Wagamama was founded in 1992 by Alan Yau, a Chinese restaurateur that has earned an OBE from the British government. He sold his stakes 6 years later to a venture capital firm. Today, Wagamama has about 47 restaurants in the UK, Europe, Turkey and Australia. Each restaurant serves up to 1000 customers a day and it is now owned by a private equity firm which bought over majority stakes for £102.5m in 2005.
Apart from my admiration for this brilliant restaurateur, I have a pleasant positive inclination towards Wagamama and it goes all the way back to London in 2001.
In that year, I returned home from university armed and ready to take begin a finance career. 4 weeks from the first day at work, I won a fully-sponsored trip to UK to watch the FA League season opening match – the Charity Shield. Liverpool took the Shield that year.
And it was then I had dinner at Wagamama. An experience almost similar to the Lonely Planet 6 Degrees of Separation show on television, I ended up in this crowded and noisy restaurant where you slurp your noodles and chat while cramped in a long communal table with many other strangers. A new friend from the football group had some local friends and they brought us there to begin our night. I only got back into the hotel one pub, one bar and one club later the next morning.
The floor staff took orders with a wireless electronic device, I was amazed at the superb and smooth operations. Everywhere I looked, everything was proof to how well run the restaurant is. Strange that I cannot remember what I ate or how remarkably good it tasted. So what then makes a dining experience this memorable?