Coming up Rosa’s

Rosa’s Thai Cafe is usually an elephant-free zone. In contrast to most UK Thai restaurants, Rosa’s design playbook is cool London meets cool Bangkok rather than waterfalls, rotund deities and trunk-bearing large mammals.

But today there is an elephant in the room, albeit a figurative one. In the time that has elapsed since this interview was arranged, the 10-strong London chain has appointed Grant Thornton to lead a sale of the business that will likely result in founders Alex and Saiphin Moore giving up a significant stake and taking a back seat, or even leaving completely.

We’re having lunch at the group’s most recently opened restaurant in Covent Garden and – to their credit – the Moores don’t dish up a sales pitch. Instead, Saiphin orders up a huge spread of food which, as Thai tradition dictates, arrives all at once and is to be shared. There’s beef penang; som tam salad; moo ping (pork skewers); and grilled pork neck with a tamarind sauce spiked with chilli powder.

Rosa’s menu is less anglicised and obvious than most Thai menus, but inevitably its biggest sellers are green curry and pad thai. In fact, the group just sold its millionth portion of the latter.

Thai-born Saiphin oversees Rosa’s food as F&B director while Alex, who hails from Surrey but has spent half his life in Asia, runs the wider business as chief executive. The pair met in Hong Kong in 2001 and founded the business that would become Rosa’s in 2007 as a permanent market stall on Brick Lane in East London.

A year later, the couple signed a lease on a former traditional British café called Rosa’s on nearby Hanbury Street and opted to keep the name.

Ten years and 10 sites later, the Moores look set to move on, yet their love of the brand and the people that work for it remains palpable. In fact, they talk about Rosa’s with the enthusiasm of a couple who are just starting out rather than one who has reached the end of the road. Are they sure they want to sell up?

“Over my career I’ve tried to leave things at a point where I still love what I’m doing,” says Alex, a self-styled entrepreneur with a background in digital marketing. “We’ve loved the journey, but we’ve now reached a point where the business can work well without us.”

The pair sold their house to open the Hanbury Street site and have held on to the majority of the equity thus far. As such they’re potentially in for a windfall, with the business thought to be valued in excess of £25m.

Entering the regions

As well as having hit double figures in sites, Rosa’s has proved it can work in a variety of trading environments, but the Moores have yet to take the brand outside London. Alex and his recently appointed managing director Gavin Adair (Wahaca, Ask Italian) have now remedied this, having just signed heads of terms on a site in Liverpool’s Albert Dock.

The north-west may seem like an odd choice for Alex, a man who currently cycles around his restaurants on a Brompton folding bike, but it turns out the city has a particular draw for Rosa’s.

“It’s got a great independent food scene but it also has a comparatively high Thai population, which is good news in terms of both diners and staffing,” he says. “It’s also a very popular holiday destination for Thais.”

“It’s because of Liverpool FC,” interjects Saiphin, who has hospitality in her blood having founded a noodle shop at the tender age of 14 and latterly run both restaurants and food import companies. “Many Thais support the club so when they come to England the city is first on their list. We keep getting calls from Thai tour operators asking when we’re going to open there.”

The team should be on site in the new year. Following that, the plan is to create a regional hub in the north-west before looking at other regional locations.

Delivering the goods

Rosa’s can take smaller sites – its sweet spot is about 1,500sq ft – that would not be of much interest to most other chains be-cause it has a strong delivery business. Its dining rooms may be small, but its back-of-house teams are also busy cooking food for local homes and businesses.

“It’s been part of the model since we launched our first bricks and mortar site. At many sites, it takes our numbers from fine to very good indeed. Thai food travels very well and it’s also one of the most pop-ular takeaway cuisines. Nobody goes

home and says let’s order a French,” says Alex, who has invested heavily in packaging that keeps food hot for up to 40 minutes, allowing most sites to offer delivery to locations within a 4km radius. Takeaway and delivery accounts for around 20% of the group’s total turnover.

The competition

The Thai restaurant sector isn’t short of brands, most notably the London-centric Busaba Eathai and regional players Giggling Squid, Thaikun, Chaophraya and Koh Thai Tapas. Rosa’s will soon be up against them in some locations but this isn’t of much concern to the Moores. “It keeps us on our toes,” says Alex. “Our food will stand up against anyone’s. We don’t dumb down what we do or anglicise it. I’m glad our competitors are doing well. Thai food is on the up and we’re riding a macro wave. But good Thai food is still hard to find, and we believe that’s the niche we have found.”

One thing that sets Rosa’s apart from its branded competitors is its willingness to fiddle with its menu and model at each site. “Typically, restaurants get bigger and the quality goes down,” says Alex. “The way we fight this is to try and make each Rosa’s we open better. Where we have fields of expertise, for example, a chef from southern Thailand or a chef that’s brilliant at cooking noodles, we use them and do a special menu for that site.”

