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The brightly lit inside of the first ever Wagamama in London’s Bloomsbury, the kitchen with chefs busy to the left and customers seated on benches and stools at tables in the background, a waitress carrying two dishes and smiling broadly in the foreground
Use your noodle: inside the first ever Wagamama in London’s Bloomsbury.
Use your noodle: inside the first ever Wagamama in London’s Bloomsbury.

How Wagamama changed the way we eat

This article is more than 6 years old

It’s 25 years since Wagamama opened its first branch. Sophie Wilkinson reveals how the chain stays fresh

A waiter scribbles on my placemat, asking: “Have you eaten here before?” Yes, of course, because I’m at Wagamama, the 128-strong chain which has been feeding hungover, shopping-weary and other assorted Britons for 25 years.

New dish: Vegan Ramen

Launched by Alan Yau in 1992, Wagamama has since produced enough noodles to circumnavigate the globe 64 times, and 2016’s sales clock in at £266m. Wagamama has revolutionised the way Britons eat, what we eat and the spaces we eat in. But what is its place today, in the increasingly competitive but struggling restaurant sector?

At Wagamama’s “noodle lab” in London’s Soho, customers use digital tablets to review new dishes, such as the perversely delicious katsu curry ice cream. Tablets have always been part of Wagamama’s offering, with waiting staff keying orders into hand-held terminals because of “a desire for speed and efficiency,” says managing director Sarah Hills. “It was really a turning point in modern ‘casual dining’ in the UK.”

She’s not wrong. “Wagamama felt very high-tech when it debuted,” explains Sarah Housley, senior lifestyle editor at trend forecasters WGSN. “It played an important role in normalising the use of advanced tech in dining, such as augmented or virtual reality and projection mapping.”

Technology has also changed the way customers appreciate their food; dishes have to look great on Instagram. “The original restaurants were very minimal, bordering on stark,” says design director Mark Standing. “There were lots of hard surfaces and bright ‘lambing shed lighting’ so we’ve introduced a lot more warmth and texture, with brick walls and polished plaster.”

Crowd sourcing: a queue forms outside the first Wagamama on the day it opened in 1992.

The pared-back decor didn’t only give the chain its identity, though. It inspired customers. “Japanese-style dining was well received as a sort of halfway house between the traditional fast-food destinations and smart white table-clothed restaurants,” says Dr Vanessa Brady, president of the Society of British and International Design. “The fuss-free, no clutter, clean lines of home interiors has progressed year on year and influencers like Wagamama cannot be ignored.”

Offering just enough to fit on to an A3 paper placemat, the original menu was simple, too. No dish more so than chicken katsu curry, which, bought 2.5m times last year, is Wagamama’s most popular dish. “It doesn’t scare people,” says executive chef Steve Mangleshot. “People read ‘fried chicken, rice, curry sauce’ and think, ‘Oh, I can eat that!”

As Britons’ palates have diversified, though, so too has the menu, which now includes such pan-Asian delights as pad thai, Cambodian samla curry, Peking-style duck wraps and Korean bulgogi steak. A Vietnamese salad is being trialled. “Customers are a lot more travelled now, so you can’t get away with doing the simple things,” Mangleshot explains. “We need to push some of the boundaries and make flavours unique. We’ve got to keep it fresh and exciting.”

‘We’ve introduced more warmth and texture’: the interior of a recently opened Manchester branch. Photograph: Philip Panting

I can’t help thinking of Bone Daddies, the six-strong London-based ramen noodle joint using rich, fatty bone stock that renders Wagamama’s comparatively limpid. But their founder Ross Shonhan is diplomatic: “When describing what ramen was in the early days, I always referred to us as ‘Wagamama 2012.’ I don’t really think we are in competition. They help educate our audience and we help evolve their offer.”

It’s worth noting that pan-Asian food is still relatively new to the average Briton – it took until 2008 for etiquette overlords Debrett’s to issue guidance on polite chopstick usage. And Wagamama’s food is still fresh, tasty and decently priced. But have Japanese options been exhausted? It also seems a bit hubristic for everyone’s favourite noodle pit-stop to be re-packaged as what Standing is calling “A place for a romantic meal.”

Seitan change: Vegatsu curry. Photograph: Philip Panting

Wagamama is under pressure to keep up while keeping risks low after having re-financed this year in order to ease a debt burden. Customer director Emma Woods attests the company is “confident that our business is robust and strong enough to adapt to the many and varied challenges ahead”. This includes the rising cost of employment, thanks to the national living wage, and the rising costs of imports, thanks to the post-Brexit weak pound. These two factors, accountancy firm Moore Stephens has warned, could put a fifth of the UK’s restaurants out of business.

Latching on to the burgeoning vegan market with the seitan “vegatsu” curry, is a good move: the company can save on food costs and become marketably “woke”. Wagamama is not going for a radical overhaul, but maybe, for those of us who have used the brand’s values and tastes as a step to bolder flavours, that’s a comfort.

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