How high-end restaurants went global
As a new generation sets out in the footsteps of Nobu and Zuma, Jay Rayner examines the rise of ‘luxe’ food chains — and whether it has come at a cost
In Dubai’s International Financial Centre you are never far from a prettified plate of raw tuna. At the city’s branch of the Venetian-born Cipriani, it’s a tuna tartare. Across the pedestrianised precinct at La Petite Maison, it’s a tuna carpaccio with hazelnuts. Two minutes’ walk down the street from there, at the Japanese-inspired Zuma, it’s tuna with chilli, coriander and sesame, and a further five minutes’ walk on at the generic Asian Shanghai Me, it’s bluefin tuna oshizushi. Early next year there should be a new tuna tartare on the block. The British-based tapas restaurant group Barrafina is opening its first international outpost. And they do so love their raw fish.
On the sort of brutally hot day many people would call a climate emergency and Dubai calls Wednesday, I am taken on a WhatsApp video tour from London of the hard-edged DIFC. My guide is Sam Hart, co-owner of London’s Quo Vadis and the Mexican El Pastor group alongside Barrafina. With him is Anna Watkins, MD of the highly regarded tapas part of the company. “There’s a really good business crowd here,” Watkins says, as they dance from one shadow to the next. “We think our small plates will appeal to them.”
Hart nods vigorously before pointing out that what they’ll be offering is very different to all the other restaurants we’ve peered at. “A lot of these places are 300 to 400 covers,” he says. “Whereas we’ll be Barrafina-sized, so only about 50 covers. Oh, and we won’t have a DJ.”
In Dubai the restaurant DJ is a big thing. As are blancmange-pink slabs of Wagyu, lozenges of sushi and dollops of caviar. A little rustic pan con tomate and a plate of chicken thighs with a nutty romesco sauce might well prove a blessed relief. Either way, the new international Barrafina will be part of a booming global hospitality sector which, post-Covid, has become a proven cornerstone of the luxe economy.
The restaurateurs, chefs and brokers who have made this their business say it’s a product of premium shopping habits moving online through the pandemic, just as they did for all categories of consumer, so the big brands no longer need so much physical floor space. “Premium retail has just shrunk,” says Noah Tepperberg of the New York-based Tao Group, which has the international brands Hakkasan and Lavo. “But you can’t buy what we do on Amazon.”
In the UK, restaurateurs talk only of economic headwinds and brutal trading conditions. “A lot of it is to do with the UK economy right now,” says Mark Wingett, group editor of Propel, the hospitality business newsletter. “Businesses are questioning whether it’s worth opening here and instead are looking overseas.”
Meanwhile, from the UAE to Singapore, from Hong Kong to Mykonos to LA, it’s boom time for anyone with a menu of, say, crispy squid, king crab and Wagyu, a wine list stacked with marquee names and a veritable army of suited-and-booted waiters who know how to service the demanding $150-a-head crowd.
It’s a feverish business. The US-based Major Food Group has just opened its ninth branch of the high-camp New York Italian Carbone in London, serving lasagna bianco at £98 a pop. The London-founded Azumi group has dispatched Zuma west across the US and east to Dubai and all points beyond. Dubai’s Fundamental Hospitality group has returned the favour by opening branches of the sort-of-but-not-very Greek Gaia, and the kind-of-French La Maison Ani in London. The Swedish chef Björn Frantzén has sent his Wagyu beef sliders and veal tartare toast to Bangkok, Singapore, Marbella, the Maldives and Dubai. None of them miss out Dubai. There are now 56 branches of Nobu worldwide, doing a roaring trade in black cod with miso and rock shrimp tempura. There are 25 Zumas, about two dozen Ciprianis, 13 LPMs and 12 Hakkasans.
These restaurants sell themselves on the promise of a unique, perhaps even bespoke night out; increasingly, however, they are defined by familiarity, fully detached from the neighbourhood in which they sit. They appear to represent different culinary traditions, but they all offer deracinated takes on the same reassuringly luxurious ingredients. And many of them are to be found side-by-side in the same resorts and developments. On the small Greek island of Mykonos there are, of course, local Greek restaurants. They’re probably lovely. But there’s also a Zuma, an LPM, a Matsuhisa from the founder of Nobu and a Nusr-Et steakhouse from Turkish chef Salt Bae. Though it’s not quite clear what the island did to deserve that.
