End of the road for 67 Little Chef restaurants

Between 500 and 600 employees of Little Chef may have had their chips as the roadside greasy spoon 'caff' chain announced plans to shut 67 of its sites.

The company said all of the restaurants being closed have been unprofitable for a number of years.

The closures will reduce the size of the Little Chef estate to 94 restaurants, but at least the brand lives on; the continued existence of the familiar site on Britain's A-roads looked in doubt back in 2007 when the company fell into administration, but private equity group RCapital bought up much of the business, saving 3,500 jobs at the time. The latest closures means the workforce will have reduced to 1,500.

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"When we acquired Little Chef four years ago we inherited a number of sites with leases that were uncompetitive," RCapital chairman Graham Sims said.

"Despite very hard work from some very committed colleagues we have been unable to lift the performances of these sites to a level where they are viable," he continued.

The group is pinning its hopes on developing its remaining estate along the lines suggested by celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal when he appeared in a Channel 4 reality TV show in which he attempted a makeover of the fry-up specialist.

"By closing these sites we will be able to focus our attention on protecting over 1,500 of our colleagues' jobs and enabling our investments to be targeted on our remaining strong sites and to develop our brand and our New Concept - towards which the customer response has been very positive," Sims said.

Paul Maloney, senior office of the GMB union, was critical of the decision. Quoted by Press Association he said: "Little Chef has had so many owners over the past decade that GMB members have struggled at times to keep up with who owns what."

"What GMB members have had no difficulty in following is the extent to which the private equity owners asset stripped the organisation with the sale and leaseback of land at unaffordable rents which killed off hundreds of restaurants," Maloney added.

"Little Chef has shared the same history as Southern Cross [the failed care home operator] and the pubcos [pub companies] in being financially engineered to death. Private equity has been a disaster for jobs while enriching the multimillionaire elite," Maloney claimed.