![]() It also gave him an opportunity to effectively trial a start-up when he was given free rein to launch a takeaway outlet from a van, initially serving the Canary Wharf area. While immersed in the restaurant world, Carroll started formulating an idea for a restaurant of his own based around a quality, affordable steak offer and decided he needed a grounding in how the sector operates.Ī meeting with Mark Selby, co-founder of Wahaca, led to a job as operations adviser at the Mexican restaurant group, where his analytical skills were put to use to help the chain’s expansion. The hours were long and the work exacting, although it gave him invaluable experience in the industry he is now in, including running the slide rule over Carluccio’s for a potential buyer. ![]() Instead he took a graduate job at Parthenon-eY strategy consultancy. It put him off the whole restaurant career idea for a few years and convinced him that when he did pursue it again, it would not be from the bottom up. While at university, Carroll did a few unpaid shifts in the kitchens at The Fat Duck and restaurant Gordon Ramsay, the latter of which he recalls as being a particularly gruelling experience. However, his career path beyond that gave him the drive and, more importantly, the acumen to set up and operate his steak restaurant group as he does. There are no reservations, the wine list comprises just five reds and five whites and the dessert option begins and ends with a salted caramel sundae ice cream.Ī food obsessive and determined from a young age that one day he would run his own business, Carroll studied natural sciences at Cambridge, specialising in biology. Other cuts and dishes, such as rump cap and the popular burger and béarnaise sauce, are available as specials and there’s a choice of creamed spinach, market greens, a blue cheese salad, roast aubergine and dripping cooked chips as sides, but that’s about it. The restaurant primarily serves just one cut of meat, the eponymous flat iron which, at £10 (it comes served with a green salad) is significantly cheaper than those at many of the capital’s grander steakhouses. While many steakhouses serve a huge variety of cuts as well as many starters and sides, requiring a lot of kitchen space, staff and skill, Flat Iron is an altogether more simple operation. It’s an approach that might have proved unworkable once the restaurant became a reality, but Carroll has so far been able to do this thanks to the very simple blueprint he has created for his group. “I had the view from the outset that the sites were going to have to be able to operate independently of me from very early on.” “We opened Beak Street (Flat Iron’s first permanent site) in November 2012, and in April 2013 I went and spent some time in America,” he recalls. That he was able to go away at such a critical time says a lot, not only about Carroll’s confidence in his fledgling affordable steak restaurant group, but also of his management style and approach to business. In fact, he returned to work on the day the new 75-seat Flat Iron in Shoreditch, the newest restaurant in the group, was handed over, only one week before opening. ![]() The founder of the now four-strong Flat Iron restaurant group had recently taken a two-week holiday but, given the timing, he might well have had other things on his mind. For someone who also has a five-month-old baby at home, he is remarkably so. For a man who has recently opened a new restaurant, Charlie Carroll comes across as being pretty laid back.
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