Bella Italia Brand Guidelines: From Bella Pasta and Whitbread to The Big Table

Two Grand Metropolitan chains become Bella Pasta.

Bella Italia grew out of two restaurant chains, Pastificio and Pizzaland, which belonged to the Grand Metropolitan group, according to English Wikipedia. In 1990 Michael Guthrie, formerly chairman of the Mecca Leisure Group, formed a company called BrightReasons, which bought both chains from Grand Metropolitan in February 1991 and renamed Pastificio as Bella Pasta, the same source says. In February 1993 BrightReasons added restaurants bought from the Rank Organisation, trading as Pizza Piazza and Prima Pasta, which took its estate to 165 restaurants.

BrightReasons prepared a stock-market flotation in 1994 but postponed it that November, and after a difficult 1995 it was put up for sale. In November 1996 the brewing and leisure group Whitbread bought it, English Wikipedia says. Bella Pasta then sat inside Whitbread’s restaurant division alongside names such as Café Rouge, which Whitbread had bought with the Pelican group.

Whitbread’s ownership lasted less than six years. On 10 June 2002 the Morning Advertiser reported that Whitbread had sold the Pelican and BrightReasons groups, 153 restaurants including Café Rouge, Bella Pasta, Mamma Amalfi and Oriel, to Tragus Holdings, a management buy-in vehicle led by a former head of the Aroma café chain; its team included a former managing director of Bella Pasta, who returned as operations director. The sale followed a review of Whitbread’s restaurant division in October 2001, after which the group said it would concentrate on brands including Beefeater, Costa, Pizza Hut and TGI Friday’s. Tragus said it planned to develop Café Rouge and Bella Pasta as family brands and to broaden Bella Pasta’s appeal, while the smaller names in the deal would carry on as niche brands, the Morning Advertiser reported; Health Club Management carried the same account of the sale on 6 June 2002.

Bella Italia under Tragus and Casual Dining Group.

The name Bella Italia arrived soon after that sale. English Wikipedia says the Bella Pasta chain was rebranded in December 2002, with the first fully branded restaurant opening in Leeds. Tragus Holdings was later renamed Casual Dining Group, the same source says, and the chain sat in that group beside Café Rouge and, later, Las Iguanas and Belgo.

Holiday villages became one of its settings. In 2007 Tragus signed a concession agreement with Center Parcs UK and Ireland that brought Bella Italia restaurants to the Elveden and Whinfell villages, according to English Wikipedia, and in 2016 the Strada restaurants at the Sherwood and Longleat villages were rebranded as Bella Italia. In September 2012 the chain joined the Nectar loyalty scheme as a partner where members could spend points, the same source says.

The group’s run ended in 2020. On 2 July 2020 Casual Dining Group, owner of Bella Italia, Café Rouge, Las Iguanas and Belgo, went into administration, with the advisory firm AlixPartners appointed to handle it, The Guardian reported that day. The company said 91 of its 250 outlets would stay permanently closed because buyers did not want every site. Bella Italia accounted for 35 of those closures and Café Rouge for 32, while Las Iguanas shed 11 sites and the airport brands Huxleys and Oriel were also closed, the newspaper said. The closures included a dozen airport restaurants, four of them at Heathrow. The group had warned in May 2020 that administration was likely after all its sites were temporarily shut, and the administrators expected the group to be broken up and its chains sold to new investors.

Italian chains on the British high street.

Britain’s Italian restaurant chains tend to tell their stories through a room and an oven. Pizza Express traces itself to a single pizzeria on Wardour Street in Soho, opened in 1965 with an oven brought from Italy, according to accounts in MCA and Restaurant Online in 2018. Franco Manca, which began in Brixton Market in 2008, says its founders built their own oven there before opening anywhere else.

Menus and naming are usually plain. Dishes are listed by ingredient and region rather than by invented brand names, and some chains publish where those ingredients come from: Franco Manca’s pages run through its flour, tomatoes, cheeses and coffee one by one. Restaurant names lean on a founder, a place or a simple description; Franco Manca, the company says, means “Franco is missing,” after the man who ran the market pizzeria before it.

The corporate pages tell a second story, about owners. Many of these chains have passed between founders, stock-market listings and investment firms. In 2014 City A.M. noted that the private equity firm Cinven’s Gondola group ran Pizza Express alongside Zizzi and ASK Italian; Franco Manca was bought by the listed group Fulham Shore in 2015, and Fulham Shore by the Tokyo-listed Toridoll in 2023.

Restructurings are part of that record too. Company voluntary arrangements, which let a business close restaurants and reset its leases with creditors’ approval, were used by Pizza Express in 2020 and announced by Franco Manca’s owner in 2026, according to trade press reports. Each guide in this series sets out what can be checked about a chain, who founded it, who owns it and what has changed, and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

A 2020 pre-pack and a wider family of brands.

The chain kept trading. On 3 August 2020 Restaurant Online reported that the private equity firm Epiris, a former backer of TGI Friday’s, had acquired Casual Dining Group in a pre-pack administration deal overseen by AlixPartners. The Bella Italia, Café Rouge and Las Iguanas businesses moved into a new company called The Big Table, run by the existing management team, and more than 150 restaurants from the old portfolio carried on. Epiris said the new name referred to an internal culture programme at the former group, the report added. The new business carried no external debt, and its restaurants began reopening across the UK the following week.

The Big Table Group has since widened around Bella Italia. In September 2023 it took on The Restaurant Group’s Leisure Division, 75 sites mainly trading as Frankie & Benny’s and Chiquito, which took the group from 158 to 221 restaurants, Restaurant Online reported on 25 June 2025. The same report listed the group’s brands as Bella Italia, Las Iguanas, Café Rouge and Banana Tree, and named brand conversions and digital marketing among its recent investments. English Wikipedia describes Bella Italia as a chain of more than 90 restaurants in the UK and Ireland whose menu combines pizza and pasta, its main focus, with grill and speciality dishes and Italian wines, many from smaller producers.

For a design guide, Bella Italia shows a name that has passed through several owners and two renamings since 1991, built by its 2002 buyers as a family brand; compare Frankie & Benny’s, its stablemate inside The Big Table Group, and Pizza Hut, one of the brands Whitbread chose to concentrate on when it sold Bella Pasta in 2002. For this guide we use tomato red, pine green and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bella Italia’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.