As L’ETO expands beyond cafés into standalone dining concepts, founder Artem Login shares his approach to growth, guest experience, and building brands with staying power
Since launching L’ETO in London in 2011, Artem Login has grown the café and restaurant brand into an international business with more than 40 locations. In this interview, Login discusses scaling carefully, maintaining brand consistency across markets, and what defines long-term success in hospitality today.
What was the original gap you saw in the market when you launched L’ETO in London in 2011?
Honestly, London in 2011 was a fascinating moment for hospitality. The city was still finding its footing after 2008, and the middle ground between a coffee shop and a proper restaurant was almost empty — that space where you might bring a laptop on a Wednesday afternoon and also come back for dinner on a Friday.
The whole idea of the “third place” was only just starting to take shape, and there was real room for someone to do it with proper craft behind it. We saw that gap clearly. People wanted somewhere they could walk into in the morning and feel just as at home in the evening, and feel that both visits had been thought about. So we put pastry, interior and service into the same brief and treated them as one piece of work rather than three separate departments. The cake display in the window wasn’t a marketing device, by the way — it came out of wanting the place to feel like a destination, somewhere with a sense of occasion.
L’ETO has grown into a 40-plus store international brand. What do you think has been the main reason it scaled so successfully?
I’d say we’ve been stubborn about a couple of things. The product, the pastry craft, the way the room feels when you walk in — we’ve held the line on those, even when there’s been pressure to move faster. Scaling is the moment where it’s easy to lose the thing that made the concept work in the first place, and we’ve tried very hard not to let that happen.
And realistically, forty-plus sites in fourteen years isn’t particularly fast. We’ve walked away from far more locations than we’ve taken. Careful about partners, careful about cities, and willing to be slow when slowness was the right answer. That’s the less glamorous version of why it’s worked.
How do you make sure a brand like L’ETO keeps its identity intact when it moves into very different markets?
The thing I’ve learned is that brand identity doesn’t really live in the guidelines. It lives in how the team greets you when you walk in, in what the branch manager does when an order doesn’t go quite right on a busy Saturday morning, in whether anyone on the floor remembers a regular from last Thursday. That’s the layer you have to look after.
On the surface, we adapt without much fuss — menu tweaks for the local palate, breakfast format shifts, the cake and pastry line edited for what resonates in each market, things sized for the climate. That said, our signature cakes always stay in the line-up wherever we go — they’re the ones our guests properly love, and they’re a piece of the brand’s DNA we carry with us everywhere. The region isn’t Knightsbridge and the concept has to respect that. But the tempo of service, the standard, the way a guest is read in the first thirty seconds — that has to be the same wherever you are. I spend a lot of time on the ground during openings, because that side of the culture moves from person to person. You can’t put it in a deck and email it to the team.
Across your different venues, what tells you that a concept is really working, both creatively and commercially?
Two signals, really. The first is whether the team genuinely want to be there. You can usually feel it within thirty seconds of walking in — the way the team carries themselves, who’s talking to whom, whether there’s a bit of warmth in the room. That’s never a coincidence, and it’s also very hard to manufacture from the outside. The second is repeat custom that arrives without prompting — no campaign, no offer, just guests turning up on a Tuesday because they fancy it. Earning that in a city as competitive as London or Dubai is genuinely difficult, because there’s always something new and exciting opening down the road. The P&L tells you about last quarter; those two signals tell you about next year.
Where do you see the biggest opportunity in hospitality right now for brands that are trying to do something different?
People, honestly. I know that’s a less exciting answer than the AI and format conversations, and those conversations are real — we look closely at all of it. But the industry across both the UK and the Gulf is in the middle of a proper labour shift. The UK workforce has changed its shape, and the regional growth here means good senior operators are in demand everywhere. So the brands that figure out how to keep their best people for the long run end up with a real edge.
L’ETO Restaurant is launching as a standalone full dining concept in its own right. What was the vision behind it, and how does it relate to the L’ETO brand without being an extension of it?
L’ETO Restaurant is the logical next step for our restaurant division in this region — and the reason it’s happening here, in Abu Dhabi specifically, is that we’ve genuinely taken the time to understand the city. The culture matters, the heritage matters, the way people eat here matters. So this concept has been built for Abu Dhabi from the ground up, with real care for the place rather than being a version of something we’ve done elsewhere. The name does some of the work for us, which obviously helps.
People here already know L’ETO — they know the cakes we started with fifteen years ago, they know the service, the small attentions, the way a guest is looked after the moment they walk in. That’s been earned, not bought. As a deliberate nod to that, we’ve kept the signature cake display inside the new restaurant — it’s a proper piece of brand DNA we wanted in the room, not a logo on the wall, the actual craft on view. That continuity is important to us. But the experience itself is a different proposition. New kitchen team, new menu, a different pace from anything we’ve done under the L’ETO name before. We’re building on a platform we’ve spent fifteen years earning, and from that platform we’re creating something genuinely new. And — without wanting to sound too sentimental about it — we’ve put our heart into this one. It’s not a side project. It’s the next chapter.
How are you positioning this concept differently within a competitive F&B landscape where new openings are happening frequently?
The GCC has an extraordinary F&B scene — a huge number of brilliant restaurants opening across the region all the time, and the bar is genuinely high. That’s actually one of the reasons it’s such a wonderful market to operate in. The way we’re thinking about positioning is less about being the loudest opening and more about being the place you come back to six months in, when the launch noise has settled and you want to eat well on a Wednesday evening.
In practical terms, that means putting less weight on the theatrics of week one and more on what ends up on the plate, on the lighting at ten at night, on the people working the floor. Quietly confident rather than headline-led. Less novelty, more substance. That’s the bet we’re making — and if you get year one right, year two tends to look after itself.
From a business point of view, what indicators define success for this new concept in its first year?
In our market, year-one revenue is a slightly noisy signal. New openings in the region tend to do well in the first couple of months because the audience here is so engaged and curious — which is a wonderful thing about the Gulf, but it doesn’t fully tell you whether you’ve built something that will still be busy in eighteen months.
So the figures I personally watch are: covers per night in months six to nine — that’s when you find out whether the room genuinely works once the launch attention has settled; staff retention at the six-month mark, because a growing market always means demand for good people; and the share of bookings coming from guests who’ve already eaten with us. Average spend matters too, but it’s the least telling of the four. If the room is full of repeat diners after a year, the rest tends to fall into place.
