Interview: James Brown, Brava Hospitality Group

With over a year under his belt leading Italian restaurant group Prezzo, James Brown talks to Tristan O’Hana about brand longevity, reviving Jamie’s Italian and being relentlessly optimistic

I embarrassed myself immediately as my interview began with James Brown, CEO of Brava Hospitality Group, by declaring: “It’s nice to finally meet you.” What’s the worst thing someone can say in response to that? Yep, that’s right: “We’ve met before actually.” Damn, how embarrassing. It turns out Brown (pictured above right) and I had briefly chatted at a National Pub & Bar Awards event back when he was at BrewDog, reporting to then head of bars David McDowall, who is now leading Stonegate Group. Times certainly change, don’t they?

While his former mentor is now running the largest pub company in the country, Brown finds himself steering the ship of Brava, the group launched by the Prezzo Italian team in September 2025, signalling its intent to become a multi-brand operator. Having spent the best part of a year rolling out the new-look and newly named Prezzo Italian, Brown and his team announced plans to transition from a single brand to a broader platform designed to manage and grow multiple concepts across the UK. Just over two months after that, Jamie Oliver announced a partnership with Brava Hospitality Group to relaunch his Jamie’s Italian model. All systems go then.

“We’ve been busy,” Brown says through a half-laugh, half-sigh. “We have definitely got more [Prezzo] refurbishments done than we thought we would at the very start. We have completely retrained all of our staff on steps of service. We’ve iterated the menu four times and made the menu 20 dishes smaller, reengineering those dishes to be fresher. We’re almost at every single Prezzo in the estate cooking Bolognese from scratch, which is not normal for a large-scale casual dining business, but we don’t want to do things in a normal fashion. We want to do things better. We’ve done a loyalty app, a brand redesign, and there is lots more to do, but this will be a quieter year.”

A quieter year? OK, I can understand that the majority of the heavy lifting around the Prezzo Italian rebrand is done, but can a year which involves another 40 refurbishments and the little matter of reintroducing Jamie’s Italian to the UK public really be deemed as “quiet”? In Brown’s eyes, maybe. Before he joined Prezzo in September 2024, he tells me he was quite open with owners Cain International that he was looking for a sizeable challenge.

“I made it clear from day one that I probably wasn’t the right person for the job if they wanted to do a light touch, low ambition type business,” he says. “I wanted to come and grow it, build a platform business with multiple brands. We aligned on ambition, and that’s what we set about to do, and that’s where the Jamie’s conversation came from.”

Brava Hospitality Group is bringing back Jamie's Italian 

Oliver’s army is here to stay

Let’s talk about Jamie then, for the downfall of his Italian brand was one of the most documented in mainstream media in recent years – it’s the price you pay for being as famous and successful as Oliver is. Many in the industry, including Brown, have their opinion on why the business failed so spectacularly. Lack of leadership, irrelevant branding, too expensive… Oliver himself says the model was flawed, and despite putting a reported £4m of his own money into trying to save the restaurant portfolio, by the time the administrators were called in May 2019, debts were thought to be around the £80m mark. So, the question on most people’s lips is… why? Why is Brava bringing it back and, given the consistent performance of the likes of Ask, Zizzi, PizzaExpress et al, why do they think it can work? 

“In that first meeting with Jamie and Ed (Loftus, Oliver’s global restaurant group director), we talked about the challenges they had and where they thought it went wrong,” says Brown. “As an industry person, I had my own opinion on that; I’m sure everyone does. What I found was that when I was a customer in Jamie’s Italian all those years ago, I saw that it was created by somebody who understands the magic of hospitality. How they did kids’ menus, the way they did a sharing board. Somebody understood theatre, quality of produce, quality of execution. 

“Say what you want about what happened towards the end, but I want to recapture that bit there and do it in a way that is sustainable. He’s an icon of our island and has done amazing things around the world, especially with food. He deserves to have his name on the high street, and hopefully we can be the partner that does that for the next 25 years.”

Like many on the outside, I couldn’t help but wonder how involved Oliver would actually be with this restart. One would imagine, given how it ended last time, that there would be a much more hands-on approach for the sequel. However, given his schedule and the fact that Brava will ultimately be running the business, how hands-on can he actually be?

“When I met him in the first meeting, I could see the passion in his eyes and also the pain of what happened,” says Brown. “When people have made mistakes and get a second chance, they tend to put more into it, they’re more likely to succeed, more likely to get it right and be more determined. And I see that from him in his energy. He’s written the menu. He’s got strong opinions on the design. He has committed to cooking for the first month in the restaurant. When someone’s name is above the door, they have to care. He also took the time to get to know us. He kept visiting Prezzo restaurants to check us out and we kept getting internal messages saying: ‘Jamie Oliver is in our restaurant!’”

