After an 11-year run, Josh Katz has closed his flagship restaurant Berber & Q, a North African/Middle Eastern barbecue specialist in a railway arch off the Regent’s Canal in Haggerston, east London. His debut restaurant, it was widely influential and led to his follow-ups Shawarma Bar in Exmouth Market and Carmel in Queen’s Park. Harden’s caught up with Josh as he prepared to welcome – and farewell – guests at the final service.
Harden’s: Josh, it’s wonderful to be here tonight, but also an emotional occasion. Tell me how you’re feeling, and how you came to the decision to close.
Josh: It hasn’t really hit me yet – that will probably come tomorrow. There’s a lot of love still for Berber & Q, and I’ve had loads of messages from people with great memories of the place. One was from a friend who came here on a first date that was filmed for a TV dating show. Now they’ve got two kids!
But we’re just not as busy as we were. We had a good run up to the pandemic, we were busy every night of the week. Post pandemic, there was a noticeable shift and we never really recovered. There was a gradual erosion of customers, at first down to four busy nights a week, Wednesday to Saturday.
Most times when a restaurant closes, if they’re being completely transparent and honest it’s because that particular site is no longer working financially or commercially – otherwise you keep operating. In truth, this restaurant has been washing its face for a while, but you can’t really afford to be busy only on Friday and Saturday nights.
We’re still busy at our other venues, Shawarma Bar in Exmouth Market and Carmel in Queen’s Park. You have to ask yourself strategically, is it worth losing the money in one restaurant that you’re making in the others? To be viable in hospitality a site has to be commercially successful. And this area seems to have changed.
Fish specialist The Sea, The Sea was here in Acton Mews too – for a while this was a real foodlover’s pocket of London. And now Queen’s Park, where you opened Carmel, has seen a spate of openings and become a mini dining hub. It’s interesting how areas change over the years.
The Sea The Sea was right next door, and it’s gone now. Burrito around the corner has also closed, and Chick’n’Sours which opened on the same day as us closed over a year ago.
When we launched 11 years ago, this little street was notorious for its drug deals – the first person we hired grew up around here, and he couldn’t believe we were opening. So it’s not the easiest of locations, but in its heyday it had a real hum, you could feel the energy on the streets. Maybe that was one of the things that gave us our edge – but that energy has noticeably trailed off in recent years, it just doesn’t feel the same.
I’m not an urbanist so I don’t have statistics to back me up, but it seems the people who used to live around here have moved further out, where it’s cheaper – and the people who can afford to live here now are older and don’t want to eat out on a Tuesday or Wednesday.
in Exmouth Market there are so many more people – not just people who live in the area, but people who work nearby, commuters, people in town for the day: there’s just a much bigger audience that needs places to go.
Queen’s Park is another case – perhaps it’s one of the areas where, since the pandemic, people are more likely to stay in their neighbourhood to eat, whereas they used to go into town.
Nobody really invents things in restaurants, but you certainly pioneered the mixture of North African-Middle Eastern food with live-fire cooking at Berber & Q. How does it feel that people are still opening new variations while you are closing?
That sort of thing happens in every type of business, it’s part of life. We weren’t by any means the first to be cooking over fire, but we were one of the first to approach it in the way we did, and I like to think Berber & Q has its own stamp that is hard for others to replicate – although somebody did open a restaurant in Ipswich that was literally cooking the recipes from our cookbook!
But our personality belongs to us, and the best places have that personality – places like Smoking Goat and Smokestack, which started out around the same time as us. One of the challenges is to stay relevant.
So how do you go about transferring that personality from one restaurant to the next?
Funnily enough, when we opened Shawarma Bar in Exmouth Market, we assumed we would attract some of the same people – but in fact there were regulars there who had never heard of Berber & Q, and regulars here who had never heard of Shawarma Bar. So we thought that perhaps we didn’t do a good enough branding job as a company.
But each restaurant finds its own crowd, which is partly to do with the actual site and its surroundings. And when it came to opening in Queen’s Park, we didn’t think the site was a Shawarma Bar or a Berber & Q: it needed its own concept.
What are your thoughts now on hospitality as an industry to work in?
The financial problems currently in the industry are well documented, so I won’t go into them. But I will say that you don’t go into hospitality to get rich.
I always said I wanted to do something where every day was different – where you didn’t just go into the office every day. I discovered hospitality when I was doing a masters in Sydney, and worked in a burger bar, which I loved. Hospitality is not easy, though – my father’s a radiologist, so is my brother, and sometimes I wonder whether it would be better to have a secure job with a salary.
So what of Berber & Q now? Could another site open under the name?
That is possible in the future, if it was the right site, but for the moment we are consolidating on our two venues. The name lives on in the company branding. We’re also retaining the lease on the railway arch, which we’ll use for catering and special events. It’s a great place for weddings, birthday parties and any sort of celebration.
Thank you very much for talking to us, Josh, and good luck in the future.
