HoF describes its World of Food as “an incredible food hall, selling everything from tasty take-out to delicious delicacies from around the world,” a destination for the fashionable foodie wanting great food and a stylish location in which to buy it. Carlo Gilardenghi, HoF’s fresh food buyer, who worked on the original World of Food project in Birmingham, explains: “Food is fashion. People will be able to come here and buy their beluga caviar, fresh langostine, vintage paté negra, speciality confectionery and so on. And we’ll be selling it with loads of theatre and fantastic displays.”
Butchery, bakery, fish, meat and deli counters and a fresh produce display flank the hall on its basement floor, and surround the many places customers can stop and enjoy eat-in food, including, south east Asian and international food counters, a relaxing coffee and tea lounge and a Yo! Sushi concession. Gilardenghi particularly raves about the steak and seafood counter, new to World of Food, where you can sit and watch a chef cook your food before you eat it, perhaps with a bottle from the wine department. “Once the counter is established we would like customers to be able to pick any cut of meat, fish or vegetable from around the hall and have it cooked here,” he says.
Shoppers without the time to linger can buy from a range of HoF’s own and selected food brands. They can pick up all the elements of a full grocery shop — with the emphasis firmly placed on quality and exclusivity rather than the everyday. “We provide a familiar environment for the grocery shopper but with speciality products,” says Gilardenghi. “We’re not selling Heinz tomato ketchup or products that you can find in 10,000 other shops around the country.”
It’s three weeks to opening day at Croydon and as store manager Sharon van den Bos speaks above the noise of sawing and drilling from the North End Mall below us, it’s clear she cannot wait to unveil the store from underneath its protective dust sheets. “We went in to see the store yesterday — it was quite emotional,” she says. “I have never seen fittings like that in a store, never.” Van den Bos was drawn from HoF’s Regent’s Street Dickins & Jones to her new role in no small part by the allure of the food hall. “I absolutely love the concept of World of Food,” she says. “It’s quite visionary and one of the main reasons I took on this project. WoF is the jewel in the store’s crown. We don’t want it to be just another store restaurant: it will offer people a great improvement in their dwell time, and will also open the store up to a huge raft of people who have never actually considered going into a department store, particularly guys.” This includes Croydon’s armies of eternal thirty-year-old men who will come in for a post-work Peroni and can buy some interesting food as a romantic gift to take home. “Who wants flowers?”, asks van den Bos. “I don’t want flowers, give me food! You’ll have a much more of a va voom night with a bottle of wine or some fabulous food.” For females, meanwhile, WoF can be an intrinsic part of a day’s fashion shopping — as a feel-good reward at the end of the day — or the location to kick off a girlie night out with a glass of Chablis.
“People won’t be able to keep this to themselves,” says van den Bos. “They won’t go home and say I’ve been to X and bought a Y, they’ll go and say ‘I had an experience in World of Food’. And, if they don’t use the word experience, it’ll come out in what they say.
“I really feel like we’re opening two stores simultaneously. We’ve got a full line department store with 300 staff in it, and then World of Food, which is more labour intensive and so has a further 80 people.”
Each one of the staff, from Roberto, who has worked all his life in family Italian restaurants, to the bakery department’s resident Austrian pastry chef, has been chosen because they bring something special to WoF. Several of the employees have been recruited, and given three weeks’ training, from the local Brit School for the performing arts to further enhance the personality of the store. Van den Bos herself shows that from the shop floor staff to the management, passion for the job will make the food hall a vibrant and stimulating place to shop and eat.
“We didn’t want Fanny from the checkout, we didn’t want Bobby just because he’d been there nine years — we didn’t want the habits they’ll bring,” she says. “We wanted people with an open mind, people who are larger than life.”
Not that it’s the easiest way to staff a store, she adds. “These are hard teams to manage. They’re going to be a feisty old bunch so it’s going be like holding a group of wild horses. But that’s why we’ve taken them on — because of the way they are.”
It’s characters like this House of Fraser believes will make World of Food not only a stylish, but a welcoming, engaging place to shop and eat. “I have a big issue with what I call retail repellency,” says van den Bos. “In this country we are far too accepting of this. It’s the thing that really pees me off. If I don’t get the basic human values of eye contact or civility from the staff in a shop, I will walk out. I think we have a real opportunity here. And that’s not just to have a successful store, but also to show people a really different way of retailing.”
