Italian restaurant finds generous helpings of pasta goes down well with middle class
Back in 1998 it looked as if Andy Chworowsky and his partners could not have picked a worse time to open a restaurant. It was the middle of the Asian financial crisis, but with hindsight, Mr Chworowsky thinks the timing was in fact just right for a restaurant serving large helpings of inexpensive pasta.
There were three partners in Fat Angelo's: Dale Willetts, Mr Chworowsky and another who has since left. The trio looked at the local Italian restaurant scene and spotted a niche in the market. 'At that time Italian was popular here but most were at the top end, like Va Bene; alternatively there were places like Belladonna and Spaghetti House,' Mr Chworowsky says.
The team decided if they could find a large venue in a shoulder area they could create a destination restaurant - styled Fat Angelo's, the name embracing the idea of generous helpings of pasta like Mama makes.
Their first restaurant, the 4,000 square feet Fat Angelo's in Jaffe Road, Causeway Bay, was an instant success. 'When we opened people would come up to me and say how are you doing this? They'd had their fill of food, wine and beer for $150. The same experience had cost them three or four times as much elsewhere,' says Mr Chworowsky.
Their target market was local diners. 'We knew we had to do that to succeed. Because of the high cost of advertising we wanted a local word-of-mouth sort of place so our obvious largest segment was middle-class people with money to spend. And that's proved to be 90 per cent of our business.'
