Noah’s Ark-le: Surviving rising waters for a successful launch

“The hotel has got a really massive turnover of finance and footfall and effectively puts the customers in the building where our restaurant is,” says Sam Griffiths, executive sous chef at Arkle.

2022 was a difficult year for those in the restaurant business with over 1500 restaurants in the UK closing, according to data from Mazars. Ballooning energy and ingredient costs as a result of inflation and the war in Ukraine made life difficult but that didn’t stop Arkle opening in the Chester Grosvenor hotel.

As Arkle celebrates one year since opening Griffiths talks about the success of the restaurant, the difficulties of starting a restaurant in these times and how being attached to a hotel is helpful.

The newly branded restaurant officially opened in March of 2022 but according to Griffiths a team of four, including him, spent the two months prior developing a menu full time. The team did a number of practice runs serving the food to senior members of the hotel and getting feedback.

One of the main things they focused on was the use of locally sourced British ingredients on the menu, something Griffiths credits as a part of Arkle’s success. “It’s very prevalent now in the restaurant industry that people don’t just come in to eat, they want to know a bit more about where the produce comes from and the background stories. They like to have the link to how we sourced things,” he says.

Being part of the Chester Grosvenor hotel is another part of Arkle’s success. According to Griffiths, having other things attached to the restaurant helps drive footfall. The hotel does afternoon tea and includes a deluxe bar with all sorts of high end spirits and champagne.

However, with success inevitably comes challenges and Arkle has had plenty of them even discounting the broader economic climate. In fact the climate is one of the bigger challenges Arkle faced. “We buy things from small suppliers, whereas in the past we might have used large suppliers where everything is always available. Sometimes there’s things like the weather that affects the harvesting of things and it’s a constant. Everyday you come in and it might be something is not available and you have to juggle around [the menu],” says Griffiths.

Even being part of a hotel has not insulated Arkle from the realities of the cost of living crisis for the catering industry and it is something that Griffiths wants to see more governmental support for. “I think we’re probably the same as pretty much everyone, regardless of the scale of the hotel and the calibre of the hotel, we still have to pay a staff a good wage, and we have to make it attractive to work here. We have to pay bills, our energy bills tripled within two weeks on gas, electricity and lighting.

“It’s not the industry that it was. The margins are much, much smaller and I think that’s how that’s going to be until the errors have been really addressed . I think until we address the [energy] problems, the country in general will continue to tread water, whereas in a generation gone by we’ve been a sort of thriving, powerful country,” he explains.

While surviving the first year is an important milestone, 60% of restaurants do not make it that far. According to research from Ohio State University, surviving the second year is just as difficult. For Griffiths, maintaining the standard of quality set in the first year and keeping people interested in Arkle is what will keep it going.

“We will have had a lot of first time visitors who are just curious to see what we’re doing and I think the Grosvenor has built itself on a reputation of having returning customers and very regular guests. I think that we need to be able to rely on people to come in once or twice, a quarter or once a month even.”

Furthermore Griffiths believes that in order to have continued success Arkle must continue to refresh and innovate with its menu. “We’ve got a large whiteboard in the kitchen, where we have three sections. We have a section on the left for our current menu which is used as and when problems come up, or just maybe new ideas. We have a middle section, which is purely ideas, flavour combinations, dish ideas, whatever it might be and then we have another area of the board which is purely seasonal.

“Right now we’re planning, we’ve got dishes ready to go on the menu that have been being planned for three or four weeks waiting for things to come into season, things such as asparagus and wild garlic, and then we’ve got things in the pipeline for four or five weeks time when things like fresh pea will come into season,” Griffiths adds.

With all the hype of a successful first year, especially in such difficult circumstances it would be easy to sit back and admire their achievements, but this is something that Griffiths and the staff at Arkle are determined not to do.

“We’re not getting too carried away and thinking of too far in the future. We’re trying to just keep what we’re doing now and just get better week on week and that at the moment is just keeping it the standard we’re really happy with,” he explains.