Common Table Group buys 57 former Whitbread restaurants

Common Table Group, a new hospitality venture led by coffee entrepreneur Thomas Anderson, is buying 57 former Beefeater, Brewers Fayre and Cookhouse restaurants from Whitbread, with the first sites due to reopen from mid-November.

The deal, for an undisclosed sum, also includes one Premier Inn hotel and is expected to create 700 new hospitality jobs on top of staff transferring from Whitbread. Anderson said the priority is "to get the sites back open and trading as soon as possible."

A chain Whitbread chose to close

Whitbread spent years closing restaurants; now someone else is betting on reopening them.

Whitbread wound up its Beefeater and Brewers Fayre brands last month, part of an April announcement to cut £2bn in costs, shut all of its non-hotel restaurants and remove nearly 4,000 roles. Chief executive Dominic Paul pointed to "the implied market discount to our inherent value" in explaining the wider cost programme to investors.

The FTSE 100 group, which built its business around Premier Inn hotels, had run Beefeater and Brewers Fayre as attached restaurants for decades. Activist investor Corvex, which holds more than six percent of Whitbread, had pushed for a sale of the restaurant estate and a seat on the board.

Common Table Group was advised on the purchase by Rove360, a hospitality consultancy staffed partly by former Whitbread managers who had previously worked with the retailer on a cost-cutting programme that delivered £150m in labour savings.

Coffee and new menus across 57 sites

Anderson also runs Rodeo Group, which operates 15 Rodeo Doughnut sites in London and Manchester. The restaurants will serve specialty coffee from that sister business alongside new menus once each site is refurbished, and will keep serving all-day food and drink to Premier Inn guests.

The reopening lands in a UK hospitality market where delivery and at-home sales have outpaced dine-in growth this year, adding pressure on chains to rework format and menus rather than simply reopen as before.

The deal adds to a wider breakup of Whitbread's restaurant estate. Mitchells and Butlers has agreed to buy a smaller package of former Whitbread sites this year, and a conditional sale of 53 more restaurants to Queensway Inns has also been announced, leaving few of the original Beefeater and Brewers Fayre locations under one owner.

Whether 700 new jobs and a refurbished estate restores much of what Whitbread cut will depend on how many of the 57 sites reopen on schedule. For now, Common Table Group has given itself one month to get the first restaurants trading again.