Introducing the Brightside of the Road

Brightside is bringing proper hospitality back to roadside dining. Inspired by childhood road trips of days gone by, where the highlight of the journey was a stop at a roadside restaurant, Brightside offers a freshly cooked menu full of classic, comforting dishes, including a tasty brunch menu, brilliant burgers and proper pizzas, with lots for little ones, and plenty of vegan and gluten-free options.

Our first restaurant opened back in February 2023 on the A38, just outside of Exeter in Haldon Hill – opposite Exeter Racecourse. We opened Brightside Saltash on the A38 Trerulefoot roundabout in June of that year, quickly followed by Brightside Honiton on the A303 later that Summer.

To find out more about the inspiration behind Brightside, here’s Alex Reilley – Loungers Co-founder and Chairman.

“I have incredibly affectionate memories of visiting the likes of Little Chef and Happy Eater when I was a child with my family. Those visits were my first real exposure to hospitality, and they whet my appetite for hospitality, albeit probably fairly unknowingly at the time, because I was nine or ten years old.

“We used to travel a lot from Leicester, where I’m originally from, to Suffolk, to see my great-grandmother, and the highlight of the of the weekend was stopping at Little Chef on Friday night for tea on the way there, and again on the way back on Sunday evening. So I’ve always had this fascination with this idea of a roadside restaurant where people stop either as lone diners, as families, or to meet with others. When Little Chef sadly closed it left a real void, as there was no one else really doing roadside restaurants.

“From that point on, I had a bit of an itch – I thought there was room for a reimagined roadside restaurant concept that is fit-for-purpose for the twenty-first century. I felt it an opportunity to effectively apply our expertise to a roadside location.

“I felt that there were lots of elements of what we do in both our Lounge Café Bars and Cosy Club brands that would be very transferable to a roadside concept. However, I felt it needed to have its own sense of identity, especially being in a location where the challenge is very different to that of a high street. When you’re looking to try and capture people’s imagination as they travel past pretty quickly, you need a recognisable brand presence. From that point onwards, we decided that we needed to draw upon the positive operational expertise we had, but with a real sense of this new brand being its own thing.”