It was not the first kaiten belt restaurant in the UK, that honour went to City favourite Moshi Moshi, which opened in London’s Liverpool Street in 1994, but it was certainly the most eccentric. The first YO! restaurant opened under its former name YO! Sushi in London’s Soho back in 1997, and was the brainchild of entrepreneur Simon Woodroffe – one of the original stars of the BBC’s Dragon’s Den. Because we’re not tied to one format anymore, we’re more likely to succeed.” Plenty of fish “The pressure we’re under as a sector forces us to sit up and take notice. Those who haven’t have failed. “Everybody has to change,” shrugs Hodgson, when questioned about the restaurant group’s swerve into retail. This was followed by the acquisition of Waitrose sushi supplier Taiko Foods in 2018, and a merger with US kiosk giant Snowfox (more than 700 sushi counters across 50 states) earlier this year. And YO!’s got no plans to stop there. In 2017 YO! bought North America’s Bento Sushi – which provides grab-and-go sushi in more than 900 retail locations – for £59.2m. The company now operates 71 UK restaurants and another 18 under franchise in countries including France, Norway, Australia and the UAE, serving more than seven million people a year. While other longstanding high street restaurant brands have struggled to survive, YO! has evolved from gimmicky restaurant group to one of the largest Japanese food businesses outside Japan. This is just one of the ways Hodgson has sought to reposition YO! since he joined the business in 2017 amid a tough trading period for casual dining. The brightly coloured plates that typically revolve around YO! restaurants have been ditched in favour of muted earthenware crockery, and arrive via a human waitress rather than a mechanical loop. We’re sat down at the first YO! Kitchen site in the Westfield London shopping centre, a new concept for the brand, which has seen its famous sushi conveyor belt stripped out in favour of family-friendly booths and tables. “But one bad plate of food can stop a customer coming back. “We describe our food as ‘Japanese-ish’, we’re not wedded to one format,” he explains. The group CEO is showing off some of his top items on the new menu and has ordered enough food to cover the entire table, including Korean fried chicken and black cod.
Richard Hodgson’s favourite dish at YO! isn’t even sushi.
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