Be At One’s Rhys Oldfield on making ‘cocktails for the masses’
Rhys Oldfield co-founded the wildly successful Be At One chain of venues and is now building up his Saviour Bars concept, which has bought several former Brewdog sites.
*This feature was originally published in the May 2026 issue of The Spirits Business magazine.
One titan of the UK bar industry is hoping to make the most out of the demise of another. That’s a very dramatic way of introducing Rhys Oldfield, who co-founded the Be At One group of cocktail bars in 1998. He sold the chain to Stonegate in 2018, and has now snapped up some former BrewDog sites for his Saviour Bars group.
Anyone who’s spent a Friday night in a city centre will be aware of Be At One. “People either loved or hated Be At One,” Oldfield says. “Some of the drinks were a bit disco, a bit kitsch, but fundamentally, it was the experience that customers wanted and kept coming back for time and time again. You left feeling like you’d had a good time, and you got value for money.”
The group was co-founded by Oldfield, Steve Locke, and Leigh Miller, all three of whom had cut their teeth at TGI Fridays in the 90s. They took lessons from the chain but ditched the Americana, buying a site in London’s Battersea Rise – which remains a Be At One venue.
The brand grew to 35 sites by the time Stonegate came knocking, with Oldfield believing its success was down to its ethos of “great drinks and great people”.
Doing something right
He says: “It’s all about the people. It’s about who’s standing in front of you, engaging and hosting. Human engagement is the difference. What makes a great drink is a bigger question – but it’s all about the experience. There are some bars where you can have fabulous drinks and a miserable experience. Lots of bars come and go, but
Be At One is still there 28 years later. We were doing something right.”
One thing he believes he got right was the decision to forgo food, sport, and draft beer. “Lots of people couldn’t quite understand it,” he says. “This was a time when it was all about Jamie’s Italian and Gourmet Burger Kitchen. But when it comes to food, if you sell a lot of it, you can make a lot of money. If you sell a little bit of food, you will lose a lot of money.”
While he admits he made mistakes, he has no regrets about Be At One, or his exit. “I was very fortunate to watch Covid from the outside,” he says. “Be At One would not have survived Covid [as an independent business].” Many UK hospitality venues relied on the Eat Out To Help Out scheme, but with Be At One not serving food, its sites remained closed for much of 2020. Venues with large outside areas also benefited from guests choosing to social distance – again, not a reality for most of Be At One’s sites.
The current landscape for the on-trade is very different to when Oldfield left Be At One in 2018, and worlds apart from when he launched the brand three decades ago. “In 1998, people wouldn’t recognise a Mojito or a Cosmopolitan,” he reminisces. “The Met bar on Park Lane and the Atlantic in Piccadilly were a big thing in the 90s – these high-end cocktail bars. We tried to be the antithesis of that. We wanted to be cocktails for the masses.”
Now there are plenty of venues that do the same. “We created that kind of ‘let your hair down’ happy hour,” he says. Today, though, Oldfield is 30 years older and more grown-up, and he hopes his venues will match. “I’m trying to do great drinks but a bit more sophisticated and in a better environment,” he says. “The competition is much stiffer. You need to be better than the next guy, and that’s what keeps us on our toes.”
Saviour now has six venues, with two sites in Wokingham, Berkshire, and Horsham, West Sussex, having launched the brand in April 2023. “Those are going very well. We’re doing double what the sites were doing when we bought them,” he reveals.
A site on Northcote Road – in London’s Battersea, just like Be At One’s first venue – became available a few months later. Oldfield is a Battersea local and had a relationship with the landlord, who contacted him when negotiations with the former tenant – BrewDog – went sour.
His next conquests were also former BrewDog sites – a coincidence, but a straightforward one if you consider the large number of sites made available following that brand going into administration in March. “I’m not a big fan of BrewDog, and I never was,” Oldfield says. “I think, with all due respect, they should have stuck to brewing. The sites were not in great shape, and the staff were not happy.” Getting those sites back into shape has been his priority, with Bristol already operational. “It’s a small pub, very similar to what we’ve done,” he says. “Bath is a bit more of a bigger animal.”
The Basingstoke site, however, is more of a daytime venue and is likely to skew more food-led. That may go against the ethos he employed at Be At One, but he’s keen to do what’s right for the site and the circumstances. “It frightens me, food,” he laughs, pointing to the possibility of underselling and wasting stock – issues not faced by wet-led venues.
Hire the right people
Other parts of Saviour are almost directly lifted from Be At One. “On the front page of the menu, it says: ‘Our job is to host and engage.’ That is what it’s all about,” he says. “You have got to have the right people.” In that respect, he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is, paying staff appropriately and offering bonuses where necessary. “I’d rather pay the right people more money because they will do twice the job of somebody who’s not engaged,” he says. “If people have a bad experience, they’ll tell a friend, and they won’t come back.”
Staff turnover at Saviour is low, with Oldfield claiming a big part of that is down to trusting them to be a real part of the business. “Get them involved in stock taking and ordering. Talk to them about sales, gross profit,” he says, adding that the benefits of retention aren’t just an easier life. “It makes life cheaper, because you’re not constantly recruiting and training.”
While he’s kept some of the fundamentals from his Be At One days, Oldfield is under no illusions that Saviour’s trajectory will be the same – and he’s keen to avoid the pitfalls that have hit operators like BrewDog. “I want to make a living, but I want to produce something great,” he says. “We doubled in size in the past two weeks – will we double in size in the next three years? That would be an achievement.”
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