Category: Restaurant

Can an app save the high street?

Ian C Jones CEO of LoLo Rewards thinks it can

LoLo stands for Local Loyalty and is the brainchild of an itinerant Australian now living in Kennington. Jones has worked all his life with small and medium sized businesses and thinks he’s found a way for individual shops and services to take on the might of the giant online retailers. It’s based on loyalty discount tokens and is an app that sits on your phone.

This is how it works: Download the LoLo app on to your mobile and you are immediately given twenty loyalty tokens. One token equals one pound. Via the app you now search for a shop or service you are interested in and for the sake of argument find a restaurant that you’d always meant to try. You take your partner out for dinner and at the end of the meal get a bill for £100. On that bill is a QR code. You open your LoLo app, zap the QR code then through the magic of modern technology the telephone talks to the card reader. You decide to use all your twenty tokens, so your bill now comes to £80 with you enjoying a 20% discount. You leave and as you’re walking down the street your phone beeps and you find the restaurant has gifted you £16 new tokens. (As part of the agreement with LoLo the minimum they can give is 5% in tokens however some will accept up to 50%). The restaurant will then likely ask you to write a review of your meal for which they agree to give you another five tokens. So, you started out with 20, spent those and got a 20 % discount and now have a further 21 tokens on your app to spend at the restaurant or with any of the other retailers who are part of LoLo.

Jones adds: “Unlike a frequent flier programme where you’ll use all your points at one go, ours you’ll never run out. Ours only accumulate, you can transfer them to friends and family, but every time you spend them you end up getting back at least 10% more than you consumed. That’s what’s unique about it.”

The App also tells you how many tokens you currently hold and how much cash you’ve saved by supporting local businesses.

When a business signs up with LoLo they are given a whole stack of QR codes that are unique to their business. These are printed on cards for staff to hand out to their customers.

As Jones says: “If I had a coffee shop, I’d be standing at the door handing out the cards to everybody coming in saying download the app.”

He makes the point that if a retailer gives you a discount then that money disappears into the wider world, but with a token that money stays local.

But how do LoLo make money out of this? It’s very simple they harvest 3% of any transaction that goes through a card reader. So, going back to our notional restaurant LoLo receive 3% of the £80 spent by the customer.

Jones also sees the possibility of businesses, perhaps a florist, restaurant and dry cleaner, working together to cross promote their products to increase footfall and ultimately sales.

Jones’ mantra is first shop locally, then regionally, then nationally and if all else fails go to Amazon. He has high ambitions: “We want to make (LoLo) operate on every small business in the UK. Individually no small business can compete with the strength of online, but collectively they can. They’ve got some power so what we’ve done is given them a platform to be stronger.”

Amazon, Deliveroo, Uber Eats; they’re all disrupters and are playing havoc with our high streets. Can a humble app turn the tide on the big boys? Only time will tell, but why not sign up and be part of a revolution, there are tokens waiting for you.

Click here if you want to be part of this.

Cable Café: Back on track

Following my blog about poor service being dished out at Cable Café on Brixton Road I received a response from the owner Craig O’Dwyer.

‘A friend passed me your article about our coffee / service. I would like to apologize for that day, we were all a bit grumpy having worked non-stop to pass a health and safety inspection just minutes before you passed by. I’ll speak with staff and give them a clip round the ears, they should have behaved better. I’m glad you liked the coffee.’

Apology accepted and I did like the coffee and will continue to buy it. A health and safety inspection must be pretty gruelling.

I’m passionate about supporting local businesses but if they fall short you should let them know. If you just shrug your shoulders and never go back everyone loses. But if your criticism is valid and they listen and improve then everyone wins.

Go to the Cable Café, you may well see me there.

Growth on the high street

Debenhams just announced they’ll be closing 22 stores next year putting more than a thousand jobs at risk. House of Fraser survives on a wing and a prayer and HMV has already closed a plethora of their shops. The cold hand of digital retail is slowly strangling the high street.

M&S, long the bell-weather of UK retail, are not having an easy time, though buying Ocado and partnering with British Airways to supply food on their flights looks to be a canny move.

I went to Moscow in 1991 just before the big switch from communism to capitalism got underway and I remember what struck me most was the complete absence of shops. Their showpiece was the dreary GUM department store on Red Square where if you queued long enough you might get a loaf of bread. Russia has long since changed from communism to turbo-capitalism, but I’ve always had a soft spot for shops and think of them as the most benign form of capitalism.

Yards of newspaper space is now taken up with hand-wringing articles on the future of the high street. Should Amazon be taxed more aggressively? Should bricks and mortar stores stay open at more convenient times? Should business rates be cut? These pieces usually feature a comment from the retail guru Mary Portas, but however well-meaning these efforts, the high street seems to be dying on its feet with little sign of a vision that could turn it around.

