Britain: From Tea to Tease

During the lively late show at London’s newest nightclub, underdressed chorus girls grind in the naughtiest Memphis manner while patrons dine on smoked salmon and chicken à la Maryland. Called “Showboat” and located in the Strand, the club is so popular that it is booked solid on weekends through New Year’s. The most extraordinary fact about it, however, is its owner: London’s J. Lyons & Co., Ltd., known to Britons for years as the conservative proprietor of 170 staid, gold-and-white-fronted teahouses scattered through their country.

1,000,000 Bottles. The new nightclub is the most startling evidence yet of Lyons’ efforts to change the image it has had ever since the 1890s. Noting the difficulty of getting light refreshment in London anywhere except in pubs, three tobacco merchants—Brothers Montague and Isidore Gluckstein and Brother-in-law Barnett Salmon-set up a teashop to give women shoppers a quiet, inexpensive place to lunch. The idea caught on, and the Lyons teashops, named for a relative and staffed by “Nippies” in ankle-length black dresses and frilly white caps, spread quickly. Twelve Salmon and Gluckstein descend ants now run the company under the leadership of Sir Samuel Salmon, 65, who likes to pop in unexpectedly to test the food (mass-produced but wholesome) and the service (usually snappy) in his restaurants.

Lyons runs 29 other restaurants in addition to the teahouses, calls itself the world’s largest caterer because it serves 3,500,000 meals each week for such clients as Buckingham Palace and Wimbledon. Yet food service now accounts for only 25% of its business, which is now well over $200 million yearly. Lyons started processing its own food to ensure quality for its restaurants, has gone on to become one of Britain’s biggest food producers. It dominates the British bakery field with its 14 bakeries, is winning an increasingly large part of the ice cream market. The firm also markets soft drinks, stores a million bottles of wine in a cellar beneath Southwark, runs five hotels and a 1,000-car parking garage under Hyde Park.

Golden Eggs. In an effort to keep growing in Britain’s fiercely competitive food industry, Lyons is looking for new palates to please. It has popularized the hamburger in Britain through a chain of 375 franchised Wimpy stands, has also started up Wimpy on the Continent, where the chain is growing fast. Earlier this year, Lyons merged a subsidiary with Golden Egg restaurants, a London-based quick-order chain, and they plan to open at least 30 new restaurants together. Lyons already sells daily a million cups of tea brewed with leaves from its 1,700-acre plantation in Malawi, but it is aware that coffee is becoming more popular among the English. To get in on that market, it recently formed a new company with Manhattan’s Chock Full O’ Nuts Corp. to sell instant coffee in both Britain and Europe.