Brewers Fayre restaurants across the UK will close their doors for good in early September after owner Whitbread confirmed final trading days for all its branded eateries amid a major overhaul.
The 89-strong Brewers Fayre chain will shut after dinner service on September 7 as part of Whitbread’s previously-announced move to ditch all its separately-branded restaurants, impacting around 200 sites in total.
Whitbread has also confirmed the closure date for all its other restaurant brands, with 106 Beefeater sites set to shut on September 10 and other brands such as Bar + Block, Table Table and Cookhouse + Pub closing on September 3.
The decision was revealed in April as Whitbread announced plans to cut around 3,800 jobs in the UK and Ireland under a new five-year strategy to make £250 million in cost savings.
The group is replacing the chains with restaurants inside Premier Inn hotels, which it said was more efficient and “highly popular with hotel guests”.
It is still planning to increase the number of hotel rooms it has open to 96,000 by the 2031 financial year, from the current of approximately 86,600.
In April, Whitbread chief executive Dominic Paul said: “We always challenge ourselves to improve and, in light of significant cost increases in the form of business rates and national insurance, as well as the implied market discount to our inherent value, we’ve looked hard at the options open to us to maximise value creation over the medium and long-term.”
“This plan will transform Whitbread into a higher-margin, higher-returning pure-play hotel business,” he added at the time.
