Natasha Sideris, owner of restaurant chain tashas, continues to expand the business as it marks a year in London.
Tashas Group intends to grow its presence in the city and elsewhere and is planning to open at least five new restaurants this year, in Cape Town, Joburg, Sharjah, Riyadh and Bahrain, under various brands. These include tashas, Le Parc by tashas and Avli by tashas. By the end of the year there will be 24 tashas restaurants.
When you enter tashas in Battersea, London, it feels as if it could be in Joburg, at the Melrose Arch branch or even at the first tashas in Atholl Square, where it all started for the group.
A woman in her 20s, speaking in a strong South African accent, sits at a table in the Battersea eatery. The waitress tells us she has never met as many South Africans in the city as she has since the restaurant opened a year ago.
The brand has reproduced the casual upmarket dining concept it has in South Africa — that of a boutique café with stylish interiors and quality food.
It’s not Sideris’s first foray to new shores. She expanded to the Middle East, using Dubai, where her business is now based, as her platform.
The London menu is not as expansive as those in the South African branches; it’s crisper, with fewer options. But at midday on a Saturday it’s packed, with people clamouring for a seat.
Battersea is far less populated by restaurants than other sought-after areas in London
Tashas in London is on the doorstep of the Battersea power station, which took nearly a decade to be restored and rejuvenated and is now a mixed-use development. The four-chimneyed building is more than a century old. It was once a symbol of industrial London, but after its decommissioning and closure in 1983 it fell into disrepair.
It opened in its new guise in 2022, and holds apartments, six floors of offices, a cinema, a boxing gym, cultural venues, shops and a hotel. Since its redevelopment 22-million people have visited it.
The building also has its place in rock history and pop culture; a picture of it featured on a Pink Floyd album. Roger Waters, co-founder of the UK group, lived close by and could see the power station from his window. It was his idea to use it on the group’s Animals album cover.
Battersea is far less populated by restaurants than other sought-after areas in London, and less competitive than, say, Marylebone, Mayfair and Chelsea. This no doubt played a role in Sideris’s decision to first set up shop there. Her formula is to seek out sites close to a city centre and a hub with a residential clientele, where local residents can sit alongside those enjoying a business lunch and, of course, the brunch brigade.
The UK is “extremely busy”, Sideris says, but she underestimated just how tough the UK is in terms of labour. “We had to modify our menu to serve 300 to 500 people a day and on weekends up to 600 to800 people a day in a 100-seater restaurant.”
“Our experience with the Battersea branch has taught us much. We want to partner with someone who’s helluva experienced. We are being offered sites every single day but will hold off until we find the right partner,” she says.
Close by is the largest Zara outlet in the UK, at 4,500m². The clothing store is tech driven and has a self-checkout area. But some things can’t be enabled with technology and there were queues at fitting rooms.
Also nearby is an M&S Food store, which is similar to Woolies in South Africa, and a hotel with an upstairs garden (though it’s more like a pool deck). There’s a skating rink as well as some carousels outside, but it’s the plethora of brands inside that define the shopping centre.
So much for the neighbourhood. As far as the London tashas bestsellers are concerned, it’s prawn pasta, Portuguese steak and cornflake chicken schnitzel. However, you won’t be able to have a meal for anything close to what it costs in South Africa (pumpkin fritters are £12, making it more costly than an entire tashas meal back home).
It’s clearly attuned to the more affluent, but it’s buzzing with happy customers, many of whom no doubt plan to return.
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