
The firm has indicated that the average cost of re-opening a second-hand site is in the range of £500,000 to £800,000 — that's a lot lower than the average for a new site of around £1.2m.
Chief executive John Hutson (right) tells City Diary that JDW is now re-opening a fresh trickle of Laurel sites that have been languishing in receivership since last March. For example, the company is planning to re-open a Yates in Derby that was eventually handed back to its landlord.
JDW also had a look at some of the Orchid sites that were dumped into receivership last December, but 45 of these bounced straight back to Punch Taverns.
Oh, and for the record, Hutson has reported that JDW has never had a single leasehold site, of the 50 or so it has sold over the years, bounce back on reversion.
Nadine hopes luck of the Irish will bless Stateside bars
Nadine Coyle, the "voice" of Girls Aloud, has her sights set on building a chain of Irish bars in the US. The singer, 23, has opened an Irish-themed bar, entitled Nadine's Irish Mist, at Sunset Beach, in California's Orange County.
She now owns three bars and restaurants across the pond.
The new pub is run by her parents Niall and Lilian, who relocated to California with her sisters Charmaine and Rachel.
She's fully aware, though, of what's known as the SFI effect. She said: "The ultimate business plan is to open a chain of Irish bars. Americans are screaming for them.
"I'm a bit dangerous with money. A few times in recent years, just by buying so much stuff as investments and dropping big sums, I've left myself without enough money to buy chewing gum."'
