Feature: Keeping it Hush

From premium burgers to Latin American cuisine and a vegan dark kitchen concept, The Hush Collection has more than one finger on the pulse of the industry’s most in-demand categories. Genna Ash-Brown caught up with founder-CEO Jamie Barber to dissect the group’s enduring success

Jamie Barber is a self-proclaimed “accidental restaurateur”. He tells me he never expected to find himself here, at the helm of one of London’s leading boutique restaurant chains, and yet, almost two decades later and with five collective brands operating from locations across the capital, here he very much is.

“I used to be an entertainment lawyer in central London. I was in my mid-20s and I had a lot of disposable income. I wasn’t married, I had a lot of fun nights out and I was very much ‘on the scene’,” he reminisces over Zoom. As chance would have it, one of Barber’s clients at that time was 007 himself – the late, great Sir Roger Moore. His son, Geoffrey, became a good friend of Barber’s – a relationship that blossomed over the seed of a very bad idea. “Geoffrey was trying to get involved in a themed restaurant based on his father, called ‘Spy Café’, but it was a disaster,” he chuckles. “We’re talking ‘Live and Let Fries’ and all that type of stuff – it was terrible! At Roger’s request, I helped get Geoffrey out of the arrangements he’d tied himself into.”

Not willing to give up on his ambition, Geoffrey presented Barber with a proposition: why not launch a new restaurant concept together? “So, I left my career in law. At that point, all I really knew was I wanted to create somewhere like the places I loved visiting when I went out. It was the early 2000s, and I wanted to build something like the Met Bar, which was really cool at the time, as well as a brasserie. I was thinking along the lines of a souped-up version of The Ivy,” he explains. “I wasn’t a foodie back then, but we set off on this mission to create restaurant Hush in Mayfair. Then, in that first year, I became a proper foodie. I absolutely loved it. I made pilgrimages to lots of incredible restaurants in different countries and just tried to soak it all up. I might have fallen into it by accident, but it has since become my calling.”

Rolling with the punches

Barber beams at the thought of Hush still going strong almost 20 years down the line, noting that the brand is on track to achieve its best trading year to date. But the voyage to this destination wasn’t all plain sailing. Geoffrey left the full-time business a couple of years after opening Hush. While Barber stayed, his co-founder’s exit prompted his attempt at a new solo venture. “I opened a restaurant in St James’s that I was extremely proud of. It was a high-end Italian that used Japanese presentation techniques to create very pretty small plates. But Jay Rayner killed it – he said I should be arrested for crimes against food!” We giggle; me, sensing that it was all now firmly water under the bridge, along with a trickling, unspoken subtext of ‘Well, look at me now’.

“Interestingly, Fay Maschler said it was one of the most notable openings that year,” he offers as an aside. A beat passes as we spare a second to marvel at an industry that can be so uplifting and so simultaneously cut-throat. But resilience is a trait that pays dividends in this business – something Barber’s successes are a testament to. True to his entrepreneurial spirit, the Hush founder delved into various new concepts – including Sake No Hana, launched in 2008 alongside Wagamama and Hakkasan founder Alan Yao. The concept was solely acquired by the now global Hakkasan group in 2011 and, while the venue quietly closed its doors permanently last October, it certainly left its mark on London’s dining elite. It wasn’t until 2012 that Cabana came to fruition. The concept’s launch demonstrates Barber’s sixth sense for the UK’s emerging culinary trends.

In 2015, when The Guardian reported that the number of Mexican restaurants in the UK had risen 71% in just 12 months, Cabana was already firmly established. While not specifically focused on Mexican cuisine, the Latin American-inspired grill and cocktail bar offers a fusion of some of the region’s most iconic flavours and dishes, the influence of Brazilian fare and carioca culture clear in menu items such as truffle parmesan cassava, chargrilled malagueta chicken wings and refreshing Caipirinhas. The concept now has branches in Covent Garden, Westfield Stratford and White City, and the O2. Cabana has even gone global, launching in Riyadh last August, with a second due to open in the city’s Sikha District this month. Three more Saudi Arabian locations are to follow, with Innovative Union Company, the Collection’s first international franchise partner, committing to a total of five venues across the region in the next 10 years.

