Entrepreneurs: The Pimlico landlord who crafted a pub revival from one no-go boozer

First, a confession. The entrepreneur we’re profiling this week has deserved to be highlighted in this paper for a decade, but I have deliberately kept him out. You see, this business is so good that I’ve wanted to keep it a secret; a place for me to enjoy and no one else. I’ve finally come to the realisation that it’s way too late for that.

The enterprise in question is my local boozer — The Cask Pub and Kitchen in Pimlico.

For years, the pub on the site where the Cask now stands was the place you went if you fancied buying heroin or getting stabbed. Possibly both.

So bad was the Pimlico Tram (“The Tramp”, as it was inevitably known) that it was eventually shut down after yet another stabbing.

It stayed like that for months until one day, with no fanfare, new signage went up and the doors were open again.

Donning Kevlar vests, a few of us ventured in. The transformation was extraordinary. Not that the décor was much changed, but the bar was resplendent with 20 taps and pumps dispensing weird and wonderful beers. Names like Hophead and Wild Swan had appeared from microbreweries across the nation. Hundreds more in exotic bottles and cans from around the world were enticingly displayed in tall, glass fronted fridges all around.

There was no Carling or London Pride. Just delicious, artisan stuff from microbreweries. Every few days the selection would completely change. For ale lovers, it was little short of a miracle.

Within weeks the place was packed so full that people would be spilling out onto the pavement, even crowding on the traffic island in the road outside.

A new London concept — the community craft beer pub — was born. The man behind this ale alchemy was Martin Hayes, who, despite his stout physique, defies the cliché of the jovial landlord. Brought up a few streets away, he’s quiet, forensically minded, and — believe it or not — hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since his early twenties.

The Cask was born in recession-bound 2009, before the craft ale movement had really exploded in London.

“Everyone said I was mad,” Hayes recalls, sipping on a bottle of posh Voss mineral water while I get stuck into my first Peckham Pils. “But it just made so much sense to me. You’d go into Waitrose and people would be choosing from 20 types of olive oil and 10 different breads, yet when they went to the pub, the only choice was Fosters or Kronenbourg. It seemed mad.”

“In America, there had already been a craft beer revolution in pubs and I felt it was ready to happen here.”

As hunches go, it was a good one. From being a dead boozer Greene King could barely give away, it is now turning over £1.2 million a year and making a stonking profit.

Two years after opening the Cask, he and business partner Peter Slezak, his “oldest friend”, started looking for new sites and came up with the brand Craft Beer Co. A rundown pub in Clerkenwell was first, then other unloved venues followed. There are now eight Crafts in London and Brighton which last year turned over £5.7 million and made £1 million profit.

It’s not been easy. The Clerkenwell opening was “stressful and ruinous” as it took a year to reopen after the back of the building partially collapsed. But, for all that financial pressure, Hayes has only ever funded expansion from cashflow, religiously refusing to take on debt or raise money from equity investors. “Sell 20% of the equity and you’re working for someone else. Why would I want to do that?” he reasons.

His first foray into the industry was not so successful. In his early twenties he took a lease from Punch Taverns on another Pimlico local. It was an old-school boozer in a bad location with what’s known as a “tie”. Under the tied model, tenants get supposedly reduced rents in return for buying all the booze from the pub company at inflated prices. For Hayes, the economics didn’t work. “I signed a bad deal with them and it was my mistake. But I learned a lot; they say you have to pay for your education, and that was mine.”

He has never entered a tied agreement since, and now orders personally from his stable of 200 breweries.

How does a teetotaller like him know which are the good beers to order? “I dunno really,” he says. “I suppose I’ve just got an instinct for it.”

I’ll drink to that. And it won’t be mineral water.

The Cask and Craft Beer Co

Founded: 2009

Staff: about 100

Turnover: £6.9m

Business idol: Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality. “His book Setting the Table is a must read for anyone in hospitality.”

Best moment: “Opening Craft Covent Garden in 2014. It’s only small, but competing with the best of the best in the beating heart of London has been thrilling.”

Worst moment: “When the back of the building partly collapsed as we prepared to open our first Craft pub in Clerkenwell.”