Holiday Inn Brighton to open concept burger bar in £3.5m development

15 December 2015 by Emily Clark

The 126-bedroom Holiday Inn Brighton is opening a concept burger and craft beer restaurant in January 2016 as part of a £3.5m development of the hotel.

Stock Burger Co, designed by Superfutures, will have 186 covers and focus on pairing high-quality burgers with craft ales. Developed by Wayne Horo, director of food and beverage concept development Europe, InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG), and Mick Newton, director of food and beverage development, Kew Green Hotels Group, the restaurant could be the first in a new brand of outlets.

The burgers will be made from Glenarm Shorthorn beef, aged for 28 days in a Himalayan salt chamber, sourced from Hannan Meats in Northern Ireland. Craft beer will be supplied by Naked Beer Co, the Brighton Bier brewery and Marston's, with spirits from Blackdown Distillery and coffee from Brighton-based Small Batch Coffee.

The seafront restaurant will be able to serve an additional 40 covers on an al fresco terrace.

Paul Johnson, founding director of Kew Green, which owns and operates the hotel under a franchise agreement with IHG, said: "Stock Burger Co is a totally new approach for us. The fact that we can support some of the UK's leading independent producers and suppliers at the same time makes it all the more exciting."

Simon Burdess, IHG's vice president of food and beverage in Europe, said: "We've found this blend between things which are scalable and things which are local. In this concept, there are items there we could easily roll out but there's an element of the menu, about 25%, that we will always try and personalise wherever we put the concept.

"It's not just a restaurant and not just a bar - it's a real hybrid. When it's successful we would look to do more with it; we'd be mad not to."