Revenge of Little Chef as Loungers sells motorway nostalgia

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 and, quite possibly, some unpleasant toilets.

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 ubiquitous and 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 175 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 very 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 young 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. “There’s no sense of anyone offering much of an experience.”

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 more than 400 restaurants across the UK at its peak in the nineties, 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 and other dishes also failed to impress.

By 2006 the chain was on the verge of collapse, reportedly losing some £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. A spokesman for Little Chef was quoted as saying the venture “seemed like a good idea at the time” but that “[Blumenthal] took everything away from its core”.

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 very 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.”

Ultimately what was left of Little Chef was bought by billionaire petrol station kingpins Mohsin and Zuber Issa, who would eventually go on to buy Asda in a £6.8bn deal in 2020. The Issas turned many of the remaining sites into Starbucks, KFC and Gregg’s outlets, and, by 2018, Little Chef was little more than a memory.

Reilley says he thought about buying the remnants of Little Chef before the Issas pounced. "When the end of what was left of [Little Chef] was being sold I suggested to our private equity partner at the time that we should buy what was left of it to which he laughed. And I said 'I'm not joking'."

Despite his enduring fondness for the defunct chain, Alex Reilley stresses Loungers is “not looking to copy Little Chef or re-launch 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 technological flourishes such as electric vehicle charging. Where possible, all sites will have solar panels.

"With the growth in electric cars, there's a need for [people to take a longer] stop. They're going to have to."

Brightside will, like Little Chef, sell breakfast, and has created its own Brightside Breakfast.

But it will also sell pizzas and burgers, and make use of far higher quality ingredients. “Obviously the kind of dishes we’ll be serving will be similar… but what people expect from any restaurant in terms of quality of food and ingredients has massively moved on. It will be nothing like Little Chef from a quality of food perspective."

Loungers has acquired 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. "If I was optimistically gazing into the future I would say we would be comfortably in double digit figures in the next three or four years," says Reilley.

Loungers isn’t the only business trying to give roadside dining a jolt of excitement across the UK. A small but steadily growing crop of operators have big plans to channel the spirit of Little Chef – sparking hopes of a fully blown roadside dining revival.

Posh hotel brand Soho House, for instance, launched its own take on 1950s US roadside dining, Mollie’s, in 2019. Mollie’s plans to open 100 sites over the next ten years.

Upmarket players have also entered the fray, like Gloucester Services, a strikingly modern, family-owned service station with a huge farm shop selling local produce and an upmarket restaurant, and Mainsgill Farmshop, off the A66 near Richmond, which runs a popular tea room and a posh homeware shop.

Stenning says the omens are good. “These are incredible destinations that are just about great food and drink in a nice environment and so different from what our vision of a motorway service station is, which is all a bit crappy.”