Loungers team to launch new ‘roadside restaurant concept’

Brightside promises to “bring proper hospitality back to roadside dining”.

It will become the third brand for a company founded in Bristol by three friends, whose business journey started in 2002 with them opening a small cafe in Bedminster.

That first cafe on North Street has grown since then but is still Lounge, with dozens of other Lounges across the UK alongside sister venue Cosy Club.

The first Brightside is set to open on the A38 near Exeter in February 2023 with two more sites opening in the spring.

The Loungers team, whose head office is on Baldwin Street, say that Brightside is “inspired by childhood road trips of days gone by, where the highlight of the journey was a stop at a roadside restaurant”.

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Loungers co-founder and chairman, Alex Reilley, says that he has “incredibly affectionate memories” of visiting the likes of Little Chef and Happy Eater with his family when he was a child with my family.

“Those visits were my first real exposure to hospitality, and they whet my appetite for hospitality, albeit probably fairly unknowingly at the time, because I was nine or ten years old.

“We used to travel a lot from Leicester, where I’m originally from, to Suffolk, to see my great-grandmother, and the highlight of the of the weekend was stopping at Little Chef on Friday night for tea on the way there, and again on the way back on Sunday evening.

“So I’ve always had this fascination with this idea of a roadside restaurant where people stop either as lone diners, as families, or to meet with others.

“When Little Chef sadly closed it left a real void, as there was no one else really doing roadside restaurants.

“From that point on, I had a bit of an itch. I thought there was room for a reimagined roadside restaurant concept that is fit-for-purpose for the 21st century. I felt it an opportunity to effectively apply our expertise to a roadside location.

“I felt that there were lots of elements of what we do in both our Lounge cafe bars and Cosy Club brands that would be very transferable to a roadside concept.

“However, I felt it needed to have its own sense of identity, especially being in a location where the challenge is very different to that of a high street.

“When you’re looking to try and capture people’s imagination as they travel past pretty quickly, you need a recognisable brand presence.

“From that point onwards, we decided that we needed to draw upon the positive operational expertise we had, but with a real sense of this new brand being its own thing.”

Brightside will be opening its first restaurant in 2023 – image: Brightside

Reilley added: “It will be fascinating to see how people receive what we’ve done. We’re taking a relatively big bet.

“Some people don’t think there’s a place for this kind of ‘break your journey up, sit down for 45 minutes, and have a meal’, and I just don’t believe that. Because with more electric cars on the road, people are going to need to consider how and when they stop.

“We will encourage people to plan their journeys, hopefully around a stop-off at a Brightside, to get out of their cars, take a proper break and enjoy each other’s company around a table instead of all being sat staring at a screen.

“We want people to feel that if they stop at a Brightside, it’s going to be a really worthwhile, enjoyable experience, and they will walk out with a smile on their face.”

Main image: Brightside

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