Welshman Scott Matthews has a passion for living in the moment and is all geared up for branching out of the capital with Dirty Martini. Mel Flaherty finds out more about the CG Restaurants & Bars man
A man who admits to enjoying walking city streets late at night on his own could be cause for alarm in some circumstances. But this man is Scott Matthews, the chief executive of CG Restaurants & Bars, and the only people with just cause to fear this behaviour are his competitors.
Matthews does these late-night recces whenever he is considering a new location for Dirty Martini, the firm’s growing chain of cocktail bars. The genial Welshman talks animatedly about the two consecutive nights he spent pounding the moonlit pavements of Birmingham and Manchester earlier this year for this purpose; and about how he, with the help of some of the company’s other directors, spent three nights a week, for three weeks, literally counting how many people were in all the bars in Islington before opening their venue there. And he is serious when he says he has committed to memory upwards of 300 units in London’s West End, giving him knowledge of the area to rival that of a cab driver.
This thoroughness in site selection is just one example of Matthews’ absolute dedication to his work and the almost fanatical attention to detail he seems to apply to it.
“I am lucky that I am single and I have committed myself to this job, and I am very happy with where I am,” he comments.
It is certainly fortunate for the prospects of the currently seven-site-strong brand on the cusp of making its first foray outside the capital. Two deals have been agreed in principle for sites in two cities from either Manchester, Cardiff, Leeds, Birmingham or Bristol, and Matthews is hopeful of signing these within the first half of this year. And he is confident of achieving the current target of opening a total of four new sites this year and four next, ideally in these locations plus further north and in the West End and City of London.
Of course, moving to other regions of the UK will be a very different prospect for the currently London-centric business. But CG, under Matthews’ very hands-on leadership (and the very hands-off chairmanship of ‘Mr Leisure’, David Coffer), made the decision more than five years ago to focus on developing Dirty Martini. Over time, it has sold off four Fire & Stone pizza restaurants, leaving it with just the one it intends to keep under that name in Covent Garden, where it also operates its iconic Tuttons restaurant.
Matthews says the evolution of Dirty Martini during all this has well and truly prepared the brand for this next significant step: “We know exactly what Dirty Martini is about now and we will not compromise that.”
He is referring principally to the quality of the offer. Matthews cheerfully admits that the bars’ designer glassware costs three times what he could pay for an industry average glass; that the managers deliberately never fill the bars to capacity to make the environment more pleasant, and he trumpets the fact that not only are all food and cocktails prepared from scratch (the company even makes its own syrups), but all menu and drinks development starts with quality and taste – never price. All the directors are involved in this process, taking part in sampling sessions a couple of times a year for both the cocktail and the food menus (he acknowledges this is not exactly the toughest part of his job).
The brand has now proved it can work everywhere from a high footfall, short dwell-time environment like Covent Garden; to a hidden door basement bar in Hanover Square; to the City where its three bars buzz even at the weekends when the area is traditionally quiet; to the more suburban settings of Clapham and Islington.
The numbers say it all. The Bishopsgate bar broke even on its £800,000 investment within five months of its September 2013 opening. CG’s overall annual turnover now stands at £20.5m, with EBITDA at £3.85m. Dirty Martini accounts for £12m of the turnover and £2.95m of the EBITDA. An average of 45% of business is pre-booked, going up to around 61% at Christmas.
Matthews says the regional city sites will need to be large to maximise the two core days/nights a week that they will inevitably rely on more compared to London locations. They will also give the brand opportunity to try new things, such as a second room within a unit. He has a senior general manager at the ready to open the first such venue and is not at all scared of making mistakes.
He is incredibly determined and lives in the moment, throwing everything he has at what he’s doing. These characteristics were brought out in no small part by a life-changing accident that the now 42-year-old suffered at the age of 20. He was shot by a stray bullet at a party at the Philharmonic, a Cardiff bar he had been managing for just a few weeks. There were two occasions at the hospital when his family were told he may not make it. But he did and even went back to work at the venue for two and a half years. The incident has left him with continuing health issues but he says it has also given him a different outlook on life.
The business has the funds in place to fulfil its 15 sites by the end of 2017 programme, with the backing of its bank, Coutts, and its strategy is to review options after that point. Matthews genuinely has no plan in mind for himself beyond this, preferring to go with the flow. He genuinely loves what he does and the people he works with, many of whom have been colleagues for numerous years (the head-office team, himself included, are now in training for a Tough Mudder mud run challenge). The inclusive and open culture he has developed at the company, inspired by his own experience of working for Hard Rock International, truly drives him along with the passion he has felt for the industry since starting as a part-time glass collector in Swansea after a short stint as a buyer for a pharmaceuticals company. His early career was with Scottish & Newcastle in Swansea, then the Philharmonic and then on to a community pub in London. After this, he managed the now closed Rock Garden music venue – his first introduction not only to that side of the business, but also to working for an independent operator and with the investors behind what is now CG, for whom he then opened the International cocktail bar and restaurant in Covent Garden. Following that, Matthews wanted a bit of time out from the frenetic pace of London and went back to Cardiff to open a site for Hard Rock International, whose approach to staff development has made such a deep impression on him to this day.
Inevitably, he found himself missing London so took a job with Novus, as a general manager for Tiger Tiger before being lured back to CG as operations manager for the original Dirty Martini in Covent Garden, where his role in overhauling service, focusing on pre-bookings and ensuring consistency of product, led turnover to rocket from £1.2m to more than £2m in less than two years made him the obvious candidate for the role of operations director and, ultimately chief executive.
However, there is not a whiff of complacency about him and he will certainly not allow it in the business. Food currently makes up about 5% of sales and Matthews recognises there is scope to build this, especially as the group heads out of London. To that end, CG is working with consultants to review Dirty Martini’s menus, an exercise the business has recently gone through with Fire & Stone, resulting in a more authentically global taste and feel to the pizzas that had always been loosely affiliated with different parts of the world, mainly in name. Matthews believes it is important to outsource some functions like this and uses third parties in other areas like purchasing, IT and marketing.
“It keeps things fresh and gives us an outlook on what competitors are doing,” he explains.
Despite his focus on the here and now, Matthews believes the potential for Dirty Martini is huge, especially if it can do as well outside London as he hopes. It is unlikely that there is anyone who could put more into trying to make that happen.
