It would be a rare thing to find someone nowadays that hasn’t eaten at a Wagamama restaurant. If they haven’t eaten there, they know the name well and are no doubt within a stones throw of at least two Wagamama locations… And yet at a mere 30 or so years old this asian fast food dining idea was new, novel, and like nothing else that 1992 London had seen. London then was full to the brim with heavy overly formal dining and Macdonalds. Not much in between.
It was – says the man behind the very start, an age of innocence. He had no idea if the community seating and white minimalist style of eating noodles would be embraced by the British public, and certainly not in the way it has.
So who is he?
Alan Yau was born in Hong Kong in 1962.
His father who was a tailor by trade, emigrated to Britain in 1965 to work in the Chinese restaurant trade. Yau’s mother emigrated three years later, leaving him and his two siblings with their grandparents. Then at the age of 12, Yau joined his parents in the market town of King’s Lynn, Norfolk. In fact, it was his Norfolk school teacher who replaced his Chinese name; Yau Tak Wai, with Alan – which firmly stuck.
His parents opened a takeaway restaurant in Wisbech and its there he began evenings and weekend work in the food business. He supposedly hated it and left to study philosophy and politics at City, University of London.
But in 1988 he opened a small Chinese takeaway in Peterborough, with his father, made his £50,000 investment back within the year, and decided an entrepreneurial life as a restauranteur was more his thing.
Yau managed to get the ex-chairman of KFC on board as a consultant when starting out, and was quickly told by him to go and work for three months in a KFC and lean how fast food works. He then instructed Yau to work in a huge busy Mcdonald’s.
It was there Yau says he grasped the very concept of fast food success; take one product – for Mcdonald’s it was the burger the bun and the toppings- and run with it in a variety of ways. Wagamama took the noodle, the soup and the toppings and ran with that.
That concept helped him build one of the UK’s biggest Asian casual restaurant chains.
He sold the company to a venture capitalist five years later and it has gone from strength to strength, with more than 150 locations across Britain and overseas.
British catering group The Restaurant Group (TRG) later bought the Japanese-inspired formula, back in 2018, in a deal that valued the business at a whopping £559m.
TRG added it to their collective of Pizza Express, Nando’s, Chiquito, and Frankie & Benny’s. TGR also owns Brunning and Price pubs, American food chain Coast to Coast and the steak and burger brand Firejacks.
The company owns around 410 restaurants but plans to reduce its estate by 30% in the next year – TRG keen to announce this was the failing Frankie & Benny’s and Chiquito sites, not Wagamama.
Alan Yau hasn’t stopped of course. His massive restaurant successes include upmarket Chinese restaurant group Hakkasan – which won a Michelin star in 2003 – casual Thai diner chain Bubasa Eathai, Yamabahce, and Chinese entertainment restaurant Park Chinois.
Yau has pioneered everything from a Turkish pizza joint, a Milanese-style bakery in Soho and a Chinese gastropub -he opened ‘Duck & Rice’, replacing the Endurance pub on Berwick Street London, with a Chinese menu serving crispy duck and spring rolls alongside cask ales. A pub serving chop suey, of course.
Does he mind the missing out on the millions Wagamama sold for in 2018? He says not. He does say he sometimes still feels a little remorseful about the original sale – “It was like seeing your baby brought up by strangers with different values”
In April 2019, The Asian Awards honoured Alan for his culinary work with the “Outstanding Achievement in the Arts” award.
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