Did you know? ‘Waiter! Waiter! There’s a fly in my truth.’*
2 . When a restaurant opened in London in 1995 under the name, Rajamama, the owners of Wagamama successfully sued its owners, City Centre Restaurants, for passing off.
3. Tracey Emin once paid for an evening meal at a City of London Wagamama with a sketch drawn on the back of one of its menus. The drawing is now framed and hangs on the wall of Wagamama at Old Broad Street.
4. Although ‘wagamama’ can be translated as ‘naughty child’, it has wider uses in the Japanese language and can be applied to adults to mean, ‘selfindulgent’ or worse, ‘selfish, egocentric, insistent on having one’s own way.’
6. Since selling the Wagamama chain in 1998, its creator Alan Yau has never eaten there nor set foot in one of its restaurants. ‘The past is the past,’ he has said. ‘It’s like, would you have dinner with one of your ex-girlfriends?’
5. When Alan Yau launched Wagamama, he and his father provided 60% of the £500,000 it required.
*The Tracey Emin sketch/meal transaction is pure fabrication. Number three is misleading to say the least.
1. In 2008, Wagamama won the Evolution trophy at the Peach Factory awards for established businesses that continue to evolve successfully. It was described by judges as, ‘a textbook case study of how to handle growth.’
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