Sexy Fish's Decade-Long Arbitrage: When a Restaurant Becomes the Trojan Horse for a $1.9B Sovereign Wealth Exit

A Mayfair seafood restaurant filled with Damien Hirst bronzes and Frank Gehry fish lamps became the anchor asset in Abu Dhabi's near-2 billion dollar roll-up of British luxury hospitality.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Strategy • 2026-06-17

In April 2026, an Abu Dhabi investment platform controlled by one of the most powerful men in the Gulf paid $1.9 billion for a majority stake in a British restaurant empire built by a man who made his first fortune importing cheap clothing from Hong Kong. The deal's centerpiece was never the financial engineering. It was a 190-seat dining room on the corner of Berkeley Square, decorated with a pair of bronze mermaids, a 13-foot mirrored crocodile, and 19 fish-shaped lamps hanging over a bar that holds the world's biggest Japanese whisky collection. That restaurant, Sexy Fish, opened a decade earlier inside a defunct NatWest banking hall, and it had quietly become the proof of concept for an entire category: the dining room as a permanent, ticket-free museum exhibit, engineered to do the work that advertising used to do.

The Transaction

DIAFA, the Abu Dhabi luxury-hospitality platform affiliated with International Holding Company, completed a majority investment in British billionaire Richard Caring's hospitality portfolio in April 2026. The deal, reported at $1.9 billion (GBP 1.4 billion), brought The Ivy Brasseries, the Caprice Holdings restaurant portfolio (Scott's, Sexy Fish, Noema), and The Birley Clubs private members' empire (Annabel's, George, Harry's Bar, Mark's Club) under a single Gulf-controlled platform. DIAFA is chaired through its parent, IHC, by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi, the UAE's national security advisor, and the younger brother of UAE president Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. IHC itself is the largest listed company on the Abu Dhabi exchange, with a market capitalization that has been reported above $230 billion and total assets exceeding $450 billion, two thirds of it controlled by the Abu Dhabi ruling family's Royal Group.

Caring, 77, will remain executive chairman, a structure DIAFA has used before. The agreement was the culmination of a sale process that had dragged on since late 2023, when Caring first put a stake in the Ivy Collection up for auction at a valuation of roughly GBP 1 billion. Talks resurfaced in September 2024 and again went quiet, until the Financial Times reported in mid-2025 that Caring was in advanced discussions specifically with an entity controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon. Ravi Thakran, the former chairman of LVMH's Asia business and founder of L Capital Asia, was installed as DIAFA's group chief executive to run the combined platform, with Ashley Saxton, formerly director of restaurants at Harrods, as global F&B chief executive.

The financial structure underneath the headline number reveals how unevenly the empire's parts were performing even as the price tag rose. Troia UK Restaurants, the holding entity that houses Sexy Fish, Noema, Harry's Bar, George, and Mark's Club, reported adjusted earnings of GBP 58 million on turnover of GBP 303 million in its most recent financial year. Caprice Holding specifically, the entity that owns Scott's and Sexy Fish, posted a pre-tax loss of GBP 5.9 million in 2023 even as revenue climbed from GBP 74.3 million to GBP 97 million, a swing driven by energy costs, supply chain pressure, and interest rate hikes eating into a business that was simultaneously opening new sites, including a Sexy Fish location in Manchester. The Ivy side of the business, by contrast, grew pre-tax profit from GBP 29 million to GBP 37.6 million on revenue of GBP 314.7 million while trimming headcount by roughly 300 jobs. A sovereign-backed buyer was willing to pay a near-2 billion dollar valuation across a portfolio where one flagship brand was burning cash and another was printing it, on the bet that the brand equity, not the trailing P&L, was the asset being bought.

