Gino D’Acampo, the signature face of ITV’s This Morning cooking segment, is seemingly facing severe cash flow issues. D’Acampo currently operates eight restaurants around the UK, but his company ‘Gino D’Acampo Worldwide Restaurants’ is facing four years of losses, including a loss of £2.9 million in 2019, £3.1 million in 2020 and a total debt of £7.6 million overall. This forced co-owners Sir Malcolm Walker and Tarsem Dhaliwal (heads of budget supermarket Iceland), to bail out the chain with a loan of £7.125 million prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Individual Restaurants Limited, the company Sir Malcolm Walker and Tarsem Dhaliwal used to bailout Gino D’Acampo, reported in its accounts a pre-tax loss of £10.2 million between 2017 and 2019.
This is not the first time D’Acampo’s restaurant empire has faced money problems. His set of ‘My Pasta Bar’ restaurants also accumulated £5 million worth of debt, leading to borrowing on a huge scale to try and solve the problem, primarily from businesses related to Walker and Dhaliwal.
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D’Acampo appears to be unfazed by the state of the two businesses, having opened the Luciano at the ME London hotel on the Strand in partnership with Melia Hotel International. He has also opened other restaurants with the hotel business, such as First Street Bar & Kitchen in Manchester.
D’Acampo’s partnership with Melia Hotel International has allegedly led to tension between the Italian chef and the Iceland owners, with a source stating that the situation “is pretty fraught given the losses and the fact that he’s gone away opening these restaurants with someone else now”. However, Steven Walker, managing director of ‘Gino D’Acampo’s World Restaurants’ has stated how the bailout “was a simple transaction” and that “the restaurants have been trading well since they have reopened.”
In other celebrity culinary news, Paris Hilton is the face of a new Netflix show ‘Cooking with Paris’.