Common Table Group to buy 57 former Whitbread restaurants
A sister company of the Rodeo Doughnut chain takes on Beefeater, Brewers Fayre and Cookhouse sites plus one Premier Inn hotel, promising 700 new jobs and first reopenings in mid-November.
Common Table Group is to acquire 57 former Beefeater, Brewers Fayre and Cookhouse restaurants from Whitbread, along with one Premier Inn hotel, for an undisclosed sum. The deal, announced on 7 October, hands a new operator sites that have been shut since the hotel group closed its branded restaurants in September.
The buyer says the purchase will create 700 hospitality jobs, on top of the staff transferring from Whitbread. Hospitality & Catering News reports that those transfers will happen under TUPE, the British rules that protect employees when a business changes hands.
The first sites are due to relaunch from mid-November 2026. Common Table Group has given no date for the rest, beyond saying that it wants all of them trading again as soon as possible.
Whitbread closed the dining rooms; a doughnut chain’s sister company now bets it can fill them.
“Our priority is to get the sites back open and trading as soon as possible,” said Thomas Anderson, managing director of Common Table Group. “We’re building an entrepreneurial business with a local feel.”
What Common Table Group plans for the sites
The sites will stay restaurants, with an all-day food and drink menu aimed at hotel guests. The company says it will spend on refurbishment, staff development and new menus, and will give individual venues room to make their own local decisions.
The coffee comes from inside the family. Rodeo Group, a sister company also led by Anderson, runs 15 Rodeo Doughnut sites in London and Manchester and will supply a speciality barista coffee offer across the restaurants.
Common Table Group is supported by Rove360, a hospitality consultancy whose team includes former senior Whitbread managers. City AM drew the obvious headline from that: former Whitbread bosses buying back restaurants their old employer no longer wanted.
Who is taking Whitbread’s empty restaurants
Whitbread announced in April that it would leave branded restaurants to concentrate on Premier Inn, a restructuring that City AM says cut nearly 4,000 jobs. The last 106 Beefeater restaurants closed in September. Buyers have been dividing up the estate since: Mitchells & Butlers took seven sites for its Miller & Carter and Toby Carvery brands, and Queensway Hospitality Group agreed in August to take 53 for a chain of value-led pubs.
With 57 restaurants, the Common Table Group package is the largest of the three. None of the trade reports carries a comment from Whitbread, and the price remains undisclosed. The test begins in mid-November, when the sister company of a doughnut chain finds out whether it can fill dining rooms that a FTSE 100 hotel group decided to close.
