Season 2 • Episode 7

Most multi-brand hospitality groups end up as a head office running several businesses that happen to share a name on a group balance sheet. The pressure to standardise the moment you scale is enormous: consolidate procurement, replicate the look and feel, run one operating rhythm across the estate. And most of the time, that pressure wins.

Harts Group is one of the few operators who has genuinely held the line. Since 2003, the family-run business has built a portfolio of eight distinct brands (Barrafina, El Pastor, Quo Vadis, Parrillan, Bar Daskal, Drops, El Ciete and, this year celebrating its 100th anniversary, Quo Vadis) with 16 London sites and a first international opening in Dubai. Abu Dhabi is next, then Hong Kong and Bangkok. The US is in early scoping.

Sam Hart is the CEO. In this conversation with Conor Sheridan, he walks through the deliberate architecture underneath the group's growth. The group centralises finance, HR, estates, comms and a single best-in-class tech stack that the business just spent two years rebuilding. Each brand keeps its own culinary identity, sequence of service, sourcing relationships, and management line. Two MDs run the Spanish and Mexican sides of the group, each with lived experience of the cuisine. Chef proprietor Jeremy Lee runs Quo Vadis as a business partner.

The conversation also gets into the operational reality behind the growth. The internal AI task force building custom tools (including an AI-powered reservation phone line built by the head of sales). The Yum Pingo dish-level customer data that drives menu decisions at a granularity most groups never touch. The wage cost crisis that has taken Harts from 570 staff to 470 as UK minimum wage has risen 38% since 2022, and how customer satisfaction has actually improved through the process. The structural advantages of being privately owned in a sector where longer time horizons compound into brand quality. And the lived-experience test Sam applies to every new brand the group opens.

If you're running a multi-brand operator, thinking about launching a second concept, or trying to figure out how to scale without flattening the identity of what you have built, this is an hour well spent.