At 6pm at Gwen, the door is unlocked and the curtain is pulled back to reveal one of the smallest fine dining restaurants in the UK. Sister restaurant to Gareth Ward’s two-Michelin-starred Ynyshir, Gwen is so small it doesn’t have to pay business rates serving a maximum of eight guests each evening.
The Machynlleth micro restaurant is led by Peter Sanchez-Iglesias, who made his name at Michelin-starred Bristol restaurants Casamia and Paco Tapas. Gwen isn’t quite a culinary one-man show, but it’s not far off: Sanchez-Iglesias is supported by just two junior members of staff, one in the kitchen and one front of house, although in such a tiny space the distinction between serving and cooking is blurred.
Originally launched by Ward and his wife Amelia Eiriksson as a wine bar in 2023, Gwen now serves a 20-course tasting menu priced at £216 per person. The space may be small, but the culinary ambition is considerable. For Sanchez-Iglesias, who closed his final Bristol restaurant, Paco Tapas, last year, the project marks a return to the stove and a chance to strip things back and concentrate on the thing he loves to do the most: cooking.
Gwen is one of several micro restaurants exploring how small a high-end operation can become. Other practitioners of this new genre include 12-cover Brighton venture The Set and recently launched Birmingham restaurant Sǣl, which, like Gwen, has just eight covers (Sǣl is not to be confused with Jason Atherton’s now closed London restaurant of the same name. The two restaurants launched around the same time, with Atherton spotting the name and suggesting a gentlemen’s agreement in which both businesses could continue using it).
All three businesses have been shaped by extremely challenging trading conditions for ambitious restaurants. Rising staffing, ingredient, property and utility costs have combined with an increasingly inhospitable tax environment for hospitality, while inconsistent demand, fuelled by intense competition and low consumer confidence, make opening a conventional fine dining restaurant a costly and risky proposition.
This is probably a good time to distinguish between micro restaurants and fine dining establishments that serve a relatively small number of people. The latter are not new: omakase sushi bars and counter restaurants such as London’s Kitchen Table and Evelyn’s Table have been around for years. They tend, however, to have larger teams and operate from larger premises than this new crop of micro restaurants, which have emerged in response to increasingly challenging trading conditions.
Thinking small
For all three of these micro restaurants, being small is a deliberate choice, rather than simply a stepping stone towards a larger venue. For Sǣl’s Jonny Mills, limiting the size of the operation reduces both overheads and the financial exposure that comes with employing a larger team. At present, he employs just one front of house staff member.
“With the current climate and the economy, I think it is possibly safer to open something that is so small because your overheads are naturally lower, the staff costs are lower,” he says. “A lot of people at the start said: ‘Do you not want to go and do something a bit bigger, like 40 covers?’ And I was like: ‘No,’ because then I’ve got to pay staff.”
Chef Dan Kenny opted for a tiny restaurant space to reduce overheads – like Gwen, The Set is exempt from business rates – but also because he is pragmatic about the number of guests he can get through the door. “We have to be realistic,” he says. “We offer the most expensive tasting menu in Brighton at around 17 courses for £99. We’re not going to be packed every night of the week.”
The Set occupies an (obviously) very small site on Brighton’s Preston Road, away from the city’s more expensive restaurant locations. For a business that doesn’t rely on passing trade, paying a premium for a central address would make little sense.
“Nothing is cheap anymore, but the rent is roughly two thirds of what it would cost to run a restaurant in a central area of Brighton such as The Lanes,” Kenny says.
The opening investment was understood to be around £150,000. Keeping that manageable was essential given the restaurant’s limited capacity to generate revenue. But even a small operation is still exposed to unexpected bills. Kenny describes razor-thin margins while paying off opening costs, and Mills is also cautious about declaring Sǣl profitable while invoices from the fit-out are still coming in.
Not having to pay business rates or enjoying considerable business rates relief, in the case of Sǣl, provides some breathing room. At Gwen, Sanchez-Iglesias says the saving could potentially cover a part-time salary. Keeping a tight grip on expenditure remains essential in such businesses and having unfilled seats is even more problematic than it is in regular sized restaurants.
Keeping it simple
The same discipline applies to the food. With one or two chefs delivering lengthy tasting menus, dishes need to be designed around what the team can realistically achieve.
“The menu itself is very prep heavy and service easy,” Mills says. “That’s the way I try to describe it to people who maybe don’t work in the industry.”
At Gwen, preparation takes place at Ynyshir before the team packs up and heads over to set up for service. Its tiny on-site kitchen is therefore only part of the picture. Even with that arrangement, Sanchez-Iglesias has to think carefully about how each dish will be delivered.
“Some of the processes are long, but there has to be a simplicity to the way we work so that we can actually deliver it,” he says.
Yet there is a big, sometimes underappreciated advantage to running a tiny kitchen operation: control. The person in charge of the menu can pretty much cook and taste everything that leaves the pass.
Up close and personal
There’s an advantage for guests too. While they might not be suitable for every occasion – not least clandestine business meetings and teary breakups – guests at micro restaurants enjoy front row seats to the action and an intimate, personal service. At Sǣl, Mills wants dinner to feel like an evening in someone’s home.
“Another part of it is the feeling we’re trying to get across to the guests: you can come and sit down in our house for the evening and have dinner cooked for you by a mate of yours. Kick your shoes off and relax,” he says.
At Gwen, moving guests between two spaces gives the evening an attractive change of pace. It also helps the team manage the practical demands of producing so many courses in a confined space. “When you’re eating 20 courses, you’re with us for a long time, and moving into another space changes the feeling of the meal rather than having everyone sitting in exactly the same place throughout,” Sanchez-Iglesias says.
No spare hands
Having a tiny team has its drawbacks, too. When Mills speaks to Restaurant, he is nursing a cold – not ideal given he is the only chef at the restaurant and constantly on show during service. With just one colleague working front of house, there is little scope to redistribute the workload: an absence that a larger team might absorb presents a much bigger challenge when it removes half the workforce.
Even so, Mills estimates that he works around 55 hours a week, with his front of house colleague working 40 to 45. “I’m not killing myself,” he says.
A tiny team can also create opportunities for staff development. Gwen’s apprentice chef Finn joined straight from catering college and works directly alongside Sanchez-Iglesias every day.
“Because there are only two of us in the kitchen, we work incredibly closely and I’m able to spend much more time with him than I could if I was running a big brigade,” Sanchez-Iglesias says. “You build a very different relationship when you’re working one-on-one with someone every day. I get to show him not only how I cook but the way I like to work in a kitchen.”
Room to grow?
Keeping the dining room small still leaves room to develop the business. At The Set, Kenny varies the offer across the week, supplementing the full tasting menu with shorter, less expensive meals and a ramen lunch. These services give more people a reason to visit and can introduce future customers to the main event. “I didn’t like the idea of The Set sitting empty for three days a week,” he says.
Making better use of a small space brings its own demands, of course. Different menus and services require planning, and eight or 12 seats still need customers willing to fill them.
These restaurants are young, and their long-term resilience remains to be seen. Yet they offer an alternative for chefs whose ambitions are difficult to reconcile with the cost of a conventional fine dining operation.