It plays out as a gilded version of the British high street from the turn of the millennium onwards, when mid-market hospitality businesses came to dominate. Eventually, you could eat anywhere you liked across the UK as long as it was at an Ask, Zizzi, Wagamama or Côte. In 2025 a slab of prime Wagyu has become for the international wealthy what a sourdough pizza was for the British middle classes in 2010. It’s just dinner.
Restaurants spreading their wings is not especially new. In 1964 a restaurant in Tokyo called Benihana opened a sibling of the same name in New York, where skilled chefs did tableside tricks with knives and ingredients that had little to do with eating. It was the beginning of an empire. In the 1970s the New York restaurateur Joe Allen oversaw the opening of branches of his eponymous theatreland American bistro, first in Paris and then in London. In 1978 a second Hard Rock Cafe opened in Toronto, a sibling to the original 3,500 miles away just off Park Lane. But these were rare examples of international restaurant expansion.
The modern story begins with the 1994 arrival, in New York’s Tribeca, of the first Nobu. The original restaurant, overseen by a bullet-headed, bright-eyed chef called Nobu Matsuhisa, had opened in Beverly Hills in 1987, serving a Japanese menu with Peruvian influences. One of its regulars was the actor Robert De Niro, who was looking to diversify. He went into partnership with both the chef and the restaurateur Drew Nieporent to open the first Nobu. A second branch, famed for its minimalist clean lines, opened at London’s Metropolitan Hotel off Park Lane in 1997. Many more followed.
“We never sat in a room and said we’re going to build a thing,” says Richie Notar, former general manager of the original Nobu, who later helped oversee the opening of 19 further branches worldwide. “We just suddenly had the hottest restaurant on the planet. Nobody else was doing this sort of food. We wanted to polish it up, put it in designer jeans. A few months after opening in London, we had a Michelin star and Princess Diana sitting in the corner.”
The fight for tables in London was so intense that it inspired the Karachi-born businessman Arjun Waney to back a little-known German chef called Rainer Becker, who had spent six years cooking in Japan. Waney was apparently fed up with not being able to get a table at Nobu, and Becker believed he could write a menu of Japan’s greatest hits, only with bolder flavours designed to appeal to an international crowd. The first Zuma opened in London in 2002 and became a huge success, spawning those multiple outposts.
So what’s the secret to international expansion? “You have to get the first one right,” says Notar. “There’s no three, four or five if you don’t get number one right.” For Tao Group’s Tepperberg, it’s about research. “I visit a city 10 to 15 times before I’m comfortable opening there.” And then it’s about training. “We’ve had our exec chef and our general manager for Dubai working with us in London for three months,” says Watkins of Barrafina. All of which is aimed at one goal. “You need to be consistent,” Becker says. “The signature dishes have to taste as close to the same as possible everywhere.” Despite once helping to launch the opposition, Notar cannot hide his admiration. “Zuma has done an amazing job.”
On a late summer’s morning, the restaurateur François O’Neill is also thinking about Zuma, perhaps because the business is reputed to have made Becker a multimillionaire. The old joke, that to make a small fortune from restaurants you have to start with a large one, has been subverted by the Zuma model.
“Zuma holds the crown, doesn’t it?” O’Neill says, over an espresso. He’s sitting in a blonde wood window booth at Maison François, his modern take on the French brasserie, tucked away off London’s Piccadilly. His restaurant, which opened five years ago, has built a devoted fan base drawn to its sexily lit dining room filled almost exclusively with corner tables, and a smart menu of updated French classics. They do escargot flatbreads and a killer bavette Bordelaise, followed by tarts from the drop-dead-gorgeous dessert trolley. Last year it spawned a more casual sibling, Café François, at Borough.
For the past 18 months, inspired by the success of Zuma and other chefs including Gordon Ramsay and the late Joël Robuchon, O’Neill has quietly taken trips to Dubai. As he says, “The UK is not a desirable market to invest in at the moment.” The UAE, he says, “is a hotspot for restaurants. That’s what they do at weekends. They’re obsessed with brands.” O’Neill knows he has one, but he’s also desperate to protect it. “This is a beautiful part of my life,” he says, looking around the dining room, quiet now before the lunchtime rush. “You need to find the right people to share your DNA. But if you get the opportunity to scale your business in a soft-landing environment, you’ve got to look at it.”
