Pizza Express - Gondola Group

Gondola Group is the leading UK casual dining group operating PizzaExpress, ASK, Zizzi, BYRON and Kettner’s, together with a number of smaller brands.
 The Group employs approximately 16,500 people, serving over 40 million meals a year in over 600 restaurants. 


Gondola’s distinct main brands have broad customer appeal and lend themselves to different occasions:

• PizzaExpress: the nation’s favourite pizzeria
• Milano: PizzaExpress brand in the Republic of Ireland
• ASK: the local Italian restaurant with a trattoria feel
• Zizzi: a special experience, with truly memorable Italian food
• BYRON: great quality hamburgers in chic yet comfortable surroundings
• Kettner’s: iconic Soho champagne bar and restaurant

Much of Gondola’s online marketing presence and web expansion can be attributed to their strategy of consolidating all websites and services with one supportive and responsive hosting provider. Previously, Gondola’s sites and services were hosted by a multitude of digital design agencies supporting each brand. This caused challenges for the internal IT support teams and often led to confusion when dealing with the various service specifications, support agreements, contract terms, pricing and platform infrastructure.

An Internet presence for our key brands is invaluable to us. We needed to consolidate our services with one trusted service provider who was able to fully understand both our technical and business requirements whilst being quick to respond and flexible enough to deliver the right solution in a timely manner. In addition, we needed to ensure that system down time was kept to an absolute minimum and we haven’t been disappointed since choosing Sleek Networks in 2008.

John Sullivan IT Director – Gondola

“An Internet presence for our key brands is invaluable to us. We needed to consolidate our services with one trusted service provider who was able to fully understand both our technical and business requirements whilst being quick to respond and flexible enough to deliver the right solution in a timely manner. In addition, we needed to ensure that system down time was kept to an absolute minimum and we haven’t been disappointed since choosing Sleek Networks in 2008.” John Sullivan IT Director – Gondola

The solution Sleek delivered was based on Multiple Managed Servers, running Linux and Windows on HP Proliant architecture, protected by Cisco Firewalls and supported by a highly professional service management and technical team. Sleek are considerably flexible when designing a customer’s architecture and boast an experienced technical team that focuses on finding a solution to a problem as opposed to raising an objection or working within the tight confines of a contract. From an application management and technical support aspect, Sleek has ensured Gondola hasn’t had one minute of unplanned downtime, which is truly impressive.

Gondola’s customer’s expect to be able to see the myriad of menus online, check location details, opening times, make bookings and search for current promotions, with an expectation that the website is always available online.

Nick Williams is Operations Director at Sleek, “We are delighted to partner Gondola Group and ensure their leading brands are highly visible and always available through our Managed Hosting Solution. It is hugely important to us that we are recognised as the hosting partner of choice by the application developers and web experts that create incredibly complex and reliable eCommerce sites for clients throughout the world. Working with household names such as PizzaExpress and ASK is of huge benefit to us. We have a very strong working relationship with Gondola and I hope that this will continue into the future.