SHELF LIFE
Xanthe Clay meets the chefs-turned-shopkeepers who have come up with a winning new recipe
For Helen and Kris Nathan at the Kings Arms at Mevagissey, a harbour village on the south coast of Cornwall, March 20 was a dark day. “I sat in the corner of the pub and watched Boris Johnson announce that all hospitality businesses had to close after service. I burst into tears,” recalls Helen.
Overnight, however, the Nathans’ found their mood transformed. “We woke up on the Saturday morning, moved the counter in front of the door and I crossed out the word ‘pub’ from the sign.” The King’s Arms already had a couple of shelves of wine bottles for “off sales” and offered a sporadic selection of bread and pastries to take away, but from now on the business would be sustained by these dalliances with the world of retail.
The wine list went from a range of 10 to 100, they branched out to selling other deli products including olives, charcuterie, capers, flour and yeast, as well as whole lobsters from local fishermen. Meanwhile Kris – a self-taught baker – settled into 18hour days spent providing a full range of baked goods, from pasties and sausage rolls to sourdough, croissants and fruit tarts. The Kings Arms Bread and Wine was born and, although the pub and restaurant has reopened with limited hours, the shop has become the core of the business.
It’s a story replicated across the country. During lockdown, pubs and restaurants turned from pouring drinks and plating dishes to stacking shelves and stocking other people’s larders – and found they liked it. Chefs such as Adam Byatt, who opened a temporary community store in his London restaurant Bistro Union during lockdown and will soon open a permanent shop. Jess Fisher and Mark Dickey, of Liverpool’s Belzan, started a bottle shop and deli (caramelised cauliflower butter, yes please) and now run it alongside their reopened restaurant. In Belfast, Bob and Joanne McCoubrey of Mourne Seafood Bar turned over the business to wet fish sales, from the shop, and also as click-andcollect, and are launching courier delivery next month.
The driver for this new business model isn’t simply a desperate effort to keep the cash flowing, as Freddy Bird, chef and owner of littlefrench restaurant in Westbury Park, a leafy suburb of Bristol, explains. He is on the brink of opening a deli, bakery and wine shop, after he successfully pivoted his restaurant space into an impromptu lockdown food shop, with sacks of flour stacked on the floor, bottles of olive oil on the blue leather banquettes and boxes of vegetables displayed on the polished wood tables-for-two.
The impetus for him came the day before lockdown, when, as he remembers, “the writing was on the wall. We were all terrified, shutting everything down. I was on the phone to my butcher and he said, ‘I’ve got quarter of a million pounds’ worth of beef hanging in a cold room and 95 per cent of my trade is restaurants’. Imagine how that feels. I said, ‘I can’t do much, but how about I take some
‘I wanted the people I’m supplied by to be there on the other side. We’re nothing without them’