Clearly, he is now fluent in both French food and the language of investment. He’s also aware of the effort it will take. “I’d be on a plane once a month, which brings stress on my family. I want to be a good husband and father. My wife needs to sign off on this.”
O’Neill recognises, however, that if he’s going to do it, this is probably the right time. He’s already passed on one site in Dubai’s Marina because, he says, it “just wasn’t right for us”, but he continues looking and he continues talking. Anecdotally, international property groups report a major uptick in premium hospitality offerings inside new developments in Dubai. “What is increasingly evident is that the best office spaces are incorporating more food and beverage and hotel offerings,” says Prathyusha Gurrapu, head of research at real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield Core. “It is a differentiating factor.”
The same applies to residential blocks. Or as Noah Tepperberg of the Tao Group puts it, “People aren’t going to live on ground floors. You can’t put hotel rooms there, and premium retail brands have less and less interest. Real estate developers believe that if they do a deal with a premium restaurant brand, customers will assume the development is of the same quality as the tenant.”
A beneficiary of this is JKS, the group behind the two-Michelin-starred Indian restaurant Gymkhana and the more recent Ambassadors Clubhouse off London’s Regent Street. Like the Indian café group Dishoom, which recently took investment from luxury goods behemoth LVMH, it is riding a wave of interest in quality Indian food in the US. A Gymkhana will open in Las Vegas in December, and a few weeks before that New York will get an Ambassadors Clubhouse, on the ground floor of a new office block in the city’s NoMad district.
“A big part of my job is building relationships with real estate developers,” says Jyotin Sethi, the J of JKS, alongside his chef brother Karam and sister Sunaina. “The New York opening is a case in point. They have one commercial retail space at ground level and it’s going to us. In the great scheme of things it’s a rounding error for them.” As a result, landlords offer highly preferential deals. “In the US we’re finding landlords operate as partners,” Sethi says. “They’re not trying to squeeze every cent out of you.”
As to the blanding-out of the international premium restaurant sector, many of the players quietly acknowledge it’s a problem, while denying it’s anything to do with them. “We get plenty of requests to open our restaurants,” says Zuma’s Becker. “But we have to be careful where we go.”
The one challenge all these restaurateurs know they face is reputational damage, if they get it wrong. The key, they say, is the kind of deal they make. These start with the hands-off licensing of trademarks and menus. It’s financially risk-free, but there is no brand quality control. Then there are joint ventures, in which risks are shared, through to simply leasing a space and carrying both profit and loss home.
“I wouldn’t put Maison François in someone else’s hands,” says O’Neill. Barrafina’s Watkins seems a little more flexible. “The risk for us, if we f*ck it up, is indeed the brand. That’s why we have a franchise management deal with Anthem Hospitality in Dubai. It means we are responsible for all the key decisions: the head chefs, the managers and so on.”
Some companies seem a little more cavalier. They are happy, for example, to trade in Saudi Arabia, heavily criticised for its human rights record. Recently, top-flight comedians including Jimmy Carr and Jack Whitehall were attacked for taking vast fees to participate in the obviously hilarious Riyadh Comedy Festival. Meanwhile, JKS has quietly opened in the Saudi government-backed Via Riyadh hospitality development, alongside a branch of Richard Caring’s fish restaurant Scott’s and Wolfgang Puck’s Spago.
JKS says its deal is with a local hospitality business which has merely rented the space in Via Riyadh. “The Saudi government never approached us,” Sethi says. “We want to grow our brand in different markets. We decided we are comfortable with the macro picture.”
Back in Dubai, the Barrafina team are still chewing over the challenges of their new venture, due to open in January. For one, they won’t be able to serve pork. “In Dubai you need a special licence and a separate kitchen for that,” Watkins says. “And it won’t work in the space we have.” A Spanish restaurant without any pig on the menu sounds like a contradiction in terms, but Watkins insists otherwise. “It’s only four dishes.”
Perhaps they have bigger things to consider. As Sam Hart says, “The restaurants that do well here do the most crazy numbers.” He talks about yearly turnovers of $40mn. And so, despite the hoarding still being up on the new restaurant in the DIFC, they are now looking beyond Dubai. They are certain, Hart says, that there are other places where their classy, modern take on the tapas tradition would work. The next day he and Watkins were off to look at sites in Abu Dhabi’s cultural district. The Barrafina rollout has begun.