JDW boss Tim Martin: 'Jamie Oliver is causing rents to rise'

15-Jul-2014 - Last updated on 25-Jun-2024 at 10:16 GMT

Tim Martin: 'My advice for Oliver is: Be careful, son. You’re an excellent cook, but do you know about rent reviews or understand the property market?'

JD Wetherspoon (JDW) chairman Tim Martin has said the willingness of Jamie’s Italian, the restaurant group founded by high-profile chef Jamie Oliver, to accept high rent costs is causing rents for other operators to rise.

Last week JDW said it had closed five pubs in the 10 weeks to 6 July, including a site at Finchley’s O2 Centre in north-west London.

“It’s a pub we’ve had for years, with sales well above average, but with the higher rents it wasn’t working out for us,” Martin told the Publican’s Morning Advertiser’s sister title M&C Report.

“We’re wary of open-market rent reviews and normally never agree to them. In fact, we don’t agree to them now; we normally have fixed uplifts in our rental agreements so we at least know where we are. You have to be very careful, particularly in central London.”

Martin said there have been “virtually no rental increases” in the past five or six years, even at sites with upward-only rent reviews. In his latest attack on a high profile industry figure, he said: “The only one you have to be careful of around the country is Jamie Oliver, because in general he seems to agree to higher rents in several locations that are pushing up the rents for other people.

“My advice for Oliver is: Be careful, son. You’re an excellent cook, but do you know about rent reviews or understand the property market?”

Jamie’s Italian, which currently operates c40 restaurants across the UK along with several overseas, declined to comment.