The company operated a casual dining restaurant business from five sites in London and Birmingham, alongside a wholesale and grocery offering. It had a turnover of circa £4m and employed around 53 staff, but had experienced an extended period of losses which ultimately resulted in cash flow difficulties.

A team from KPMG was appointed to run an early options process in December 2017, which resulted in the trade and certain assets of the wholesale and grocery part of the business being sold to Beat Foods Ltd by the joint administrators. The purchaser has taken on three employees via TUPE, thus preserving their jobs.

However, with insufficient funds available to trade the rest of the business, the joint administrators closed all five restaurant outlets immediately upon appointment, resulting in some 50 redundancies.

Rob Croxen, partner at KPMG and joint administrator, said: ‘These are tough times for companies in the casual dining sector as operators continue to contend with rising input costs, fragile consumer confidence and the impact of the living wage.

‘Our priority now as administrators is to work with those employees being made redundant whilst realising the company’s remaining assets.’

Report by Pat Sweet