Whatever the answer is I don’t have it, but there is an interesting experiment going on in our neighbourhood. I’d hardly call our little row of shops a high street as there are in total just eleven stores. We have the usual betting shop, taxi service, optician and estate agent, but there are three shops together that might just point to a direction of travel.

Around a year ago a new restaurant opened up called Oval 24, you can see this blog’s review here, it’s a fine eating establishment which has garnered excellent reviews. To the right of the restaurant the shop has been turned into a flat and is now no longer retail space, but living accommodation.

But it’s the shop next door where things get interesting. Oval 24 has taken the space and uses it to grow vegetables for their kitchen. Just recently they erected huge tubs filled with lettuces and carrots out front of the shop. I saw these going up and was worried they’d be vandalised; this hasn’t happened. Inside the shop other vegetables are being grown using horticultural full-spectrum LED lights.

There’s long been talk of the high street offering experiences rather than retail opportunities, but I never thought shops could become urban kitchen gardens. Perhaps it’s this kind of innovation we need to counter the dreaded empty spaces, the blackened teeth of the high street, and turn it back into in a vibrant living environment.

Update: Just took the dog out and went past the street I’ve been talking about only to discover that what was once a laundrette will soon be a gym offering personal training, which kind of reinforces the point I’ve been trying to make. Good luck Damo.

Oslo Court Restaurant

I love the crazy places of London. The places that seem improbable but exist anyway. How come a flying saucer with mushrooms in the ceiling landed in Knightsbridge was named Albert Hall and became one of our favourite concert venues?

Why are men currently throwing themselves into the icy grip of Hampstead Men’s Pond when they could be tucked up at home with a hot drink and a good book? Who knows but I’m glad they do even though I’m going nowhere near the place until the Spring.

I want to introduce you to another crazy place that I’d never heard of until friends took me there last Friday. It’s the Oslo Court Restaurant in St John’ Wood.

Its location is, to say the least, unusual. Walk down Prince Albert Road and turn into Charlbert Street and you’re met with a handsome art deco apartment block. Built in 1937 it boasts 125 one-bedroom flats many with balconies on to the park. Out front there’s a small sign that gives a clue that it also boasts a restaurant. Apparently in days gone by posh blocks often had restaurants but that fashion has disappeared.

Walking into reception a smartly dressed attendant directs you through a small unmarked door and suddenly you are in the pinkest restaurant in the world. It’s like falling into flock of flamingos and is something of a psychedelic shock as you reel towards your table. You are at a pink festival on Pink Day in Pinkland.

The owner, Tony Sanchez, has been running the joint for more than 35 years. The place definitely has a period feel. The single rose in the silver vases, the rich fabrics, the melba toast with vegetable croutons creates a time-machine that catapults you back to the 70s. There is nothing minimalist about Oslo Court. There’s no steel and glass here; it’s sumptuous.

Now describing a restaurant as having a 70s vibe will be about as welcome to the management as an outbreak of norovirus. Food in 70’s London was terrible, I know I lived through it, but I was poor at the time and I guess places like this must have existed for those with money.

Let’s get to the food. I started looking at the menu which as you’ll see has Dover Sole, Crab and Prawn Salad, Duck and Chicken Liver Pate, Salmon with Hollandaise sauce and sundry other 70’s delights though not (Tut Tut) Black Forest Gateaux or Prawn Cocktails. Suddenly a waiter arrived bearing news of at least twenty specials. I love a special.

I opted for six oysters to start, served with an excellent sauce of Balsamic vinegar and garlic, then Beef Wellington (perfectly cooked and this is not an easy dish to get right) and for afters Lemon Meringue Pie with a side order of raspberries and vanilla ice cream. To finish up we had Petits Fours and coffee. A moment ago I described the atmosphere as sumptuous; the same goes for the portions. I then ordered a wheelbarrow to get me out of the place.

In the seventies, in between leaving school and going to University, I worked in a restaurant that boasted silver service. This is when the waiter serves your vegetables from a silver salver grasping the spuds and cauli between a spoon and fork and placing it effortlessly on your plate. Frankly I found it tricky and carrots typically ended up in the lap of some unsuspecting patron.

Silver service is now about as rare as a dodo, but not at Oslo Court where the waiters are dishing out the veg left and right while dressed in natty bow ties and dinner jackets.

This is a destination restaurant and if your destination factors in power cuts, a 3-day week, Ted Heath as PM it’s the place for you. The food is generally excellent but it’s not cheap; lunch comes in at £36 and Dinner £47. My only quibble was the vegetables were overcooked, but hey that’s the way we liked them 40 years ago.

Reservations: 020 7722 8795

Chalbert Street, NW8 7EN