The Beefy Boys picks Cardiff for its first Welsh site
The Hereford burger group will open on Wharton Street in March 2027, its first site outside England, built on competition-winning Hereford beef cheeseburgers.
The Beefy Boys will open its first restaurant in Wales in March 2027, taking a site on Wharton Street in Cardiff.
The Hereford-born burger group confirmed the move this week. It is the chain's first restaurant outside England, arriving after an eighth UK site now being fitted out in Cambridge, on Bene't Street, inside a grade II-listed former Barclays Bank building that last traded as a BrewDog bar.
The Beefy Boys started in 2011 as a backyard barbecue in Hereford. Co-founder Anthony "Murf" Murphy has called it "a drunken barbecue that got out of hand": he and Dan Mayo-Evans cooked on a broken gas grill that had belonged to Mayo-Evans's father, then began selling cheeseburgers from a stall outside a petrol station.
Four friends with no catering background turned a backyard grill into a nationwide chain and a world championship runner-up medal.
None of the four founders — Murphy, Mayo-Evans, Christian Williams and Lee Symonds — had worked in catering before. Williams found the break that mattered: a Bristol barbecue contest called Grillstock, where the team won the King of the Grill title with a cheeseburger made from Hereford beef. A second-place finish followed at the 2014 World Burger Championships in Las Vegas, a fourth place about a decade later in Indianapolis, and the UK Burger Awards title in 2023.
Smash patties built the chain
The signature order is still that Hereford-beef cheeseburger. About seven in ten burgers served across the group are smash patties, pressed hard onto a hot griddle for a seared crust, made with beef the company says comes from a single farm and butcher and is never frozen.
The chain now runs restaurants in Hereford, Shrewsbury, Cheltenham, Bath, Oxford and Nottingham, with Exeter added this year as its most southerly site; it employed about 200 people in early 2025, before several of those openings. Backing from Manjit Dale, a founding partner of private equity firm TDR Capital, has funded the growth, and the group launched an international franchise programme earlier this year aimed at sites overseas.
Cardiff follows a push east to Cambridge
Announcing the Cambridge site in July, Murphy said: "Cambridge has an exciting and diverse food scene, and it's been one to watch for us for some time." Cardiff points the chain the other way, into Wales rather than further into eastern England; property agent James Grimes of AG&G, who worked on both the Exeter and Cambridge deals, has handled the chain's recent expansion.
The growth comes as other UK burger brands pull back. Honest Burgers closed its only Smash + Grab site this year, and Byron reported a £1.5m loss as turnover fell to £10.6m. No Cardiff address number or opening date beyond "March 2027" has been released.
