Christina Ong’s Como Group invests in Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant group

Christina Ong’s Como Group has emerged as a key shareholder in the lossmaking SL6, the holding company behind The Fat Duck and the Hinds Head, handing the celebrity chef the firepower to expand.

The Singaporean billionaire long credited with turning London’s Bond Street into a luxury catwalk has set her sights on a rather more idiosyncratic British institution: the country kitchen of Heston Blumenthal.

Christina Ong, the 78-year-old fashion mogul and hotelier dubbed the “Queen of Bond Street”, has emerged as the new financial backer of the celebrity chef’s lossmaking restaurant empire. Filings lodged this week show that her family’s Como Group has become a key shareholder with significant control of SL6, the holding company behind Blumenthal’s culinary ventures.

The deal hands the Ong family a foothold in one of British gastronomy’s most distinctive brands and offers the chef the financial muscle to push into new markets. It is understood the cash injection will underpin the expansion of Blumenthal’s award-winning operations, headed by The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant that almost single-handedly placed British “molecular gastronomy” on the world map when it opened in 1995. Blumenthal, 59, also operates the nearby Hinds Head pub close to Maidenhead.

“Como’s international experience in the hospitality sector opens up new doors for what comes next,” Blumenthal said, adding that the partnership would allow the group to “explore new possibilities”.

The investment arrives at a delicate moment for SL6. In its most recent set of accounts, the company conceded it was in talks with potential investors to secure long-term funding “to help overcome the current economic challenges [and] provide a foundation for future growth”. For the 12 months to the end of May 2024, revenues fell to £8.9 million from £9.5 million while pre-tax losses widened to £2.1 million, up from £1.4 million the previous year.

A spokeswoman for the company sought to balance the picture, insisting that demand for reservations across both restaurants remained robust and that the Hinds Head had delivered consistent month-on-month growth over the past 18 months, putting it on course for a record year.

Ong’s arrival comes only weeks after Blumenthal confirmed the closure of Dinner by Heston, his two-Michelin-starred ode to historical British cookery housed within the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge. The London site, which opened in 2011, will shut once the hotel tenancy expires, although a sister Dinner by Heston, opened in 2023 inside the Atlantis The Royal hotel on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, continues to trade.

For Como Group, the deal extends a hospitality and lifestyle empire that already spans 15 countries. Headquartered in Singapore and controlled by the Ong family, it operates 11 restaurants, the bulk of them in its home city, alongside a portfolio of 19 luxury hotels and resorts in markets including London, Italy, France, the Maldives, Bali, Australia and Thailand. The group’s first foray into food and beverage came in 1989, when it opened the Armani Café in London.

Ong herself is a fixture of British retail and luxury. She founded the Club21 fashion boutiques in 1972 and, through Challice, the investment vehicle she runs with her 80-year-old husband Ong Beng Seng, holds a 56 per cent stake in Mulberry, the British leather goods house. Her interests also include a string of fashion franchise stores running brands such as Emporio Armani.

“We see this partnership as the beginning of something very special,” Ong said. “We look forward to supporting that continued evolution of these iconic restaurants, while unlocking new opportunities for thoughtful growth in the years ahead.”

The deal also marks a public reappearance for the Ong family on the corporate stage. Last year, Ong Beng Seng was fined S$23,400 after pleading guilty to a charge linked to a gift scandal involving a former Singaporean government minister. He had faced a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment, but a judge granted “judicial mercy” in light of his poor health.

For Blumenthal, who has spent three decades coaxing Britons into eating snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream, the message to the dining public is more prosaic. With Como’s chequebook now within reach, the chef has the runway to refresh, and quite possibly enlarge, an empire that, for all its critical acclaim, has been struggling to make the books balance.

Amy Ingham

Amy is a newly qualified journalist specialising in business journalism at Business Matters with responsibility for news content for what is now the UK’s largest print and online source of current business news.