Sushi tycoon buys his own Yo! Island*
* Well you can’t blame the Yo! Sushi founder changing its name from . . . Cockroach Cay!
A BRITISH entrepreneur who made his fortune in raw fish has joined Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio and Celine Dion – by buying his own island.
Simon Woodroffe, founder of restaurant chain Yo! Sushi, has set up a new business, Yo! Island, and bought a 70-acre slice of paradise in the Bahamas.
The Mail on Sunday has learned that 66-year-old Mr Woodroffe is now the proud owner of Cockroach Cay – which was hastily renamed Wild Berry Cay by estate agents when they started marketing the site to potential buyers.
Mr Woodroffe wants to develop t he uninhabited i sl and i nto a holiday destination and make it more affordable to visit a private Bahamian resort, until now a privilege available only to the world’s super-rich.
Bahamian government documents show that Mr Woodroffe spent £2 million on the island, which is just a mile long and half a mile wide. He bought it from Bahamian development firm TH-PY.
Mr Woodroffe, who aspires to emulate the success of billionaire tycoon Sir Richard Branson, says the cay was being offered for twice the price, but he managed to land it for just $2.5 million because ‘on an impulse’ he said he could pay in cash the next day.
Explaining the island’ s two names, Mr Woodroffe said: ‘Wild Berry is a name the estate agents made up – it has always been Cockroach and no one knows why. Certainly no cockroaches there.’
Mr Woodroffe, a former star of TV’s Dragons’ Den, founded Yo! Sushi in London in 1997 shortly after getting divorced from his wife, Clare. He sold off his controlling stake for a reported £10 million in 2003 and offloaded the remainder of his shares five years later, cementing his status as a multi-millionaire.
In addition to Yo! Sushi’s 70 restaurants across the country, Mr Woodroffe also founded Yotel, an international luxury hotel chain with miniature rooms to make them more affordable.
In more recent years, he has been building up Yo! Home, which specialises in interior designs to maximise the use of small apartments, such as sunken living rooms and bedrooms perched on platforms.
Mr Woodroffe lives on a houseboat in Chelsea with his girlfriend, Mairenui de Font-Reaulx, whom he met five years ago in Tahiti.
He said t hat having bought Cockroach Cay, the couple plan to ‘ hang in the Bahamas’ with his sailing boat for now and will develop the island into a ‘commercial enterprise in time’ under the Yo! Island brand.
‘I’ll be able to say, “You’ve eaten in Yo! Sushi, you’ve slept in Yotel, you live in Yo! Home – now come and visit us in our island in the Bahamas,’ he said.
‘What I’ve always said is that the brand value of Yo! is, first of all, it reinvents things and, secondly, it gives to everybody what very rich people have. I want to do an island which is not for everybody obviously, but for more people than just the very rich.’
He will be assisted in his new project by his daughter Charlotte, a 29-year-old interior designer.
Mr Woodroffe has previously said he wants to follow in the footsteps of Sir Richard, whose Virgin brand encompasses the leisure, travel, finance and technology sectors.
Branson bought 74-acre Necker Island – part of the British Virgin Islands – in the 1970s for just
‘The Bahamas for more than just the very rich’
$ 180,000. Mr Woodroffe said he had been looking to buy his own island for some time before stumbling upon Cockroach Cay.
He first visited the Bahamas after his boat was destroyed by Hurricane Irma last year while he was sailing across the Atlantic.
While hi s vessel was being repaired in the British Virgin Islands, the entrepreneur quickly became enchanted. He said: ‘A really good sailing friend of mine said I could spend the rest of my life sailing in the Bahamas and never get to the same island twice. So I thought, I’m not going to go across oceans any more – which is a very stressful thing to do, because I sail my own boat – we’re just going to hang in the Bahamas.’
There are more than 700 islands and cays there, a number of which are privately owned.
Mr Woodroffe joins a star-studded cast who own islands in the area. Actor Johnny Depp bought a 45-acre Bahamian island in 2004 after reportedly falling in love with the area while filming Pirates Of The Caribbean. US magician David Copperfield was reputed to have spent $50 million on a private island with five homes on it in 2006. His list of famous guests is said to include Oprah Winfrey and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
And pop star Shakira and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd reportedly spent $16 million on Bonds Cay in the Bahamas to turn it into a luxury resort in 2011.