THE chip shop has a noble place in Italian-Scots history. It provided generations of Italian families with a good living and generations of Scots with a welcome tightener on the way home from the pub.
Many outfits, like Glasgow's Jaconelli, the Nardinis of Largs, and Stirling's Corrieri, became household names in their own right, but many also remained family concerns, rooted in the areas they first served.
Angelo Varese, however, has different ambitions. The owner of the Blue Lagoon brand already has a chain of nine fish-and-chip shops stretching across west central Scotland, which he is now planning to expand even further using an informal franchise system.
The plan seems to be working so far. The group has a turnover of [pounds]3.5m with "excellent" profit margins, employs up to 140 people and is debtfree.
"I'm looking for the right people in the right areas to take the brand forward, " he said in his small office at the back of the busy chips-with-everything restaurant underneath the Hielan' Man's Umbrella in Glasgow city centre.
"I don't want to expand too fast - I've seen what happens when people try that - but I envisage a steady progress, with the shops opening up when everything is just right."
Varese has just launched the ninth outlet, a shiny modern restaurant in the entertainment heartland of Sauchiehall Street which cost [pounds]100,000 to fit out.
It is destined to serve the hordes of clubbers who pour out on to the streets in the early hours of the morning and, like his other city centre outlets, will stay open till 4am.
It is a different city centre from the one in which Varese's father - who, unlike many other restaurant families in Scotland, did not come from Barga, in Tuscany, but La Spezia, between Genoa and Pisa - opened the doors of the first Blue Lagoon in the 60s.
"When he started serving in our first shop in Sauchiehall Street, there was hardly anywhere else in the city centre to eat. The restaurant was right beside the bus station and people would pour into it coming and going, " said Varese.
The formula is one that he has stuck to. "All the shops are on a high street or a main drag, with a good flow-through of people and cars, " he said. "Ideally they should be close to where people are waiting for buses or trains, and to places where money can be made at night-time, like off-sales, 24hour newsagents or pubs and clubs."
Varese, who joined the business 25 years ago when he was 18, has seen - and seen off - the rise of kebab shops, big-gun chains such as McDonalds, Burger King and Pizza Hut and, more recently, the proliferation of Greggs sandwich shops.
He admits it was the chains that pushed him down the expansion road, with the acknowledgment that economies of scale would work as well for him as they did for them if he could get the right people.
"I have the city centre shops pretty well tied up myself, but the outlying shops are franchised. One, in Howard Street, has been franchised for 10 years now, " he said.
Perhaps franchise is too formal a word, suggesting as it does strictly-worded contracts with targets, penalties and tightly-delineated budgetary constraints.
"So far, I have given the chance to run their own outlet to people who I know and who have worked for me, " he said.
"They don't pay an upfront fee, and for the first four weeks they pay me nothing. This lets them get established.
"Then, when we see how things are progressing, we agree a 'franchise fee', or rent, if you like.
"They become self-employed with their own accounts and VAT number and we provide them with back-up, the value of the brand name, and the benefits of bulk purchase. If it isn't working after a year, we part company amicably."
Varese is reluctant to talk about target numbers of outlets and is aware that if he takes on untried franchisees he will have to institute a more comprehensive and formal vetting process, with contractual backup.
But he is convinced that his three sons, the oldest of whom is 17, will be running a substantially-bigger Blue Lagoon group when they come to take over.
"That's who I am doing it for, " he said.
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