Restaurant General Manager
14 days ago
Leamouth, Tower Hamlets
🎹 GENERAL MANAGER - BERINGERS All-day brasserie and piano bar | London City Island, E14 Full-time | Salary plus tips and service charge | [Bonus Scheme | Immediate start In 1895, a man called Guy Beringer wrote a letter to the press complaining about Sunday lunch. He had a point. Victorian Sundays meant getting up early for a heavy, joyless meal, usually while regretting the night before. Beringer proposed something better: push the whole thing back to midday, combine breakfast and lunch, and let people linger. He called it brunch. His argument was never really about food. Breakfast, he wrote, suits solitude. Brunch is cheerful, sociable, talk-compelling. It sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week. He finished with a postscript that we've taken rather seriously: beer and whiskey are admitted as substitutes for tea and coffee. We named the place after him. Beringers is our attempt to build brunch the way he actually meant it - not a queue and a 90-minute table turn, but a long, unhurried, sociable affair that starts with coffee and has no particular obligation to end. ☕ FOUR MONTHS IN We opened on London City Island at the start of this year, and it has gone better than we hoped. The room has found its people. Residents who come in every week. Tables that book at midday and are still there at six, having moved from brunch to a bottle of wine to the terrace for a spritz. Late nights at the bar where nobody's watching the clock. The regulars know our team by name and, increasingly, know each other. Our opening team has built something genuinely special from a standing start, and we're proud of them. Now we want to take it to the next level - and for that we need a General Manager. 🍸 THE VENUE All-day brasserie. Doors at 7am for coffee and the Pantry, through brunch and lunch, into a full evening menu. Signature dishes people come back for: Duck and Egg Waffles, the wild mushroom omelette, Nduja Toast. Piano bar. A baby grand at the heart of the room, live performances several times a week, and a proper cocktail list. Our Piano Plates are the signature - tapas-style sharing dishes built to be picked at slowly with a drink in the other hand. Terrace. Where a long lunch quietly becomes an evening. Events. Concert Nights, Uncork and Unwind wine tastings, tribute evenings, festival collaborations, private hires and the 1895 Club membership programme. There's a calendar, and it's growing. Full table service throughout. This is a restaurant, run properly. 🎶 ONE THING THAT MATTERS MORE HERE THAN MOST PLACES Music sets the room. It's the single biggest lever you have over how Beringers feels, and we take it seriously. The right playlist at 8am is not the right playlist at 8pm. Sunday afternoon is not Friday night. Knowing when to lift the room, when to let it settle, when to turn it up because the bar has found its second wind - that's a craft, and we want a GM who has it. You'll also work with our resident musicians and programme the live schedule alongside our events team. If you've ever changed a playlist mid-service because the room needed something else, you'll know exactly what we mean. 🚀 THE ROLE You'll take full ownership of Beringers City Island, reporting directly to senior management. Running the floor. Leading service from the pass to the door, at the standard we've set. Present in the room, known to the regulars, hands on when it counts. Leading the team. Recruiting, training, developing and retaining a front of house team that's already good and can be better. Rotas, structure, clear standards and a culture people want to stay in. The commercial side. Full P&L accountability: revenue, GP, labour cost, stock and controls. You'll be given real numbers, real targets and real autonomy to hit them. Growing covers. Building the reservations book, the regulars, the events diary and the 1895 Club. Making a busy Tuesday as good as a busy Saturday. Working with the kitchen. A genuine partnership on menu development, execution and consistency. The unglamorous but essential. Food safety, health and safety, licensing, compliance, reviews and everything else that keeps a venue running properly. Shaping what's next. Menus, events, ideas, the evening offer. We're four months old. There's plenty still to write, and we want a GM with opinions. 🔥 WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR • Proven experience as a General Manager, or a strong Assistant GM or Restaurant Manager ready to step up, • Genuine restaurant background - full table service, food-led, quality-driven, • Real commercial confidence. Comfortable with a P&L, labour percentages, GP and stock, • A leader people want to work for. We'd rather hear about a team you developed than a team you managed, • A natural host who understands that regulars are built one conversation at a time, • Instinctive about atmosphere - music, lighting, pace, energy, • Bar and cocktail knowledge, or the enthusiasm to get properly involved, • Personal Licence holder preferred, or willing to obtain one, • Someone who wants to build something rather than maintain it You do not need a piano bar on your CV. You need to care about rooms that feel good and people who come back. WHAT WE OFFER • Salary reviewed as the site grows. (Inc. performance bonus scheme), • Tips and service charge, • Real autonomy. This is your site to run, not a script to follow., • A group that's growing. Beringers Wandsworth opens this winter, and The Bull Group also runs Lockdown, Supershakes, The Observatory and The Eleventh Hour across London. We promote from within wherever we can, and there's a genuine path here for someone who wants one., • A Sunday & Monday close at 5pm, which in an all-day restaurant is rarer than it sounds, • Food and drinks on shift, plus discounts across every venue in the group, • Involvement in menu development, supplier tastings and the events programme, • Direct access to senior management. Small group, short decision chain, ideas get heard., • 28 days holiday ⚡ WHY THIS ONE Most General Manager jobs in London are about maintaining something that already exists. This one is four months old, in a growing group, with a story worth telling, a room people are already protective of, and enough left to build that your fingerprints will be all over it a year from now. If that's the job you've been waiting for, we'd like to hear from you. 👋 HOW TO APPLY Hit apply and send us a short message about why you'd be good for this GM role at Beringers. We read every application and reply to everyone. From there it's a short call, then we'd love to have you in - see the venue, meet the team, have a coffee and a proper conversation about where Beringers goes next. Beringers, 45 Hope Street, Leamouth Peninsula, London E14 0QG. Part of The Bull Group.
