The spirit of Little Chef lives on as a new era of roadside dining is born
Bar group Loungers is to revamp UK service stations with modernised eateries, writes
Pull into a service station today, and you’ll likely be greeted by the same fast-food brands that litter the nation’s high streets. But it wasn’t always this way. Motorway stops used to be dominated by one brand: Little Chef.
With its Olympic breakfasts and much-loved mascot, Little Chef was, at its peak, a reassuring staple of British road travel. That is until it fell into ruin, battered by changing tastes and failed attempts to reimagine its food.
It may be long gone, but Little Chef still holds a special place in the heart of Alex Reilley, the co-founder of restaurant and bar group Loungers, which operates 75 Lounges and 35 Cosy Club venues across the UK.
Reilley is hoping to bring proper roadside dining back from the dead, channelling the spirit of Little Chef with a new group of eateries called Brightside. Billed as a modern take on the roadside diner, Brightside promises to bring “proper hospitality back to roadside dining” with a nod to “childhood road trips of days gone by”, but offering a wider range of dishes made with higher quality ingredients.
Reilley has never given up on the roadside diner despite watching Little Chef decay. “I remember fondly the sense of excitement and the thrill of it being something that made a long car journey bearable”, he says, crediting it with sparking an early interest in hospitality when he was a boy.
He claims service stations today are “a bit like going into a shopping centre before we put restaurants in them”.
“It’s a food court full of brands not necessarily serving the healthiest of foods – it’s purely functional,” he says.
The original Little Chef was founded in 1958 by caravan manufacturer Sam Alper and catering businessman Peter Merchant, who styled the business on roadside diners in the US. The first Little Chef restaurant, near Reading, had just 11 seats. It went on to become a phenomenal success, operating 400 restaurants across the UK at its peak in the 1990s, offering classic dishes such as the massive Olympic Breakfast and much-feted Jubilee Pancakes.
But after the turn of the millennium, its fortunes took a swing for the worse, and it was forced to steadily close swathes of underperforming sites.
A rebrand of the “Fat Charlie” mascot as a slimmer chef was dropped after thousands of customers complained. Attempts to make its menu healthier with the introduction of salads also failed to impress. By 2006 the chain was on the verge of collapse, reportedly losing £3m a year and buckling under the weight of rents across its estate. Perhaps its most famous attempt to reinvent itself came in 2007 after it was bought by turnaround specialists Rcapital, when Little Chef enlisted top chef Heston Blumenthal to revamp its offer for a TV documentary called Big Chef Takes on Little Chef. The move amassed publicity but Blumenthal’s haute cuisine was never accepted by Little Chef ’s customers and he was ousted in 2013. Over the years that followed “the whole estate became horrifically underinvested. The restaurants became tired. The food didn’t evolve or innovate,” says Reilley. “It was sad.”
Put simply, says hospitality expert Simon Stenning, it was “death by a thousand cuts”. “Little Chef failed because it couldn’t keep pace with the modern world of fast food and coffee shops. The world moved on.”
What was left of Little Chef was bought by billionaire petrol station kingpins Mohsin and Zuber Issa, who would go on to buy Asda in a £6.8bn deal in 2020. The Issas turned many of the sites into Starbucks, KFC and Gregg’s outlets, and, by 2018, Little Chef was little more than a memory.
Despite his enduring fondness for the defunct chain, Alex Reilley stresses Loungers is “not looking to copy Little Chef or relaunch it” and that Brightside will be “a 21st-century reimagining of what people would like to have on the side of the road”, complete with modern flourishes such as electric vehicle charging. However, Brightside will, like Little Chef, sell breakfast. It will also sell pizzas and burgers, and make use of far higher quality ingredients. “It will be nothing like Little Chef from a quality of food perspective.” Loungers has four sites already, with the first on the A38 south of Exeter set to open in February 2023. It plans to grow that number quickly.
Loungers isn’t the only business trying to re-energise roadside dining. A small but steadily growing crop of operators have big plans to channel the spirit of Little Chef – sparking hopes of a roadside dining revival.
Posh hotel brand Soho House, for instance, launched its own take on 1950s US roadside dining, Mollie’s, in 2019. It plans to open 100 sites over the next 10 years. Upmarket players have also entered the fray, like Gloucester Services, a family owned service station with a restaurant, and also Mainsgill Farmshop, off the A66 near Richmond, which has a tea room and posh homeware shop. Stenning says the omens are good. “These so different from what our vision of a motorway service station is.”