The ‘Market Place’ of Ideas: Reinventing the dining experience

“I think the way the industry is going and where people see casual dining, is completely changing. The fact is now you can go out with a group of friends, and all have the same experience of being somewhere but all have a completely different food and drink experience. I think the difference is, people just want to go out and just eat what they want to eat,” says Blake Henderson, managing director of Market Place London.

Market Place is a street food dining concept offering multiple vendors under one roof. The company has recently opened its fourth site in Harrow to add to its three existing sites in Hounslow, Vauxhall and Peckham, although the Peckham site is currently closed for refurbishment.

The company is trying to target places where the food and beverage offering is lacking, and this is a criteria that fits Harrow. The team at Market Place believe that this, as well as the company’s unique offerings, are what set them apart from traditional restaurants.

“I think we’ve seen that on high streets they are often missing a food and beverage element. There’s a lot of retailers around, but there’s not a lot of investment in the food and beverage scene.

“I think Harrow is really underdeveloped on the food and drink side. You’ve got a lot of people in a great community but just undeveloped. There is only a Pizza Express, a Prezzo and two Nando’s so there’s not a lot of independence,” Henderson says.

Setting up a concept like Market Place offers its own challenges compared with setting up a traditional restaurant. Not only does having multiple vendors complicate things, the company is setting up sites in places that are not equipped for food vending.

“It’s just the logistics of getting everything from WiFi to water to electricity. What we’re often doing is not going into ex-restaurants or ex-bars. Our Harrow site was a Mothercare unit previously so we’re going into a traditional retail site to turn it into food and beverage. In a traditional restaurant, you’ve got one kitchen, one layout, we’ve got eight to twelve all requiring different needs and different styles of cooking, different extraction,” explains Henderson.

The vendors

While the Market Place concept presents challenges compared with a traditional restaurant it also offers unique benefits. By having the ability to attract multiple vendors it gives Market Place the ability to offer already established food operators to draw people as well as connect to the local community.

“Having some recognised names really helps. When we look at all the markets, we get some big names like Bread Ahead from Borough Market and Sides and Sidemen and that can help us with a PR push,” states Henderson.

With the Harrow site, Sides from the Sidemen is the big PR draw aiming to get people through the door. The deal with the Youtube collective Sidemen, who have over 18 million subscribers, was one sought out by the team at Market Place.

“That was a pure scouting deal. One of the guys dropped a DM to the Sidemen and seeing if they were interested. We had 20 meetings with the team in Dubai and went back and forth with them. We all know that social media is such a big part of what we actually do so bringing in the Sidemen made sense. Good food and good drink is one big part of it but having a big social media presence is the second part,” says Henderson.

It’s not just the big name vendors that Market Place focuses on. The company has put lots of effort into incorporating the local community in its sites, especially in Harrow where the local community will be the main customers.

“Essentially, it’s different targets. We weren’t going after the big London names, we wanted to go out to the community vendors and we are doing a lot of community outreach. It’s very different from working in London where you can kind of be in every newspaper, whereas in Harrow we have all the heritage and we are working with the council,” Henderson added.

Overall, Market Place is just getting started. The concept is a strong one and the company has had marked success in its three current sites as well as a strong opening month in Harrow. The company is now looking to expand the brand across the country, using its experience of setting up in different markets to help this.

“We’ve got massive expansion plans. We’ve just closed down Peckham to relaunch it. We have another three to four opening within the next 12 months. Within the next five years the aim for us is 30 sites in all the UK. We’ve got one opportunity in Liverpool, hopefully, in the next 12 to 18 months.

“We’re looking in Cardiff or Newcastle and we’re looking countrywide. There’s still those opportunities on those high streets and their central locations, which are undeveloped and unattached. I think Harrow shows we are willing to take risks. I think the community part of Harrow has done so well, which shows that it doesn’t all need to be central London,” Henderson concludes.