The first Just Pizza & Pasta in the UK just got a lot closer

We’ve had surveyors out looking at a couple of sites around Birmingham, and I am happy to say that I think I have found the perfect site for a new restaurant. what they’ve found has been genuinely promising. Everything’s pointing towards opening our first UK restaurant in the area by early 2027.

I know the systems we have put in place here on the Isle of Man work incredibly well, and I’ve always been confident we can replicate them anywhere in the UK with the same level of success. Probably more, in fact, given that we’ve been operating in a small island market with its own quirks, its own costs and its own limitations. If we can pull in thousands of covers week after week here, the potential in a large city or town in the UK is enormous.

Well, I’m not satisfied with that just being theory any more, and am putting my money where my mouth is so that I can show you just how well this will work in practice.

Anyone who’s opened a restaurant will tell you that location is usually the hardest part of the whole process. Right site, wrong rent. Right footfall, wrong lease terms. It can take months just to find somewhere workable.

What surprised us was how many strong options turned up once we started looking properly in the Birmingham region. We’re only taking on one for now, but that means we’ve already identified other genuinely promising locations nearby. If you’re considering opening your own Just Pizza & Pasta in the area one day, I’d be happy to show you what I’ve found. There are plenty of great locations available, and plenty of space for multiple operations in this busy, well-populated area.

Why this matters beyond Birmingham

It comes back to something I keep saying: we’re not trying to build this business around finding superheroes.

What I mean by that is that we are not pinning our plans to open multiple restaurants on the hope of stumbling across exceptional people, because exceptional people are rare by definition. If a business depends on that, it isn’t really a model, it’s a lottery. What we’ve built instead is an environment – a framework – where a good person who is ready to follow our model will succeed.

The Birmingham opening will be a chance to show that the systems work regardless of postcode, that they’re not propped up by anything unique to where I happen to be based, and that the same framework which has worked in Douglas can be handed to someone else entirely, and still work. That’s exactly the kind of test I’m happy to put this business through.

The £300,000 question

I put a question to people fairly regularly. If you had £300,000 to invest in a restaurant, would you build your own or buy into one that already works?

Go it alone and you get complete freedom. Your concept, your menu, your brand, every decision your own, and no franchise fee to pay. It’s an attractive picture, right up until you get to the part nobody puts on the brochure. Every mistake becomes yours to discover, usually at the worst possible moment and usually at your own expense.

A franchise changes that equation, and that’s really the only question that matters to me when I think about what we do. Not “how much can we charge for a licence?” but “how much value can we actually put on the other side of the table?” You’re buying into systems that already work, training that’s already been refined, marketing that’s already been tested, and years of my own hard lessons, already learned and already fixed, built straight into the model.

Birmingham is the clearest proof of that I can offer right now. I believe in this model enough to put my own money behind it and take the first step myself, before I ask anyone else to take one alongside me. If the model can be proven somewhere I’ve never operated, with none of the advantages of home turf, that’s not just a Birmingham story. It’s evidence of what’s possible anywhere in the UK.

Maybe you’ll be taking the next step with me?

If you’ve been waiting to see whether Just Pizza & Pasta can work in new locations, wherever you are in the UK, this is probably a good time to have a conversation. I’ve got the thinking behind the Birmingham launch, the numbers behind it, and plenty of detail on how the model works to talk you through.

Get in touch by emailing me at mitch@justpizzaandpasta.com or WhatsApp me on 07973 493787.