By the end of 2014, the Staniforth Road store was turning people away on weekends. The team had maximised the space as much as physics would allow. The decision to open a second location was not purely commercial — it was about capacity for the community, and about proving that the model could travel.
Choosing London Road
London Road was a different proposition entirely. It sat in a more established dining corridor, with footfall that included students, families, and the kind of late night crowd that had money to spend and nowhere quite right to spend it. The unit was larger, which meant a fuller menu and a sit down experience that felt closer to a proper dessert restaurant than a parlour.
“The second store taught us that we were not just a Darnall thing. We were a Sheffield thing.”
The interior was a step forward too. More seats, better lighting, and the beginnings of the visual identity that would later become the Rassam signature: bold colours, clean lines, and a warmth that could not be designed but had to be earned.
Learning to Replicate Quality
The biggest lesson from London Road was operational. How do you run two kitchens and ensure that a waffle on Staniforth Road tastes exactly the same as one served three miles away? The answer involved training protocols, standardised recipes, and a level of quality control that the original single store had never needed to formalise.
Those systems, built out of necessity in 2015, are the same foundations that now support fourteen locations across three countries. The second store was where Rassam stopped being a restaurant and started becoming a brand.
