Green Shoots

Three weeks ago we reopened the doors after our summer break and it's fair to say things have moved at some pace since then!

A whole new menu. Not just the dishes, but the look and feel of it too. An overhauled dinner menu with more dishes than we've ever offered before. A completely restructured lunch. Repriced cocktails, a tweaked wine list and...most challenging of all...a new approach to the way we course dishes, talk about the menu and serve our tables.

Behind the scenes, the amount of work required to bring all of this together has been considerable. New dishes for the kitchen to learn and for the front of house team to understand and explain. New ways of approaching tables. New questions to answer...and some new answers to old questions.

We are, as ever, incredibly grateful to our amazing team!

Against the backdrop of all the usual trials and challenges of restaurant life, they have brought a level of positivity and professionalism that is a constant source of inspiration. The ability of skilled hospitality professionals to move seamlessly from difficult conversations and balancing spreadsheets into coaching sessions with the team and then straight into the complexities of a busy service...it never ceases to amaze us. It's also a fairly emphatic rebuttal to those, often politicians, who persist in describing hospitality as a low-skilled sector. It is anything but.

The thinking behind these changes is something we wrote about at length a couple of weeks ago. The financial situation underpinning all of it is something we've tried to be open about too. So we won't repeat all of that here.

What we will say is this: three weeks in, the overwhelming emotion is relief.

These past few weeks have been good.

Not stellar. Not spectacular. But good...and given where we were standing a few short weeks ago, we will absolutely take good.

The feedback, both in person and online, has been really encouraging. Some of the new, lower-priced mains have been a genuine hit. The £25 set lunch on Fridays and Saturdays has gone down well. And...perhaps unsurprisingly...£5 cocktails have proven extremely popular.

One swallow does not make a summer. Things remain genuinely tough and the line we're walking is a tight one. But we're a few steps further along than we were. There are chinks of light where a few weeks ago there were none.

If you haven't yet had the chance to come and see what's changed, we'd love to see you. And as always, we'd love to know what you think.