itsu Brand Guidelines: A 1997 Chelsea Shop by Pret’s Co-Founder & a Supermarket Range

A second chain from the co-founder of Pret.

itsu — the company writes its name in lowercase — was founded by Julian Metcalfe, the co-founder of the sandwich chain Pret A Manger. English Wikipedia says he started it in partnership with Clive Schlee, and that the name is the Japanese word for “when.” The first restaurant opened in Chelsea, London, in 1997, according to English Wikipedia and Restaurant Online, which wrote in July 2024 that Metcalfe launched the chain there following the success of Pret.

The company tells its own origin story in the first person on its website. Metcalfe says he first visited Tokyo in the winter of 1994 and came back wanting to build a new kind of food place; itsu Chelsea opened in 1997 and a Soho site “a few years later,” the company says. The same page heads itself “its’our story,” one example of the way the brand plays with its own name, apostrophes and square brackets in headings.

Until 2013 every itsu was in London. English Wikipedia and Restaurant Online both date the first restaurant outside the capital to 2013, in Oxford. English Wikipedia adds a first northern English site in Manchester’s Spinningfields district in January 2016, followed later by Leeds. When the chain opened in New York in June 2018, Eater New York counted more than 70 itsu locations across the UK.

Restaurants abroad, on franchise.

The New York opening, in Midtown Manhattan in June 2018, was itsu’s first location in the United States, Eater New York reported, describing an Asian-inspired grab-and-go menu of sushi rolls, udon noodles, rice bowls, salads and wraps. English Wikipedia notes that by June 2026 the company’s own website listed Brussels as its only location outside the UK.

Expansion on the continent came through franchising. In November 2021 RetailDetail reported that itsu was opening at Brussels Airport, in Terminal B, with the travel caterer Autogrill as its first franchise partner in continental Europe; the restaurant had 46 seats and a takeaway counter. In December 2022 QSR Media UK reported the first itsu in France, near the Champs-Élysées in Paris, run with the restaurant operator Groupe Bertrand, and put the group at 78 franchised and owned restaurants in the UK and EU, nine of them franchised.

Scotland followed in March 2022, when the Daily Record reported the opening of the first Scottish itsu in Edinburgh’s St James Quarter, with a menu of 52 dishes including sushi, dumplings, bao, hot noodles and rice bowls.

Ownership changed in June 2021. The Caterer reported that the investment firm Bridgepoint, which had once held a stake in Pret A Manger, was taking a minority stake in itsu; at the time itsu had 74 restaurants in the UK and was building new ones in Reading, St Albans and Holborn, as well as in Belgium. The Grocer reported the same deal as “a significant minority stake.” Restaurant Online still described the chain as Bridgepoint-backed in July 2024.

The estate kept its London weighting. English Wikipedia counts 76 itsu restaurants in England in 2022, 54 of them in London, plus the Brussels Airport site, and the Evening Standard wrote in March 2023 that there were 40 itsus in central London and 79 worldwide. The chain mixes company-owned and franchised restaurants, English Wikipedia says, and much of its trade has been lunchtime takeaway: the Standard described its sushi boxes as a staple for office workers eating at their desks.

British fast-casual chains.

Britain’s fast-casual and restaurant-group chains sit between the quick-service counter and the traditional sit-down restaurant. Many of them began as a single London room and grew into groups of dozens or hundreds of sites, and their identities are built as much from the room, the menu and the tone of voice as from a logo. Wagamama’s website, for example, describes its format through communal benches, open kitchens and food served in bowls as soon as it is ready.

The format often comes from somewhere else. Some chains borrow a setting from abroad — a Tokyo ramen bar, a Bombay Irani café, a street-food stall — and rebuild it for British high streets, shopping centres and railway stations. The restaurant guide Harden’s, writing in 2018, credited one such chain with popularising communal, canteen-style dining in Britain. Others are built around a single dish, such as a burger, a bowl of noodles or a plate of sushi, and keep the menu short enough to repeat across many sites.

Naming is usually plain and descriptive. Dishes are listed by what they are, sometimes in the language of the food’s home country, and restaurants are named after their street or district. Some groups give each site its own story or decorative theme; others keep every branch close to a single template so that a guest knows what to expect anywhere in the estate.

Ownership is part of the story. Founders often appear on the companies’ own pages, while trade titles such as Restaurant Online record the private-equity owners, listed groups, takeovers and restructurings that follow. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and where it trades — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the shop counter to the supermarket freezer.

The itsu name also sits on supermarket shelves. English Wikipedia says the brand moved into retail in March 2012, when Metcalfe’s Food Company launched it under the name itsu [grocery], keeping the square brackets that run through the company’s writing. By 2021 that business included a frozen gyoza range and a line called Brilliant Broth, The Grocer reported in June 2021, when itsu made its debut in supermarket chilled food-to-go: a noodle pot called Lucky Katsu Hotsu’Potsu went into Tesco, and Bao’Buns and Gourmet’Gyoza into Waitrose. Metcalfe told the paper the range answered customers asking to buy restaurant products in supermarkets. The Grocer also linked Bridgepoint’s 2021 investment to the growth of the grocery side.

The restaurants have kept changing too. In March 2023 the Evening Standard reported that the itsu on Hampstead Road, near Regent’s Place, had reopened as a 96-cover dine-in restaurant serving only steamed hot food — bao, dumplings and broths — with no sushi; Metcalfe told the paper that sushi had been the bedrock on which itsu was built. In July 2024 Restaurant Online reported that itsu had appointed the property firm Savills to look for sites to double its estate of about 80 stores, with a focus on larger flagship restaurants the company calls “temples” in busy city centres.

The verbal identity is part of the brand. Product names join words with apostrophes — Hotsu’Potsu, Bao’Buns, Gourmet’Gyoza — and headings use brackets and run-together words, while the company name itself stays in lowercase.

For a design guide, itsu shows how one consistent verbal style can carry a brand from shop fascias to supermarket packs. Compare Pret A Manger, the sandwich chain Metcalfe co-founded, and Wagamama, another London-born Asian-inspired chain. For this guide we use an ink plum, a rice white, a wasabi green and a miso amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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