How family business Bread Meats Bread became a Glasgow burger success story

Since opening their first restaurant in 2013, Glasgow’s Bread Meats Bread has gone from strength to strength. It began with a corner unit on St Vincent Street that had 40-50 covers, which “took off like a shot,” according to Paul Hislop, operations manager at the company. “The success of that allowed the company to grow and branch out into other restaurants.”

The business has expanded rapidly since then, first into Edinburgh with the acquisition of a branch on Lothian Road, and they are now onto their seventh site - including three in the capital and an expansion into new businesses - Leopardo Pizza at Glasgow Fort and ‘Babs on West Nile Street. 

Despite this period of growth, Bread Meats Bread remains a local family business - with relatives taking on roles across the business from front of house to payroll. “There are eight of us with family connections,” Paul explains. “Brothers, sisters, myself as a brother-in-law and then another brother-in-law involved.”

The ambition for Paul and the team is to bring people into that family feel of the restaurant by “trying to create an environment where people feel part of that kind of family connection.”

An ambition, he admits, is a well worn trope. However, he believes they can back it up. “I know that can be used quite a lot by businesses. But we do believe that that's been a recipe for success, with all the family invested in it and pulling in one direction,” he says.

Does working alongside family pose its own set of challenges? Paul thinks that their background is a big part of what has fostered Bread Meats Bread’s success: “We all come from a hospitality background in different shapes and sizes, and we all have our own opinions. Some of us worked for big groups, for small groups, and owned and ran our own businesses and were operations people.” 

“So I think you take a little bit from everyone you've worked for or worked with, and you try and learn from the good things and the bad things. It has its challenges, but although we're all involved, we each have our own kind of individual roles and responsibilities that we focus on.”

There have been a number of highlights over the last 11 years for Paul - including a shout out from Canadian crooner Michael Buble: “Just randomly throughout his set, he started talking about how he had had this toastie and this burger last night from Bread Meats Bread, and he could make love to that sandwich, and it was just so random.”

In Glasgow, Paul says the business has played its part in revitalising St Vincent Street since opening that first restaurant, “That was kind of around the time of burger mania. There wasn't a great deal on St Vincent Street, restaurant wise,” he says. “And I think that Bread Meats Bread should take credit for partly being responsible for bringing the street back up and making so many operators want to come into this area.”

Despite its expansion, Bread Meats Bread can still trace a mainline back to those early days on St Vincent Street with a number of staff still on the books from around that time period - “seeing them grow and develop is obviously fantastic for us,” says Paul. 

With all that in mind, in many ways, Bread Meats Bread is a classic Glasgow success story.

“I think being Glaswegian myself, you see that people, they're very open, and they want us to do well and they’re good communicators and support each other,” Paul explains. “We've definitely seen that, with the amount of kind of regular clientele that we built up from the original site until to this day.”

Looking ahead to the next 11 years of Bread Meats Bread, Paul says staying true to their principles and ethos will be at the heart of what they do.

He added: “I think we are all young enough and hungry enough that we want to continue to evolve, we're always learning. I think that's again, partly, you know, a reason for the success is that we've stayed humble and stayed true to ourselves when there's been challenges.”