Newton Abbot’s Beefeater restaurant, The Grandstand, is set to close early in July.

The Whitbread-owned venue, which opened in January 2012, is one of 238 of the group’s restaurants earmarked for closure over the next two years.

Whitbread said plans for The Grandstand restaurant ‘are subject to consultation’. Staff are likely to find out if they can transfer to other roles within the business on Friday (June 14). However, a Whitbread spokesperson confirmed that the neighbouring Premier Inn hotel at the racecourse site ‘will indeed be staying open’.

The Whitbread spokesperson continued: ‘We recognise that this will be unsettling for our team members, and we are providing them with dedicated support.’ The company added that it is ‘committed to working hard to enable as many as possible of our affected team members to stay with us by either transferring into new roles, or by taking up other vacancies across the business more broadly through our existing recruitment activity.’

Earlier this year, Whitbread announced plans to sell 126 restaurants as ‘going concerns’ and its intention to replace a further 112 restaurants with guest-only facilities. The hospitality group said it would convert existing restaurant space into additional guest rooms and build new restaurants inside its hotels.

The company explained that the performance of some of its branded restaurants had failed to ‘meet their targeted levels of return’ due to ‘a reduction in footfall from non-hotel guests’.

The hospitality group plans to focus on growing its more profitable Premier Inn hotel brand while ‘evolving’ its food and drink offer.