The UK hospitality industry is grappling with an unprecedented crisis. Rising wages, a lack of staff and surging energy bills mean that an estimated 30 per cent of operators are now loss-making, according to UK Hospitality. As restaurants and bars close their doors, it’s estimated that 200 jobs a day are disappearing from the sector. 

But as others retreat, one owner in North London believes that now’s the perfect time to expand and has just opened his second location. 

The Rossella family business 

Luca Meola founded his first restaurant in the North London enclave of Kentish Town, on the borders of Hampstead Heath, when he was just 18. With £30,000 savings and a bit of help from his family, he started Rossella. 

Modelled on a traditional trattoria, Rossella was named after the first Rossella restaurant, opened by the Meola family in Benevento, Italy, in 1960. In 1978, Luca’s father, Luigi, moved to the UK, where he went on to start a trattoria in Seven Kings, Ilford. 

Luca grew up inside the restaurant business. “I remember when Pokémon cards came out. I was about four,” Meola tells City AM. “If I wanted a packet of Pokémon cards, I had to peel a 25-kilo sack of potatoes. That was the kind of deal that I had.”  

When he turned 18 in 2011, Luca set out on his own. He moved into a location on Highgate Road that another Italian restaurant, Pasta Habit, had formerly occupied. When the police raided Pasta Habit in 2010, they confiscated a mammoth 23 kilos of cocaine and a six-figure sum of money. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Luca got a good deal on the rent. 

Eight years after opening in 2020, Rossella used the coronavirus pandemic to expand. The trattoria operated on a takeaway-only basis from the nearby Lady Hamilton pub and a dark kitchen while the restaurant closed its doors and doubled in size. 

“We always wanted the shop next door and we managed to get it,” Luca says. “We were allowed to carry on with construction, and then by the time we’d finished, everything had opened again,” he adds. 

The decision to expand was based on the simple principle of diversification. Indeed, Meola argues that selling food on plates is not enough for hospitality to survive in today’s market. “Opening up and just selling food and not using every angle you can is kind of just like setting yourself up to fail,” he says. 

The restaurant also acts as a retail deli. They sell house-blended chilli oils, estate-bottled olive oils, and balsamic glazes. Even the beverage list protects their margins. The house wine comes directly from the Meola family vineyard in Italy. Their limoncello is batched on the Amalfi Coast using an old family recipe.

Expanding 

Luca refined and built on this model with the new location in Muswell Hill. Designed to complement the Kentish Town location, the new restaurant is developed to stand out. 

“Our business model is based on a community restaurant,” Luca says. “We’re not a pizzeria..We’re a trattoria. We do meat. We do fish. We wanted to be a restaurant where we do the classic Italian dishes and we do them well.” 

And, according to Luca, doing Italian food well means avoiding the takeaway business. “Food doesn’t travel well,” Meola says. “Pizza doesn’t travel well. Pasta doesn’t travel well. If a customer has a bad experience in a takeaway, they’ll then not think about coming to your restaurant.”

What’s more, when the kitchen is focused on serving delivery apps, it can affect in-house customers as well, because “they’re waiting for their food”. That’s bad for everyone, Meola says. “I need people to know me, to see me, to know my staff. I don’t want a load of drivers representing us that don’t know me” he adds. 

So what does it take to operate a successful restaurant business in the current climate? “You need to be really busy all the time,” Luca says, adding, “It’s really hard to be extremely busy all the time.” The other avenue is diversification. “Opening up and just selling food and not using every angle you can is kind of just like setting yourself up to fail,” he says. 

There’s no space in the industry anymore for owners who can’t juggle five jobs at once. “I think it’s very hard for a person who’s starting off in the restaurant industry who doesn’t know anything and just wants to cook good food…or who doesn’t know how to cook, who can’t go into the kitchen. Those kinds of people just can’t run a restaurant anymore,” he notes.

Rosella’s growth is a positive business story in what’s a dark time for hospitality and it shows what can be done with a unique audience, hard work, diversification and a focus on quality.