As part of Conran Restaurants and D&D London, Des Gunewardena ran some of London’s best-known restaurants, from Coq d’Argent to Quaglino’s to German Gymnasium.
His departure in 2022 was far from the end of the story, however, and today he will announce plans for a £10m restaurant, bar and events space at Olympia, the west London exhibition venue, The Times reports.
The new site, which is due to open next year, will become the third restaurant for D3 Collective, the former D&D boss’s new hospitality company. The first, set to open on Thursday, election day, is a 5,000 sq ft Japanese-Korean venue with a “1920s Berlin vibe” at the Royal Exchange in the City of London; the second will be a 10,000 sq ft site in Canary Wharf, east London, due to open in November.
The Olympia restaurant is part of a £1.3bn redevelopment of the 14-acre site spearheaded by Yoo Capital and Deutsche Finance International and co-designed by Heatherwick Studio and SPPARC. Their aim is to turn the 138-year-old site into a state-of-the-art culture and entertainment hub.
Gunewardena’s project will be incrementally bigger than his first two sites, at 30,000 sq ft, as it encompasses Pillar Hall, a grade II listed building built in 1885 by Henry Edward Coe, the architect. The new-look Pillar Hall will be designed by Robert Angell Design, who worked with Gunewardena on the award-winning 14 Hills restaurant in the City.
There will be a main restaurant, a less formal café-grill, a central bar, outdoor dining and a basement “speakeasy”. It will feature a 370-capacity music and events space that will cater for a wide range of events. As the 200-room Hyatt Regency hotel next door does not have its own restaurant, D3 Collective will supply breakfast in Pillar Hall.
The restaurateur said that, despite its location in an exhibition centre, the new hospitality venue would produce “a menu that is purely destination, not appealing to crowds of people. We’re aiming to be a world-class restaurant.”
Although his wife declared three restaurants to be “quite enough”, he said: “I don’t think that is going to be the case. There are lots of opportunities and sites being offered to my company and I think that as the company develops there will be more overseas moves.”
He said he had been to Mumbai and had talked to a well–established business about opening there, while he had seen great opportunities in the United States. On funding, Gunewardena said the first site at Royal Exchange had been financed by family money, while Giles Rothwell, a former investment banker with Barclays Capital and a close friend, was backing Olympia. “So I have no private equity and no bank debt. It’s a different way in which I’m building my new world,” he said.
