Feature: Nice one, Brother!
Dine Out chats with Alex Large and Tas Gaitanos, founders of Eastern Mediterranean restaurant brand Brother Marcus, as the duo prepare to launch their sixth site in the capital
You can’t help but absorb the warmth that emanates from Alex Large and Tas Gaitanos. From meeting at school at 16 to founding their very first restaurant in 2016, the familiarity that buzzes between them is one that can only have been cultivated through being long-term friends. In the nine years since its conception, the duo’s restaurant business has gone from strength to strength, but the provision of stellar hospitality wasn’t always their primary ambition.
“After finishing our A-levels, Alex went off to train to be an actor, while I went to Edinburgh to train to be a photographer,” says Gaitanos. “Coming out of those degrees with zero job prospects, you end up being drawn into hospitality. But that’s not to say it was all bad – Alex was quite successful at one point!”
A laugh passes between them. “I have actually been on the West End,” notes Large. “But not for long enough not to have another job to make ends meet.”
So, he took a job at Caravan and several other restaurants in succession, working on the bar, waiting and generally falling in love with hospitality. “I was also dabbling in street food, but I did still always want to go into acting.”
Before Brother Marcus, hospitality had been a constant in the background for Gaitanos, whose parents owned a restaurant in Greece while he was growing up. So, when their initial aspirations hit somewhat of a brick wall, it sort of made sense to get stuck into food, and it happened to be just at the time when KERB was putting the London food scene on the map. They had a friend who worked for the street food incubator, and gave them their first opportunity to experiment with brands and develop concepts.
“It was with Lily Smith from Stakehaus,” chimes Large. “She’s still going 10 or 11 years later, but we were helping her at the beginning, running one of her stalls at Festival Number 6 in Wales. That’s when we said, ‘Right, let’s do this for ourselves.” So, we got some money together and were about to try and launch our own street food thing, when we came across this space in Balham. We managed to get the café open in just three days.”
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Balham branch (which, unfortunately, closed for good in 2021 due to the pressures of the pandemic) was the first Brother Marcus to grace the capital. It was established through pure grit and graft from Large, Gaitanos and fellow co-founder, Arthur Campbell – a trio who were in fact all at school together. While they remain firm friends, Campbell made the decision to leave in 2021 after having a tough time through the Covid-19 crisis. “It’s a stressful industry,” says Large. “The three of us did a lot of work on how we were going to get through it together. He decided to step back and so we dealt with everything fairly. We’re still really great mates – we’ve always said friendship’s central to this whole thing and has to come first. It’s not always easy but we’ve managed to achieve that, which we’re really proud of. Arthur remains a small shareholder, which is great, so our motivation is to make sure he’s looked after.”
Okay, now we’ve met Alex, Tas and Arthur – so who the heck is Marcus?! “Alex’s brother’s called Marcus,” Gaitanos chuckles.
“That’s right,” says Large. “I would always call him ‘Brother Marcus’. Tas was like, ‘Mate, we know who Marcus is, we know he’s your brother!’”
Gaitanos adds: “It was a joke for about six months before we decided exactly what we were going to do. But even then, we knew that whatever it was, it was going to be called Brother Marcus.” So what does the real Brother Marcus think about his name being immortalised in restaurant form? “He loves it,” giggles Large.
“His walk changes as he gets closer and closer to one of these sites,” says Gaitanos, with a smile. “He thinks he owns the place!”
A vibrant brunch spread, served Brother Marcus-style
While the original Balham branch is no more, sites in Angel (2018), Spitalfields (2019), Borough Yards (2022), South Kensington (2022) and Covent Garden (2024) soon followed, demonstrating the resilience of the brand and its resonance with diners in the capital.
“Balham was just a brunch place, so as we were looking to expand, our fridges literally weren’t big enough for us to open in the evenings,” Gaitanos explains. “But as we launched Angel, we knew we had to figure out how to do it. We looked at our brunch menu and thought we needed to lean into something that was us, we weren’t going to try and pretend to be anyone else. I think authenticity is really important in this game. We expanded the menu while sticking to what we knew, modernising it, reframing it for the English palate and delivering it with great hospitality via Alex’s expertly trained demeanour.”
Unlike the foodie offerings the group purveys today, that first menu in Balham was never intentionally designed. It was really just the guys cooking food they loved, which was inherently Mediterranean. “One of our best-selling brunch dishes – sweet potato, courgette and feta fritters – has been on since the beginning, which I don’t think was ever intentional,” says Large.
