Tashas now has more outlets in the Middle East than in South Africa, and will open its first restaurant in London next month.
That restaurant will be based in the Battersea Power Station, which acolytes of rock band Pink Floyd will remember from the cover of the 1977 album Animals.
It’s a defining step for Tashas, the brand that helped redefine South Africa’s casual upmarket dining scene. It was founded by Natasha Sideris, who moved to Dubai in 2014 to expand the business in that region.
This change, you’d have to say, has been a profound success: today there are 17 restaurants in the Middle East, outnumbering South Africa’s 16. Sideris tells the FM she plans to open two more Tashas in South Africa, along with two more in the Middle East and one in Bahrain, which means that by the end of next year, Tashas should have 38 locations.
Her new restaurant is on a corner next to the largest Zara retail outlet in London, and next to the entrance to the old power station. “It’s an iconic building and we’re outside the main entrance. I don’t think you can get any better,” she says.,
The 4,000 square foot site in London has been designed by Sideris and design studio Verhaal, with the interiors featuring South African designers, including Elonah O’ Neil and Bronze Age.
It will be an updated version of the original tashas which opened in Atholl, Joburg, 18 years ago. “I’m a bit superstitious in that way. I wanted to bring my first good luck charm to the UK. In terms of a design aesthetic, there’s nothing like it in London — it’s got that light, bright feeling,” she says.
The menu will be significantly smaller than the one in South Africa, where there are large kitchens and labour doesn’t cost as much. But she plans to “upstyle” dishes for the city: “I take a dish everyone knows, change the plating a little bit [and] make it look a little bit more glam.”
Sideris says from a restaurant perspective, Battersea is less saturated than the rest of London. “The other areas that we would consider include Marylebone, Chelsea, Mayfair and the high streets, where there is a lot more competition,” she says.
Last year, she told the FM that any new sites need to be close to a city centre and a hub with a residential clientele. “We need the housewives, we need the ladies who lunch, we need people who are picking up their kids from school and coming to have a bite to eat. We need the business people as well.”
This frenetic expansion speaks to how well Tashas has done since 2019, when Sideris bought it back from JSE-listed Famous Brands. Since then, she’s launched several brands under the Tashas umbrella including Le Parc, Flamingo Room, Avli and Bungalo34.
Soon Nala, an upmarket quick food concept, will open in Dubai. Sideris hopes to replicate this in other high-volume cities such as London and Paris. “We try not to view it as this huge business and we treat each restaurant as its own and give it the attention it deserves,” she says.
This has attracted interest from people keen to buy into the group, but Sideris isn’t ready to do that again, just yet. “We think it’s a little premature and we’re not ready to sell quite yet — I think there’s a lot to do,” she says.
But if all goes according to plan, Sideris says she’ll be ready to “start talking to people” at the end of 2024. Right now, the focus is on opening six new restaurants next year, bedding down the eight opened this year and consolidating Tashas’ presence.
“We’ve grown quite rapidly,” she says. “The idea is just to get the team together, huddle together, improve process [and] bask a little bit in what we’ve done.”
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