Frites night

Being a business owner was always the dream for Frites co-founder Katrina Kerr.

As a child, she would go around her neighborhood in Melbourne to sell cosmetics and candies.

Her first job was at the local supermarket and she loved the experience so much that she ended up as supervisor.

"I remember going into our local Safeway and asking the lady for a job. I wasn't old enough to actually do it, but I would still go in there every week and bother her until I was old enough, and I got the job straight away."

Kerr's move from Down Under was spontaneous - she originally came to Hong Kong to visit family friends.

"I ended up really enjoying Hong Kong and wanting to stay," she said. "So I started going out, networking and meeting a lot of people. And I raised money to open my first bar because I didn't have enough of my own."

But her first business venture was not a smooth ride. She naively took on a lease, thinking a group of investors would give her the money to start.

"On the day the money was supposed to go into the account, the main investor disappeared and I never saw her again!"

But she did not give up. She found another group of investors and secured the investment for her first bar.

The bar in question was the Groovy Mule, a Coyote Ugly-style bar located in Wan Chai, featuring bartenders dancing on the bar tops. "This was before Central had really taken off, so there was really nothing around," she said. "People would go to Lan Kwai Fong, and when Lan Kwai Fong closed at 11pm, you would go to Wan Chai - that's what you did."

After that, Kerr opened two more bars and later dipped her toe into the restaurant scene with her business partner, Viviano Romito. Together, they opened a series of restaurants focused on different cuisines, including Spanish, Greek and Peruvian.

In 2014, the pair decided to sell off all their other restaurants and focus on Frites, a Belgian beerhouse restaurant.

"Up until then, we based our business model mostly around Central, and the idea was to open different venues in Central."

However, Kerr and her business partner realized that rents in Central were expensive, and they risked either moving elsewhere or paying a skyrocketing rent with a new lease.

"We decided to change our strategy. Instead of opening lots of different concepts in Central, we thought we would sell off all the other concepts, just stick to Frites, and take Frites all around Hong Kong."

"We always knew Frites was going to be the one," she said. "Frites had the most unusual concept, and we found that it was the most loved. Every time we opened a new store, it is busy from the very start and people love it for many reasons."

The beer-hall style restaurant was inspired by the Belgian beer cafes in Melbourne and Sydney. Seeing their popularity in Australia, Kerr and her partner realized that the concept could work in Hong Kong - especially with the corporate crowd.

To make Frites as authentic as possible, Kerr and her business partner flew to Belgium to find inspiration for the first restaurant.

The concept of Frites, as Kerr and her partner predicted, was a success. Over 13 years, it opened seven branches across Hong Kong, with the newest located in Tseung Kwan O.

While Kerr's restaurateur partner focuses on operations, she takes on the business side. "We have this amazing partnership because we stay out of each other's way," she said.

"I think it is really my business partner's passion and intense love for food and everything to do with the industry that allows our restaurants to do so well."

Having been in the food and beverage industry for almost two decades now, Kerr found that things have changed drastically since she first began.

"It is just a completely different scene because now the market is flooded with so many amazing concepts, and there are so many big groups opening up multiple restaurants.

"Now, you really have to get it right to actually be busy with a lot of customers."

For Kerr, to succeed in a saturated market, one has to stand out with a unique concept. "In Hong Kong, that is the most important thing. It is hard to really stand out in Hong Kong these days," she said.

"You have got to know how to run it well and have your operational team very tight."

Much like her counterparts in the industry, Kerr has been affected by the pandemic as well, with restrictions on capacity as well as dine-in hours disrupting business.

"It has definitely been challenging, we have to constantly try to change our strategy as we go along."

But she is making the best of it, focusing on takeaway deliveries and online strategies as well as looking to expand Frites to more parts of Hong Kong, Macau and even the Greater Bay Area.

"We just try to manage the best we can. But overall, we are okay and we will manage to get through it."

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