Three Michelin-trained chefs quit restaurants for wholesale pies

Three chefs with combined résumés spanning Bibendum, Sketch and Holborn Dining Room have launched The House of Pies, a wholesale business supplying British pies to stadiums, restaurants, events teams and corporate hospitality operators.

The joint venture pairs Calum Franklin, the "pie king" and former executive head chef at Holborn Dining Room inside Rosewood London, with Hervé Deville, former executive chef at the three-Michelin-starred Sketch in London, and Paul Shearing, former senior sous chef at the two-Michelin-starred Bibendum.

For Franklin, the move converts a personal brand built on the Pie Room into a business-to-business production model. He opened Holborn Dining Room in 2014 and its dedicated Pie Room in 2018, after earlier posts at the Ivy, Chapter One and Aurora. Wholesale shifts the economics: instead of one kitchen serving one dining room, the same recipes now scale across multiple venues and client brands.

What is on the menu?

The signature range runs from pork birria with queso sauce to dauphinoise potato, caramelised onion and comté. The lineup signals menu engineering aimed at premium buyers rather than the traditional steak-and-ale base — birria and comté command food-cost headroom that stadium concessions and corporate hospitality contracts can absorb.

Franklin announced the launch on Instagram: "Extremely exciting news alert! We have been working hard for the last year building our new business and are finally ready to release it into the wild."

He added that the business was "built around craftmanship, great ingredients and passion for tradition" and that The House of Pies "develops and produces pies for stadiums, event team, hospitality and brands."

Where did the idea come from?

The venture arrives roughly a year after Franklin partnered with chef Pip Lacey and contract caterer Company of Cooks to open a pie restaurant within the Guinness Open Gate Brewery in London in December 2025. That project marked his first London restaurant following the end of his partnership with Harrods earlier that summer.

Shearing worked alongside Franklin at the Guinness Open Gate Brewery site, most recently and directly. The third partner covers that ground already.

Who are the partners?

The trio's training grounds carry weight in London fine dining. Saint-Étienne-born Deville trained under Claude Legras at Le Floris in Geneva, then served as sous chef at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud in Dublin — Ireland's first two-Michelin-starred restaurant. Shearing honed his craft at Bibendum before four years as head chef with Gordon Ramsay, then rejoined Franklin at the brewery site.

The pattern is familiar: elite restaurant credentials, redirected at volume production. Stadiums and events run on consistency, shelf stability and portion control, not à la carte improvisation. Whether Michelin-honed technique survives that translation at scale will determine if The House of Pies becomes a supplier of note or a celebrity-side project. The trio has spent a year building the operation before going public, which suggests they know the difference.