The Room That Became the Argument

Sexy Fish opened on October 19, 2015, inside a former NatWest banking hall on the southeast corner of Berkeley Square. Caring commissioned Martin Brudnizki Design Studio to gut the space and rebuild it around an aquatic theme, with floors laid in roughly 100 tonnes of Iranian Esmeralda onyx, raspberry leather banquettes, an internal water wall behind the bar, and a hand-printed ceiling mural by Michael Roberts, Vanity Fair's style editor-at-large, designed to evoke a coral reef. The interior was reported to have cost around GBP 12 million, making it one of the most expensive build-outs the West End had seen at the time.

What made the room newsworthy, rather than merely expensive, was the art commissioned specifically for it. Damien Hirst contributed three site-specific pieces, including a pair of patinated bronze mermaids that flank the bar and a large bronze relief depicting a mermaid and a shark, conceived as a callback to his own 1991 work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Frank Gehry, the architect behind the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, designed the largest single-venue installation of his Fish Lamp sculptures ever assembled, 19 of them suspended above a red stone bar counter, alongside a 13-foot mirrored crocodile that appears to crawl across the north wall. Downstairs, a private dining space called the Coral Reef Room houses what is reported to be the world's largest coral reef tank in a restaurant setting, along with its own dedicated bar.

None of this was incidental decoration purchased after the fact to dress up a finished restaurant. The art was commissioned as part of the build, by named artists with global reputations, sized and placed to be photographed, and the bar's separate claim to holding the world's largest Japanese whisky collection outside Japan was assembled with the same instinct: spectacle as a load-bearing element of the business model, not garnish on top of it. A restaurant industry that had spent decades competing on menu and service was shown a different lever entirely. Caring understood that a dining room could function as content before "content" was the word anyone in hospitality used for it.

Caring's Long Game

Richard Caring did not start in restaurants and did not start rich. Born in Finchley in 1948 to an Italian-American GI father and a Jewish immigrant nurse mother who met while he was recovering from a war injury, Caring began working at 16 and later joined his father's dressmaking business. In 1971 he visited Hong Kong and recognized that local manufacturers could produce garments at a fraction of British labor costs if someone taught them to hit Western quality standards consistently. He spent a year living out of a hotel suitcase, running the same garments through production over and over until the quality held, then built International Clothing Designs around the relationships that resulted. By the 1980s, ICD was reportedly supplying up to 70 percent of the clothing sold by household names including Marks & Spencer, Next, and Mothercare. Caring moved his family permanently to Hong Kong in 1979 to run the operation directly.

The pivot into hospitality came two decades later, financed by the fashion fortune and accelerated, by Caring's own account, after he survived the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. That year he bought a 20.6 percent stake in Camden Market for GBP 45 million and partnered with hotelier Surinder Arora to buy Wentworth Golf Club for GBP 130 million, GBP 50 million above its book value. Wanting better food at his new golf club led him, in 2005, to approach his favorite restaurant, Le Caprice, owned at the time by restaurateur Jeremy King's Caprice Holdings. Negotiations deteriorated to the point that Caring later joked it was cheaper to simply buy the whole group, which is what he did, for GBP 31.5 million, picking up J Sheekey and Daphne's in the same transaction. He added The Ivy and fish restaurant Scott's that same year, then bought the Birley Group, including Annabel's and Mark's Club, in 2007, shortly before its founder Mark Birley's death.

By 2024 the Ivy Collection had expanded to 46 sites across the UK, turning a single Covent Garden address into a platform generating roughly GBP 250 million in annual revenue, and Caring had already shown he understood the exit as well as the build: he co-founded Cote Brasserie in 2007 and sold his majority stake in 2013 in a transaction valuing the chain at GBP 100 million. In 2019 he sold a 25 percent stake in Caprice Holdings to Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar, a transaction that in hindsight reads as a dry run for exactly the kind of Gulf sovereign capital relationship that would eventually buy him out entirely. Caring built Sexy Fish in 2015 as a single, spectacular bet on the proposition that a restaurant could be a museum people paid to eat in. A decade later, that proposition is the reason Abu Dhabi paid what it paid.