“Running from multiple locations really isn’t the biggest challenge if you’ve got skilled operators on board, and we’ve got some fabulous operators working for us,” he says. “The challenge comes from operating multiple brands because they each require a different headspace; your drivers on one particular concept will be different to the other. You have to work out who the customer is for each one and tune into what they’re looking for. That’s why we started to form the idea of The Hush Collection. We wanted to find the threads of the Hush ethos and values that run through the other brands so they can feel part of a cohesive restaurant collective.”

Capturing the Hush vibe

In 2016, neighbourhood all-day burger restaurant Haché joined the collection. Founded as a family business in 2004, Barber acquired the brand along with business partners Ed Standring, former MD of the Richoux Group, and veteran restaurateur Ian Neill, Wagamama’s former chief executive. The brand has since built a presence in some of capital’s most prominent F&B hubs, including Balham, Camden, Clapham, Shoreditch, Holborn, Chelsea and Kingston. So, what ‘threads’ tie this concept to the Hush restaurant family?

“It has a lot of the same values as Hush –its music, its lighting approach, the quality of the food and the supply chain,” he explains. “Hopefully people can sense that continuity.”

Location is another critical element to consider in developing any new Hush Collection restaurant. Of course, the team carry out thorough research before committing to any new site. “We do some analysis – including competitor figures which is always very interesting,” states the CEO. “But actually, it’s a lot like buying a flat. You might see 20 properties but when you come across ‘the one’, you just instinctively know and can feel that it’s right.”

The Kingston branch, Haché Riverside Social, launched in 2019. A warm and open space overlooking the river, Barber knew  right away it was the perfect fit for the burger concept’s next opening. “We’ve also got a brilliant space for Cabana in the O2, and it’s the very first site you come across when you go into the arena. That’s about as powerful a statement as you can make. Each location has to have its own uniqueness.”

The Haché Truffle Croissant Burger

The final dining concept rounding off the Collection, for now at least, is Little Planted Kitchen (LPK). Established during the first national lockdown in March 2020, the group committed to bringing back the delivery-only vegan kitchen as a permanent standalone brand in January. Dishes can be ordered from 12 locations across The Hush Collection portfolio, covering a vast span of the capital, with plant-based menu highlights including small bites, loaded bowls, stacked burgers, sides and desserts, as well as vegan shakes, beer, wines soft drinks and juices.

“With Haché we saw a fantastic shift towards vegan and vegetarian food. It’s a brand that’s predominantly burger-based, but 20% of our burgers are now vegan or vegetarian and that happened in a short space of time. Lizzy – my sister, who’s an acclaimed author on top of being our head of marketing for over a decade – was very keen to explore an independent vegan brand where we could expand the menu and provide something fresh. So, along with two other great ladies on our team, we let them run with that concept.”

LPK now has a partnership with Deliveroo Editions – an initiative that sees the food delivery giant host dark-kitchens for handpicked restaurants all over the UK.  “If we found the right location, we would look at launching an LPK restaurant. I think that would be fun. The vegan category doesn’t quite have the demand for it to be a huge 6,000sq ft space in the O2 arena, but if we found a nice local environment, we could certainly look into it.” If Barber’s track record is anything to go by, it’s only a matter of time before we see LPK materialise in bricks and mortar.

The Midas touch

In the group’s August financial report, Barber proudly declared that venues across the estate are “performing well ahead of expectations”. The figures are impressive, with the update citing a turnover of £11.48m, an 8.7% increase on 2019 – the last pandemic-free year. Given everything the industry is battling right now – including a cost of living crisis and a sector-wide staff shortage – it appears that Barber’s years of experience and keen eye for potential has given him the ability to turn a restaurant concept into gold. His reputation in the industry is such that he was invited to be an investor on the hit BBC Two show My Million Pound Menu. Each episode sees a string of budding restaurateurs showcase their business plans to some of the sector’s most influential figures, going head-to-head in a bid to win a £1m investment in their concept. Barber featured in two seasons (2018–19), an experience he says was “a lot of fun”. It’s not clear whether the show will be returning, but Barber’s hunger to find the ‘next big thing’ lives on regardless.

“What I’m looking for now is what I like to call an ‘accidentally vegan’ concept,” he says. “Meat substitutes are fine, but I’d like the focus to be on dishes that come from natural ingredients which carnivores would quite happily eat without any hang up. By coincidence, a lot of Middle Eastern and Israeli food is vegan. Nothing is processed in that palate – it’s completely natural and delicious. That’s really what I’m after.”

You heard it here first, folks – watch this space…

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