For example, Rosa’s Dean Street restaurant serves southern Thai food; its site just off Carnaby Street specialises in noodles; and its Victoria restaurant serves food from Laos. “Our finance director hates it because usually the aim is to standardise everything. But this approach to our menus keeps our soul intact. It’s not death by spreadsheets and it allows our staff to show off their expertise,” he adds.

Alongside its core brand, Rosa’s operates two sub brands. Westfield Stratford City’s Rosa’s Thai Market Kitchen is a fast-casual version of Rosa’s with a heavily edited menu comprised of Rosa’s best-sellers and some street-food dishes. The offshoot looks to have been created to demonstrate that Rosa’s can work in a more heavily branded, shopping centre environment as well as trendy London streets. “It’s a different type of experience designed to ring-fence the original Rosa’s concept,” says Alex. “We didn’t want to dilute the core brand.”

The pair also run a delivery-focused site in Hackney called Saiphin’s Kitchen. The London Fields restaurant doubles as a production kitchen and is now used to make the majority of the group’s sauces and dips.

Later this year, Rosa’s Dean Street restaurant will become 100% vegetarian. “It will be a pop-up at first but there’s no reason it couldn’t go permanent if it’s successful,” says Saiphin, who is partly using the project to promote her second cookbook, which is focused on vegetarian Thai food. “It’s amazing how easy it is to prepare Thai food using only vegetables. The biggest challenge is finding good substitutes for fish sauce and shrimp paste.”

“We’re always looking for new angles,” adds Alex. “We want Rosa’s to be interesting. We don’t want to become the McDonald’s of Thai food.”

Staffing issues

Rosa’s finds staffing a challenge but not to the extent of most restaurant businesses. In common with some of its competitors, it is able to attract Thai staff already working in independent Thai restaurants with better pay and better conditions.

The pair are well aware that a number of high-profile Asian restaurants have recently landed themselves in hot water for employing illegal workers. “It’s a big concern for us. We’re rigorous about the processes and structures we use to ensure nobody falls through the net. We spend an unbelievable amount of time on compliance. So far so good,” says Alex.

A Home Office ruling that you can’t employ someone on a work visa in a restaurant that offers takeaway has hit Rosa’s coffers. There are now three Rosa’s restaurants – Carnaby, Soho and Hackney – that don’t do delivery in order to allow them to employ chefs on work permits.

On the plus side, the pair aren’t losing too much sleep over Brexit as they only employ a handful of EU nationals. Saiphin even has high hopes that Rosa’s will soon anoint its first non-Thai head chef. “He’s not quite up to my standard yet, but he will be soon,” she says

Looking to the future

After the sale, the pair will continue to run Lao Café, a Covent Garden restaurant that Saiphin opened late last year. She grew up in Phetchabun province, in northern Thailand, but her family are originally from Laos and cook Laotian food at home.

Alex admits he wasn’t that keen on the project at first. “I was of the opinion that we should do Lao Café after we finished with Rosa’s,” he says. “But Saiphin would have done it without me so I had no choice but to get on board. We’re very different people. I’m very structured and measured in my thinking and Saiphin is creative. That’s why Rosa’s works and also why we’re very happily married.”

Lao Café is performing well. When it first opened customers were nearly all Asian, but now the demographic is more mixed. “We could certainly open a few more at some point,” says Saiphin.

The Moores are also planning to open a simple Thai noodle shop that would be loosely based on the business a teenage Saiphin ran from her house in Thailand. “It will be a mix of stir-fry dishes and noodle soup dishes. I don’t leave the house until I’ve eaten my morning noodles,” she says.

Such is the popularity of Thai food and east Asian food more generally, there is a gap in the market for more specialist concepts. Indeed US-based Thai food specialist Andy Ricker has already launched a number of specialised Thai restaurant concepts in New York and Portland, including a noodle shop and a Thai chicken shop.

“We’re a few years off westerners eating noodles for breakfast but we will eventually follow Asia,” predicts Alex. “Japanese noodle restaurants have got the market ready. There’s room for a Thai concept.”

There is also a Thai food business in the offing that would eventually supply Saiphin’s Kitchen-branded products into supermarkets. Saiphin is already working directly with Thai food producers to import bespoke products for the restaurants including fresh curry pastes, palm sugar, rice noodles, fish sauce, soy sauce and rice.

“We don’t really use any of the big Thai brands,” she explains. “We’re currently flying in 400kg of fresh curry paste a week from southern Thailand. The prices are comparable to buying branded products in but the quality is far higher and there’s also a big benefit to the communities that make these products because we’re trading direct.”

The Moores won’t be twiddling their thumbs after a sale, with Saiphin on the way to building her own brand. With interest in south-east Asian food at an all-time high, Rosa’s is unlikely to be short on suitors from both trade and private equity, with the latter the most likely destination for the business. The future looks rosy for Rosa’s, and indeed the Moores themselves.

■ This article was first published in Restaurant magazine