Gaitanos chimes in: “Courgette fritters are an incredibly popular dish in the Med, more for dinner than anything. For the UK market, we were just taking a familiar item, which was sweetcorn fritters and ‘East Medifying’ it. It works wonders. That quartile of food – whether you’re in Greece, Turkey, Israel or Egypt – they’re social cuisines that are really just about honest ingredients, treated well. You get a very simple outcome that’s incredibly tasty, but also healthy.
“Every menu change is an evolution,” Gaitanos emphasises. “It’s a chance to see what’s working on the menu and what isn’t, what guests are buying and what they aren’t. Whenever you do something creatively, I guess it’s just easier to go with what naturally feels right. It’s an opportunity for us to do something new, something better, and to learn from our previous mistakes.”
Every day's a school day
Both Large and Gaitanos are open and honest about being self-taught restaurateurs. While the latter generally takes care of the food side of things, he laughs at the fact he didn’t even know how to poach eggs when he was a student, while the former takes great pleasure in reminiscing on his first ever business spreadsheet.
“It was amazing,” Gaitanos beams. “It was a three-by-three box, each one a different colour. You clicked on it and there was no formula. We’d all say, ‘Alex, where did you get that number from?’. But if you start from zero, everything is a learning curve, and we were basically starting from zero.”
At the beginning, Gaitanos served as waiter-cum-chef-cum-bartender, while Large and Campbell swapped between working the floor and bar. “Then we sort of became restaurant managers, then GM and head chef,” says Large. “Then I guess we became area managers and ops managers. We just gradually learnt the ropes through wearing so many hats. Ultimately, we’ve learnt a lot and saved a lot by doing it this way. I think it was the only way we ever could have got to this point. We wouldn’t have had the money to employ official ops directors, food people and heads of marketing; it just wouldn’t have worked.
“Hospitality requires 1,000 quite easy things to go right, which actually then makes it quite complex,” he muses. “But then it’s subjective and creative, while also being linear and logistical. This balance is playing out the whole time. It really is an incredible industry.”
The fact they know how it feels to wash dishes for eight hours, how tense it can be on the pass and how stressful it can get when knocking out 400 dishes in one service has gifted them meaningful insight and empathy for their staff.
“In the corporate world, when people say, ‘We need to think about the team’, the response is often something similar to, ‘What do you mean – they’re getting paid, right?’ Whereas, for us, we know we need to look after them because this industry is nothing without its people,” states Large. “They might be our biggest cost, but they’re also our biggest asset.”
Gaitanos agrees, adding: “There’s a little unwritten rule everyone gets told when they enter the business, which is that everyone leaves happy, including you. It’s your job to make sure that happens. If your staff have a problem, you need to know how to fix it. You want to leave your shift with your head held high, knowing you’ve done the right thing.”
Onwards and upwards
It’s currently all systems go for the team, as they prepare a brand-new site – their sixth across the capital – for its official launch in May. Located in the YY London building, at the foot of One Canada Square, it’s set to be their biggest yet, offering 90 covers indoors and an additional 84 outside. It will have its own outdoor bar area complete with retractable roof, and will bring the signature Brother Marcus brunch, mezze and cocktail offering to a new clientele in the capital – along with the new ‘Souvla and Skewers’, exclusive to the Canary Wharf site. “It’s going to be really big for us,” says Large.
And while the group is steadily increasing its presence in the city, they are keen to make it known that Brother Marcus by no means intends to stay a London-centric brand. “We do want to expand further afield, we just don’t yet know when or where,” he adds.
Gaitanos says there are four locations they currently see as great potential stepping stones for growth. Exactly where they are remains a mystery – for now. “They’re all fraught with risk, right? And we’re in a comfortable place operationally,” he adds. “If something happens, we have contacts and are able to sort things out. We know our guests here. To think we can go and replicate that right away in other cities is incredibly naïve. Lots of people have had their fingers burnt by doing that, as it’s actually quite a similar process to opening your very first restaurant.”
“But whenever it happens, we absolutely know that we’re going to have to work hard,” Large concludes. “We already have an ops team that’s operating nicely here, and as soon as we have something two hours away, everything will become more of a challenge. The biggest thing that suffers from that is the guest experience, and therefore the company. So, when it happens, we’ve absolutely got to get it right. The thing we will always believe is that as we get bigger, we have to get better.”
You may also be interested in…
