Most multi-site operators wouldn't sign the timeline Hawksmoor signed for St Pancras. Contracts in September. Doors open in December. Peak Christmas trading. Around 90 hires. Training compressed from two weeks to seven days. Internal-only GM and head chef, pulled out of the highest-volume sites in the existing London estate at the busiest moment of the year.
Louisa Richards is the Restaurant Director who ran it. Nearly 13 years at Hawksmoor, opener of Manchester and Edinburgh, the GM who held Air Street together through Covid, and now responsible for an eight-site London estate doing thousands of covers a week.
In this conversation with Conor Sheridan, Louisa walks through the operational reality of compressing a four-month opening into eight weeks: why the head chef and GM had to be internal hires, the tronc-matched pay decision that made the internal moves fair, where the seven-day training plan had to be ruthless, the cover-per-quarter-hour discipline that protected CSI in the soft launch, and the Martini bar that took everyone by surprise (more sold in one night than across the other seven London sites combined).
She's also clear about what the eight-week timeline cost. Tears. Attrition. "Taking a punt" on personality hires. Home sites destabilised at peak trading. It worked because Hawksmoor has more than 13 years of tenured leadership in place, including a CEO and COO from day one. Louisa's frank that it isn't a model that scales indefinitely, and the conversation moves into the bigger question Hawksmoor is sitting with as it turns 20 this year: how do you scale a long-tenured, people-led culture without flattening what makes it special? Her answers cover framework, systemising what's currently in 12 GMs' heads, the traffic-light review system she's rolling out across four impact tiers, and a leadership philosophy that prizes calm over heroics.
If you're running a multi-site business and feeling the gap between informal-and-talented and systemised-and-scalable, this is the episode.
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