The Buyer's Bigger Bet

DIAFA was not improvising when it wrote the check for Caring's portfolio. The previous year, the platform had already taken a stake in Azumi Group, the operator of Zuma and Roka, two restaurant brands with their own track record of treating design and atmosphere as core product rather than backdrop. At the time of that investment, DIAFA stated its ambition was to become the world's largest food and beverage business, a claim that read as aspirational hyperbole until the Caring transaction arrived and made it look like a stated thesis being executed step by step. DIAFA's broader holdings also include the Los Angeles-based h.wood Group, owner of Delilah, The Nice Guy, and Bird Streets Club, giving the platform a foothold in the same theatrical, see-and-be-seen hospitality category on the American West Coast before it ever touched London.

The growth mandate attached to the Caring deal is explicit and immediate rather than aspirational. DIAFA and Caring have committed to opening Annabel's in New York, the private members' club's first move outside the UK, alongside continued international expansion of Scott's, Sexy Fish, and Noema, brands that had already tested the format abroad with Sexy Fish locations opening in Manchester, Dubai, and a 10,000-square-foot Miami outpost inside the Brickell Flatiron tower that reportedly carries its own roughly $20 million art commission from Hirst and Gehry, including a 23-foot octopus and an 88-foot bronze wall relief. The Ivy brand, which had stayed almost entirely domestic for two decades, is now explicitly being assessed for entry into the United States.

The macro logic DIAFA is betting on has data behind it. Boston Consulting Group's "Luxe Redux" research, conducted with Ipsos and the International Luxury Business Association across twelve developed and emerging markets, found that experiential luxury spending had grown roughly 50 percent faster than spending on luxury goods, and that experiences now account for close to 55 percent of total luxury spending worldwide, with luxury experiences alone representing more than $770 billion against roughly $350 billion in luxury cars and the remainder in traditional goods categories like watches and handbags. Bain and Altagamma separately described 2025 as a year of "tectonic shift" toward what they termed experiential indulgence over conspicuous consumption, with luxury hospitality and fine dining outperforming luxury automotive and apparel even as the broader personal luxury goods market stayed roughly flat. DIAFA's wager is that this shift is not a passing preference but a structural reallocation of where wealthy households spend, and that the format Caring pioneered at Sexy Fish, a destination dining room engineered as much for sculpture and spectacle as for food, is the most exportable unit of that reallocation.

The Inversion

The conventional version of this story in luxury retail runs in one direction: a single global brand builds an architecturally extreme flagship, often by a name-brand architect, to defend its market position in a specific city. Louis Vuitton's program of Frank Gehry-designed flagships, including its Seoul Maison, follows that logic precisely, a fashion house spending heavily on one extraordinary building to protect share against rivals doing the same thing down the street.

What happened with Sexy Fish and the DIAFA deal runs the other way. A restaurant operator built a single, theatrical, art-stuffed dining room as a one-off bet on whether spectacle could replace advertising as a customer-acquisition engine. It worked well enough that the format got cloned across an entire portfolio, Scott's, Noema, Annabel's, George, each with its own version of commissioned spectacle and members'-club exclusivity, and then the whole cloned portfolio got acquired wholesale by a sovereign wealth vehicle that is betting the format scales as a category, not as a single trophy asset defending one city's market share. The room was never the product. The room was the prototype for a business model that a $230 billion holding company decided was worth buying in full, art collection, whisky cellar, coral reef tank, and all.

What happens next will test whether spectacle travels as well as Caring and DIAFA are betting it does. A bronze mermaid and a mirrored crocodile read as novel on Berkeley Square partly because nothing else on that block looks like it. Multiply the format across New York, Miami, and wherever Annabel's lands next, and the same commissioned excess starts to read less like a singular cultural moment and more like a luxury chain's house style, the exact outcome the format was originally built to avoid looking like. Sheikh Tahnoon's platform has the balance sheet to find out either way.