The UK hospitality sector is facing one of its most severe downturns in recent memory, with rising wages, staff shortages, and soaring energy costs pushing operators to the brink.
According to UK Hospitality, an estimated 30 per cent of operators are now loss-making, and around 200 jobs a day are vanishing from the sector.
Against that grim backdrop, one North London restaurateur has chosen to expand rather than retreat, opening a second location of his family trattoria, Rossella.
Luca Meola founded the original Rossella in Kentish Town, on the borders of Hampstead Heath, at just 18 years old, using £30,000 in savings and support from his family.
The restaurant takes its name from the Meola family’s original Rossella trattoria in Benevento, Italy, which first opened in 1960, with Luca’s father Luigi later bringing the family’s hospitality tradition to the UK in 1978.
Luca grew up immersed in the restaurant trade from the very beginning, recalling a childhood where chores meant earning treats. “I remember when Pokémon cards came out. I was about four,” Meola told City AM. “If I wanted a packet of Pokémon cards, I had to peel a 25-kilo sack of potatoes. That was the kind of deal that I had.”
When he took on the Highgate Road site in 2011, Meola inherited an address with a colourful past, as the previous tenant, Pasta Habit, had been raided by police in 2010, leading to the seizure of 23 kilos of cocaine and a six-figure sum of cash.
The business used the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 as an opportunity to double in size, operating via a takeaway model from the nearby Lady Hamilton pub and a dark kitchen while the Kentish Town site was expanded. “We always wanted the shop next door and we managed to get it,” Luca said. “We were allowed to carry on with construction, and then by the time we’d finished, everything had opened again.”
Diversification has been central to Rossella’s survival strategy, with the restaurant also functioning as a retail deli selling house-blended chilli oils, estate-bottled olive oils, and balsamic glazes alongside its core dining offer.
The house wine comes directly from the Meola family vineyard in Italy, and the limoncello is produced on the Amalfi Coast using an old family recipe, both of which help protect the restaurant’s margins.
The new Muswell Hill location was built on the same community-focused model, with Luca keen to differentiate Rossella clearly from pizzerias and fast-casual rivals. “Our business model is based on a community restaurant,” he said. “We’re not a pizzeria. We’re a trattoria. We do meat. We do fish. We wanted to be a restaurant where we do the classic Italian dishes and we do them well.”
Meola has also made a deliberate choice to stay away from delivery apps, arguing that the quality of the food suffers in transit and that a bad takeaway experience can deter customers from ever visiting in person.
“Food doesn’t travel well,” he said. “Pizza doesn’t travel well. Pasta doesn’t travel well. If a customer has a bad experience in a takeaway, they’ll then not think about coming to your restaurant.”
He also raised concerns about the impact delivery orders have on the in-house dining experience, noting that kitchen attention divided between apps and tables ultimately hurts everyone. “I need people to know me, to see me, to know my staff. I don’t want a load of drivers representing us that don’t know me,” he added.
When asked what separates successful restaurants from those that fail, Meola was direct about the demands placed on modern operators. “I think it’s very hard for a person who’s starting off in the restaurant industry who doesn’t know anything and just wants to cook good food, or who doesn’t know how to cook, who can’t go into the kitchen. Those kinds of people just can’t run a restaurant anymore,” he said.
Rossella’s expansion stands as a rare positive story for UK hospitality, demonstrating that with diversification, deep roots, and relentless hard work, growth remains possible even in the most challenging of trading environments.