Kendrew Street, Darlington DL3

A potential restaurant in Darlington Town Centre...

This huge Victorian lump of a building was for many years a highly efficient two-storey restaurant in the heart of Darlington - and could be again with minimal change. Ideal location as a home-delivery hub, too!

A restaurant? A cafe? A home-delivery hub? The choice is yours!

Retaining its hot food and alcohol licences, along with its A3 (now E) planning permission, it also still has its sizeable commercial kitchen, adjacent large cool room, huge prep room suitable for assembling and packing home delivery orders, and a storeroom with a large window that could be a waiting room for delivery drivers. This combined food production area has immediate access to the enclosed courtyard and a short undercover walkway to Holly Street that's ideal for serving the home delivery market.

During refurbishment a few years ago we turned much of the building into offices and which remain today. We re-imagined the restaurant into a vertical configuration whereby food could be conveyed efficiently upwards to the dining level and requiring minimum staff. With staffing now not just often the main expense in a food business, but increasingly often the most problematic part, the unusual efficiency of this vertically stacked restaurant design is ideal as a high profitability operation for a small and efficient team. Perhaps husband and wife team?

The restaurant today, although recently refitted as office space would require little to change it back into a restaurant as it retains its period charm with ground and first floor exposed brick chimney breasts, ceiling beams, and the small ground floor entrance lobby with full glass inner door allowing the outer door to be kept open and present a welcome image from the street.

Presently, the property occupies an ideal location for both dine-in and home delivery. Set in the town centre but not landlocked and hard to find in the pedestrian precinct, being at an angle to the road presents a huge opportunity for the full building exterior signing to provide unequalled advertising to the entire Darlington market. There are plans afoot to rework the surrounding area as residential and leaving just a couple of the period properties including Kendrew House as commercial opportunities.

Designed for efficiency and profitability when we re-imagined the building a few years ago into offices and the vertically stacked restaurant, the restaurant got off to a flying start and ranked consistently in the Top 3 Indian restaurants for Darlington on Trip Advisor. Its 5-star hygiene rated kitchen, its location, adjacent huge parking, and internal character all combined to immediately put it on the map in Darlington and attracted a consistently busy trade. Sadly, run by a former junior waiter who underestimated the business and marketing skills and knowledge required, poor management and lack of marketing and attention to bringing customers back resulted in a gradual slide that nevertheless took several years before the restaurant closed. In the face of several new restaurants opening, this was really sad. Even the building's owner, who had spent a lifetime in business here, in Australia and in Asia and who designed the re-imagined restaurant for high profitability, was unable to influence the former waiter into changing to a sensible business strategy.

Successful business is not a matter of luck, it's a matter of careful planning based on experience and facts, and if you're nodding as you read this then we would be interested in talking to you about the highly profitable opportunity represented by this former restaurant. If, on the other hand, you already know how to run a successful restaurant from your experience as a waiter in your family's hospitality business, that a 'chaise lounge' in which you may recline in the restaurant's reception and a colour theme featuring black walls and representative more of a Bombay brothel floats your boat, it may be that this concept has been tried without sparkling success. You get my drift?

Imagine the opportunity for your food business in this prime Darlington location where simple signage will put your business on the map and in front of all those coming to other local restaurants. It's this prime location that supported Viraj Restaurant and established it, but it will be up to you to build the connection to your customers that brings them back and builds on their trade. As they say about building a business, to ignore your customers and not actively turn them into repeat customers is like trying to fill a bath with hot water but leaving the plug out - you may do it, but the cost will be uneconomic.

If you're still nodding, and you have a business plan that includes a monthly £1,800 rent and a firm plan to capitalise on this prime location, please get in touch for an initial chat.

David







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