Simon Hall, Simple Simon Design, on getting the most out of on-trade design

You can have the best chefs and the finest wines known to humanity, but you are not going to get people coming to your restaurant if it looks awful. Restaurant design is often overlooked as one of the key ingredients in a restaurant's success. Here we talk to Simon Hall, managing director of Simple Simon Design, who has projects on the go such as the River Cottage canteen Bristol, due to open next year, about what he sees as the key trends in restaurant design.

Simon Hall is clearly an optimist. He sees opporunities where many just see failures. Take the large number of pubs that have closed in recent months and years as the large pubcos look to cut back on their nationwide estates. For Hall this has meant the chance to work private investors and small multiple operators with the courage and imagination to reinvent them.

Simple Simon Design works across a spectrum of clients and currently sees an "incredibly polarised industry", which ranges from a cheap and cheeful carvery pub for a large pub company, to a 500 square metre top-end food and drink establishment for Bath Ales in the very heart of the West Country.

"The top end of the pub market continues to thrive, there are plenty of members of the public who have come through the recession unscathed and there is an ever-increasing number of good operators throughout the country offering a broad selection of beers and wines, great food from quality ingredients. These are served in comfortable and welcoming surroundings that meet or exceed our ever-increasing levels of taste and service expectation," says Hall.

However, he adds there is plenty of action at the budget end of the market, too. "With the growth of branded pub food chains such as the Sizzling Pubs, Flaming Grills and Hungry Horses, etc, which offer a cheap steak and chips or a roast meal at little more than the price of a pint. These venues have learnt that delivering a hot square meal to a repeatable standard can drive business, and although the margins are lower if the turnover is high enough, then the profits are still there for those prepared to roll up their sleeves."

The trickiest and most competitive part of the market, according to Hall, remains the middle ground, where USPs are harder to come by, and where it's ever more important to create the stand-out needed to survive. Hall anticipates this being a continuing trend for years to come.

In terms of design,  Hall says it is common for tastes to turn to the more traditional at times of austerity, and this latest recession has been no different. "In the current instance, much of the style palette has come from the industrial environment, with enamelled factory lamps, exposed galvanised trunking and bare brick walls, and this industrial reference is a new thing.

"Nonetheless, these industrial styles still remind us of our safe childhood homes, with mixed-up pieces of domestic furniture from across the ages, a range put together in a way that echoes our homes where quality pieces are bought rarely - and often decades apart - which creates the eclectic look so prevalent today."

Due to the beer duty escalator, Hall says food continues to be essential to drive pub profits. But there is one sector that defies this trend - and that's craft beer. "One word of warning for the craft beer houses, is that to survive in the long term, just like everybody else, they will need to make sure that they have their food offering right. This is still the driver of most lunchtime and many evening venue decisions, and those punchy hoppy flavours need to be balanced by something substantial."

* Simon Hall is the managing director of hospitality designers Simple Simon Design, it is currently working on:

River Cottage Canteen, Bristol (opening early 2013)
Graze, Bath, for Bath Ales (opening december 2012)
A new Italian restaurant for Milton Keynes
Classic carvery for Enterprise Inns
An uber-trendy bar/restaurant concept in Cardiff
Two West Country coastal destination hotels
Various independent and brewery-owned pub projects

Find out more at simplesimondesign.co.uk

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