Chicken Milanese with Spaghetti Pomodoro

Let’s get the brand back together 

With a sizeable investment programme in Prezzo Italian refurbs and a flagship Jamie’s Italian restaurant opening in London’s Leicester Square in spring 2026, Brown has the task of not only reinvigorating two national restaurant brands, but then keeping them in a positive perception from here on out. He knows just as well as anyone that a brand’s popularity and lifespan are by no means guaranteed, with many once-popular chains falling out of favour and off of the high street in place of the next go-to name. Why does he think certain restaurant brands can be so short-lived?

“Bigger companies tend to forget about the foundational building blocks of what made them great when they were incorporated,” he says. “I suppose it’s about how businesses like this are funded, right? And the funding cycles that they’re in. So whether you’re BrewDog or Big Table Group or Jamie’s or Prezzo, the CEOs of those businesses are encouraged to think in five-year cycles. I think those five-year cycles encourage people to do things that are good for five years and not always good for 20- or 25-year cycles. Ownership is a real key part in how long a brand can have a strategy and deploy that strategy. 

“Leadership stability and strategy are going to be the answer to how long these things can run, and Jamie’s was an edge case on that. I don’t think that brand, from a relevance perspective, was ready to go. I just think it probably didn’t have the financial infrastructure and the right leadership and strategy to weather the storm.”

Brown elaborates on how he is leading Brava in order to sustain a long-term future for any brands in its portfolio. He regularly uses the word ‘foundation’ and it’s the foundational principles that make up a business which he is determined to keep hold of and focussed on. For Prezzo, these are food, people, place and brand. It’s that final principle that can be made or broken by the other three, which is why, since joining the company, Brown has made large strides to bring chefs and food back to the forefront of head office operations.  

“When I joined, we had a head office that was very large, but didn’t have any trained chefs at the top table or anywhere else in the entire head office team,” he says. “So we restructured our head office team, what I would call ‘right sizing it’ for the business in the first place, but also introduced what I would call a foundational principle of a head office support function, which is having chefs in the business who talk about food every day. 

“We moved to allow us to have a development kitchen in the office. So we now sit next to the pass where the food comes out, and we build recipes, improve on recipes and we tweak. Food has become what it should be – it is the pinnacle of why we all come to work and what we talk about every day.”

The new look of Prezzo Italian

Joining the QSR crowd

With the Azzurri Group going great guns with not only Ask and Zizzi, but quick service brands Coco Di Mama and, most recently, Dave’s Hot Chicken, it is only a matter of time before Brava adds a QSR offer to its portfolio. It’s no secret that one is waiting in the wings (that isn’t a pun, by the way, as Brown is adamant he won’t be joining in with all the fried chicken fun that’s going on). 

“The chicken market is very exciting, and I see why people are excited about it, but I think that is incredibly saturated or is going to be saturated quite quickly, and at some point the world’s going to run out of chickens or run out of people that want to eat chicken, that is probably my observation,” he says. “We’ll leave that to someone else and we’ll focus on being the best Italian.”

Italian, of course. And that market isn’t saturated? He takes my point with a laugh and a nod.

“Italian is the market I’m in,” says Brown. “I’m part of the saturation, if that makes sense. So why would I go into another one? I want to focus on winning the one I’m in. That’s the strategy and that means that I get to have a more streamlined head office function, supply chain function, better focus on my team, and I don’t have to worry about chicken prices in the market or different technology for QSR brands. I’m predominantly focused on being the best Italian on the high street. I always tell my team that simplicity and agility need to be our competitive advantage versus some of our larger, slower-moving and more complex competitors.”

Chances are that simplicity and agility will lead to the debut of ‘Pronto’ this year, moving Brava into the QSR market via a takeaway pasta offer that targets train stations and travel hubs. Despite news of the concept breaking in January 2024, the UK hospitality scene is yet to see the arrival of a brand that literally translates as ‘ready’. 

“It’s been talked about a few times and we’re playing with it now,” says Brown. “It’s not the top of the agenda item, as a big focus this year is investing roughly £8m into growth through refurbishments and new restaurants. You will see something like a public-facing test or trial with Pronto at some point.”

His vagueness on a Pronto’s arrival is fair enough, given the Prezzo refurbishments that lie ahead this year. As mentioned, there are 40 more on the horizon for Brown and the team, each averaging around £200,000. If Brava completes those 40, it will take the total number of refurbished sites to 56, leaving another 25 to go in 2027. These numbers don’t even include the future Jamie’s Italian restaurants, which, according to the latest annual report from Brava, could grow by up to 40 sites over the next 10 years. 

Brown’s chat with Dine Out took place the week after the group delivered a record-breaking Christmas, which included its “busiest week ever by quite a long way” in the days leading up to New Year’s Eve. In its annual report for the 52 weeks ended 29 December 2024, the business said it anticipates that EBITDA will exceed £3m in 2025, with the impact of the operational changes and investments it has made resulting in “significantly enhanced profitability” in 2026. All in all, that seems like a pretty successful start for Brown and his Brava journey. Will he maintain those foundational building blocks beyond the corporate five-year cycle? Will the public welcome Jamie back with open arms? Will Pronto ever be ready? We’ll certainly be watching and waiting to find out.  

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