The lack of a beer cellar has seen one of Birmingham’s top restaurants call time on plans to open a third outlet as part of a £5 million redevelopment of a Victorian school building.
Metro Bar & Grill owner Chris Kelly said he pulled the plug on the new ‘School Yard’ food hub in Harborne’s Clock Tower after it was found the venue could not offer a cellar for cask-conditioned beer. The number of restaurant covers the business could offer also played a part, he said.
“When we finalised all the design it had much less space than we thought we were going to have,” Mr Kelly said.
“But the particular issue was that there was no space for a cellar so we would be unable to offer any draft beer.
“With Metro Birmingham real ale is an important part of our offer and we couldn’t do a normal Metro offer there.”
He added: “Also the overall number of covers we were looking to get in could not be accommodated.
“As we were progressing with the design it was getting smaller and smaller and the costs were going up.
“We always knew this was going to be on the smaller side but this was just too small.
“It got to the point where couldn’t see a decent return on investment. We didn’t think we could end up with enough covers to get the sort of weekly sales we had envisaged.
“It’s really sad as we’ve been trying to get into Harborne for the last five years.”
Despite the setback the restaurateur, who has Metro outlets in Birmingham city centre and in Solihull, said he still plans to open in Harborne and hopes a Metro may even open as part of the School Yard’s second phase of development, being created by former Cube developer Neil Edginton.
Mr Kelly added: “We have discussed with Neil that when phase two is built we may be prepared to take a bigger site in there,” said Mr Kelly.
“We’re pretty disappointed at this stage but feel we will be in Harborne in the near future.”
Mr Kelly said he had explored other options, even the prospect of the Harborne Metro being more of a Champagne and wine bar, but the negative feedback received when it emerged a new Metro would not be selling real ale was enough to put him off.
The Metro pullout follows that of social enterprise Kitchen, which was to have created a cookery school as part of the School Yard.
Despite both setbacks Mr Edginton said the scheme to convert the former Victorian school and Grade II listed building built in 1891 into three restaurants, a cookery school and apartments remained firmly on track and ongoing discussions were taking place with a number of interested parties.
Its first tenant Urban Coffee Company began trading from the site recently and Italian restaurant Prezzo is set to open soon.
Mr Edginton said he was still committed to the idea of a food school and was hopeful an announcement on that was not far off.
“Prezzo is a big national plc and has not been in Birmingham before and they will be opening the first week in December,” he said.
“We’re also now launching phase two, with a design competition involving three architects and the idea is that we will be releasing images of that within a few weeks.”
