Why celebrity restaurants so often fail

London has seen a string of celebrity restaurants, mostly with disappointing results. David Beckham and Guy Ritchie opened a pub in 2018 – the Walmer Castle – but it didn’t last. They handed it on in 2022 and the pub has changed hands three times since its opening. Ed Sheeran set up his grastropub, ‘Bertie Blossoms’ just two months before the pandemic, and while it is still open, Sheeran has admitted that it’s not gone smoothly. He’s learned that unless you have a large chain, making money off a restaurant is very difficult. Lewis Hamilton and Leonardo DiCaprio have tried the chain business model, opening eight locations of their plant-based ‘Neat Burger’ in London and one each in Dubai, New York and Milan – but it doesn’t look like its working wither. Just after opening the Italian branch, the company reported 140 per cent loss and is now closing half its London locations. 

Other failures have been down to basic incompetence. Idris Elba’s opened a wine bar and restaurant at King’s Cross, ‘Porte Noire’, which received a one-star rating for food hygiene last summer. The report said the place is dirty, in a poor state of repair and unfit to serve the raw sea bass on the menu. Plans for a Battersea branch have been cancelled due to ‘staff shortages’. 

Celebrities probably saw the success of Robert De Niro’s sushi collaboration, Nobu, and thought they could replicate it. Back in the 1990s, De Niro backed an unknown Japanese chef named Nobu Matsuhisa. Their restaurant is now a billion-dollar enterprise with 29 locations worldwide. But not everybody can find such success in the business, and Nobu’s stems from the fact that it has a real chef behind it. It also caters to a specific clientele – the celebrity – and has set up shop in the prime celebrity locations of LA and New York City. 

Actor Danny Trejo is joining them. He has over four hundred Hollywood films and TV credits and, while you may not know his name, you’ll recognise his face. Scarred with pockmarks and bearing a mighty black moustache, his is the kind of face you might have seen on an old western ‘Wanted’ poster. He certainly has a mugshot – he’s served a handful of prison stints throughout his remarkable life, some in juvenile, some in solitary confinement. He ran his first drug deal at age seven and was smoking marijuana by eight. For the next 20 years he was a dealer, debt collector and robber (and may or may not have participated in murder and other acts of violence). In 1961, he met Charles Manson inside the Los Angeles County Jail.

Eventually he turned things around. While in prison, Trejo earned his high school diploma, recovered from drug abuse and became a devoted Christian, and he’s helped others with substance abuse as a counsellor since 1972. Trejo got his first film gig as a boxing trainer for Eric Roberts in the 1985 film Runaway Train and, having impressed the director, he landed an acting role in the film too. The crew thought his real-life experience ‘leant authenticity’ to the prison scenes, and he’s played convicts, gangsters and assassins in hundreds of films ever since. He doesn’t mind that he’s typecast. After running drugs and robbing for a living, he was just glad for a decent wage. ‘I was offered $320 a day to teach an actor how to beat someone up,’ he said about his first film gig. ‘$320 a day? That’s more than I ever made in robbery.’ So he decided to stick with Hollywood. Now 80, Danny Trejo is the founder and owner of a global food franchise, Trejo’s Tacos. He opened the first branch of his Tex-Mex restaurant in LA in 2016, and seven more locations followed in four years. Now he’s opened on in London, on Portobello Road.

Trejo has found a niche that works in London just as well as it did in LA – Notting Hill residents and tourists who visit the Portobello Road Market. Tacos are a perfect quick lunch on a day out at the market, and the fresh ingredients make you feel better than if you’d grabbed a burger at a stall. By midday shoppers were queuing for tables but had to be turned away.

I chose ‘Danny’s Favourites’ from the menu; the carnitas tacos with slow-cooked pork, pineapple, red onion, cilantro and fermented hot sauce; then the spicy shrimp tacos marinated in diablo sauce and served with pickled onions and verde slaw; and the best breaded fish tacos I’ve ever had. I didn’t expect beer-battered cod to work in a taco but I was wrong. The fish was exactly what it should be – light and flaky batter, crispy, soft but not soggy – and somehow worked with the accompanying pineapple salsa, chipotle slaw and avocado crema. The diablo sauce on the shrimp was so hot my lips hurt. I loved it. I also ordered a non-alcoholic strawberry margarita which cost an obscene £11, but I’d pay the same for another.

I can imagine Trejo’s locations popping up everywhere from Borough Market to Bermondsey. If I lived in London I would go again. The secret to Trejo’s success isn’t hard to fathom: like Robert De Niro and Nobu, he’s found his clientele, and the food is so good they’ll keep coming back for more.