Excited, a bit scared, hugely ambitious and incredibly focused. All of these perfectly describe Tom Brooke’s current state.
The founder of Red Dog Saloon, the American restaurant chain on the cusp of a real expansion drive out of London, says it is a big year for him, but he absolutely relishes (if you’ll pardon the pun), the
challenges that lie ahead.
“I like to feel nerves and pressure,” Brooke says. “If you don’t enjoy them, I think they will consume you in this industry.
“This year is going to be very exciting and pivotal. We are investing more this year than ever before. Last year, we invested £1.5m and this year it will be £3.5m and I think it is going to define us. If we get this year right, we have the potential to have really exciting numbers.”
The firm has already confirmed its next two sites, due to open in Victoria Street, Nottingham, in September and at Westquay Watermark, Southampton, in November. Brooke says he is close to signing another restaurant in Liverpool, which he would also like to open this year, and his aim is to open five a year. These three new city units will be full-scale restaurants like the company’s existing sites in Hoxton (180 covers) and Clapham (120c), where average spend per head is around £27 and split 70:30 between food and drink. These cost around £1m, before a premium, to get up and running.
The 40-seat Soho restaurant is something of a one-off, thanks to its high-footfall location, but Brooke says there is also huge scope to roll out the fast-food format that has been operating successfully at Lakeside shopping centre in Thurrock, Essex, since opening in January. The prototype, Red Dog American Sandwiches next to the original Hoxton restaurant, will be given a revamp to match the Lakeside version and Brooke says he is in discussions with Intu Properties, the owner of Lakeside, about the possibility of further units in some of its other shopping centres.
The business is currently growing naturally and Brooke says he could get to 15 sites before he would need to start thinking about further finance to fund growth. It has all come a long way from when the 32-year-old started with the Hoxton restaurant five years ago.
“For the first nine months we were losing £10,000 a week,” he recalls with the kind of humour that can surely only come in hindsight to someone who was watching their investment running down the drain. Luckily, a turning point came when a friend of Professor Green, the rap artist, came in and videoed himself talking part in the restaurant’s Devastator burger challenge. It was uploaded to YouTube and became a massive hit, bringing money-can’t-buy levels of publicity and customers. Within nine months, turnover was averaging £90,000 a week.
Passionate aims
The restaurants still offer two challenges – The Devastator and the Hot Wings – and for these gets some negative feedback from certain quarters of the press who feel they promote gluttony and waste. Brooke shrugs this off as nanny-state nonsense. It is a bit of fun that is not pushed hard. In fact, he insists fads and promotions are the opposite of what Red Dog is about. In the main, the menu is certainly not the cheapest of its ilk, but Brooke is passionate in his aim to serve the best-tasting burgers made from the finest-quality ingredients.
“I don’t believe in selling animals that have been raised inhumanely, but I am not about to get on my high horse about it and most customers don’t think about it, they just think the meat is really good,” he says.
The group uses the same meat supplier as The Dorchester but Brooke says it was very difficult to find honest butchers who supplied exactly what they said they would. Because of the higher cost of ingredients, the Red Dog model requires a high turn-over of customers. Brooke says he is “quietly confident” that he will achieve this in the regional cities when the restaurants open outside London later this year.
“I do think this concept will work anywhere – if you can stand up to the competition in London, you should be able to do so everywhere,” he explains.
His faith is underpinned by the ultimate simplicity of the original concept, from which he has never really deviated.
“Ten years ago, my father was in business in America and I was out there eating a lot of burgers and realised that in London then there was nowhere that did that good-quality fast food – in fact, McDonald’s was the closest when you think of the quality of the bread and the thickness and ratio of the ingredients,” Brooke explains.
As well as the quality and attention to detail with the dishes, Red Dog’s USP is its smoking process using equipment imported from the US and traditional American hickory and mesquite wood to cook meat for up to 16 hours to give it a distinctive flavour.
Brunch beckons
Brooke is adamant it is not an imitation American restaurant and he believes, in that way, that it is unique and will always have consumer appeal. “I reckon cheese burgers will still be eaten in 100 years’ time,” he points out.
That’s not to say he feels there is no room for improvement. He refines the menu twice a year and believes there is scope to broaden the operation – an improved brunch menu is the current project:
“I think brunch is a big business opportunity. There is nowhere to get a really good American breakfast.”
He is happy that all the systems plus the operating team and practices are firmly in place to take the business through its next phase of growth. Late last year, Patrick
Farrell joined the firm as head of operations. He was previously in charge of 360 Boston Pizza restaurants in Canada, and Brooke says he has really helped him evolve from having a small family business mentality to that of a larger operation.
Brooke has had inspiration on that front from a young age. His father was in retail, selling cashmere in about 40 shops that he ran. He undoubtedly influenced his son’s decision to study business and economics at university, even though his true passion in life was cooking, inherited from his cookery teacher mother.
Scary and tough
Even at that time in his life, Brooke sounds like he was incredibly focused and driven, with his sights firmly set on a goal of opening his own scaleable restaurant business (having just one restaurant is something he can imagine himself doing in later life). After uni, he joined D&D London’s management training programme, where he recalls the six months he spent in the kitchens as the hardest thing he has ever done.
“It was scary and tough, like a military operation, and it was not polite. At times, I came close to walking out in tears. But the value was huge,” he says.
At the end of the 18-month programme, he did not get the job he felt should be the next step towards his target of opening his own restaurant business, so he joined Carluccio’s as an assistant manager and also gained experience in the fine-dining events sector, serving people including Simon Cowell and the Queen.
Seeing the food coming out of the kitchens is, to this day, the bit of the business he loves most.
He admits it can sometimes be “terrifying” living his life by numbers, as he puts it, but feels “I am one of the luckiest people in the world”, to be fulfilling his long-held ambitions.
Brooke is also a father himself now, to a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and sees parallels between parenthood and running a business: “You’re never sure you’re doing either right.”
If it wasn’t for his youthful looks, you would be hard-pressed to guess Brooke is still only 32, given what he has achieved so far and his clear vision for where he wants to go.
