Month: October 2012

How did all this get started?

Well I’ve been in the food industry since about the age of 21 and I had my first business when I was 26. I had a restaurant and wine bar, after that I had a delicatessen with a big element of cheese in it and then in 97 I started the Cheese society. It was the start of the internet, I started doing mail order really prior to any other people doing it I think, and the rest as they say is history.

Did you start as a delicatessen and move into the café?

I had a delicatessen on the Bailgate, sold that, and ended up eventually on the Allenby estate, literally just did cheese by mail order, people kept dropping in and buying cheese so really it developed itself. When I bought this side of the property, I decided to open a shop on the Friday and Saturday, which got a bit busy, then the next door came up so I bought that as well. I decided it was quite big to fill with cheese, so I decided to open up the cheese café. To me cheese is such a great vehicle for recipes and menus; it’s something I’ve had in mind for a long time so it just developed from there.

Why did you decide to focus on cheese?

Because it’s a living product. I wanted to focus on something supermarkets don’t compete with, because we go for farmhouse unpasteurised cheeses mainly; supermarkets tend to go for things they can refrigerate with very consistent quality. Our quality is excellent but we buy unpasteurised, which means you get seasonality in your product. You’re not buying a block of cheddar that’s going to taste the same this year, next year, all year round, we sell cheddars that will be different every 2 or 3 months and that’s the point of difference. Equally, the people you deal with are incredibly nice as well. And it’s interesting, I find the whole thing absolutely fascinating, I constantly learn and I don’t think I’ll ever get to the end of that to be honest.

Are there a lot of local cheese producers in Lincoln?

Not Lincoln itself no, I think we’ve got maybe four at the moment but we buy from the whole of the UK and from France, so we’ve got plenty of options.

How do you deal with buying cheese from France?

I use an agent and put an order in maybe once a month and then they deliver to me by one of the refrigerated couriers, quite nice, it gives us a bit of impetus. It changes the style of the fridge because normally we would probably have about 70% British and then 30% continental. Then when we get a French order in and because we buy quite a lot, we maybe shuffle it up a bit and we have maybe 60% French and 40% British. So it depends on the time of the month really.

Do you know how to make cheese yourself?

I do, I’ve been on two cheese making courses and I’ve made it quite regularly. I wanted to do it so that I knew the science behind the cheese making and also I did it for my own interest, it’s a fascinating process, pure alchemy this one.

Have you ever thought about expanding your business?

I don’t think I’m quite the right age to be doing that now, no it’s busy as it stands, the café’s very busy. The only thing I might think about doing is maybe making the café a bit bigger and taking the cheese out and separating that off and having a slightly bigger shop for that. That would be an option.

How many customers would you say you have in a day?

It varies. It depends on the day of the week to be honest, at lunch times here we normally turn the tables three or four times and we’ve got 22 seats and then, on the Saturday we’ll do that six or 8 times depending on the weather and whether there’s a lot of sport on the television. Most of our cheese sales are online, so we pack cheese and send it out Monday to Thursday with a next day courier. I would say the cheese counter is probably the busiest on a Friday and Saturday, but equally we sell to local restaurants, we sell to Michelin star restaurants, we’ve sold to film sets so we’ve got quite a wide customer base.

So there’s no one type of customer you have?

No no mixed, you should never keep your eggs in one basket, or your all cheese on one cheese board.

What have been your challenges in setting up and running the business?

I suppose staff really, more than anything else. I think anyone in a small business will tell you staff is the main problem because, as you take another step towards getting a bit bigger you have to employ people then you have to stop what you’re doing and train people, at the same time you’re still having to market your business, you’re having to pay the bills, pay the VAT, the wages, all the other things that go with it. It goes in a bit of an up and down cycle. Yes I think the problems for most business owners would be staffing it, but when you get them right and they stay with you for quite some time, then it’s not bad at all.

Have there been times when you’ve thought “this isn’t going to work”? what was it like selling your own house to start the first business?

I had no doubt whatsoever it wasn’t going to work, no.

So you’ve been confident all the way?

Totally, I’m quite confident in my own abilities to run a business; it’s not as if it was my first business either. It was my third business after the wine bar and the delicatessen, so I felt I’ve got a good track record.

Have they all been in Lincoln?

Yes, Straits wine bar which was just around the corner has recently changed hands, I bought that when it was an art gallery. Then Comestibles I bought when it was a deli from the lady that owned it. This place was my parents’ corner business and I bought the property from them, which is why I sold the house, because by the time I’d had the builders in and knocked it about, I wanted to hedge my bets.

Finally, how did you come up with the name?

The Cheese Society? Well there didn’t seem to be anybody else using it, and it looked to me like a pretty unique name. It’s been fantastic, it’s been a great business name, it couldn’t be better?

What would you say the future holds for you?

Well, the area of growth is the mail order and that would be the bit I would like to push. If I could possibly find a really good courier that went overseas into Europe I think we could hit Europe quite hard with British cheeses. There are so many British people over there that want British cheese, there’s so many French people that are starting to love our style of cheese as well. As they say, the world’s your oyster, it’s sitting there waiting really, so that’s the element I would like to go for, bigger on the mail order. That’s where you can always do it; you can always start work earlier in the morning it doesn’t make any difference.

So obviously you got your start in the restaurant business with your time on Masterchef, so why did you decide to apply to Masterchef in the first place?

I don’t know, because it was there I suppose, does that make any sense? I didn’t really have any plans the first time I applied to go on the programme for it to be a life changing thing, it was just an itch that needed scratching. I’d watched the programme for many years and, like a lot of people no doubt, thought I could do better and actually quite liked the idea of the challenge and err yeah.

So at what point did you decide to start this restaurant then?

It really was from when I entered a professional kitchen through Masterchef that made me think, “I want to do this”. In the process of doing reasonably well last year I just kind of started thinking do you know? This could actually make a change.  Because it’s an amateur competition when you get exposed to professional kitchens I was just completely bitten by it. As soon as you get in, the heat, the ferocity of it, the push, the stress, it was like “wow, this is great!” I’ve always had the cooking bug, but the cooking bug as far as I want to cook in a restaurant rather than for friends and family.

So how did you acquire this place?

Well, we’re actually sat in an Italian deli called “The Taste of Italy.” “Pompeo” owns the Taste of Italy and whilst Masterchef was being filmed and also whilst it was just starting to get shown on the telly, Pompeo and I got to know each other and we started doing a series of pop-up restaurants here where you just create a kitchen for the night and do an event. They went well and continued to go well, and eventually the two of us said, “Look why the heck don’t we get a restaurant going?” Six months from that decision we’re sat here now in “The Bronze Pig” which is still a deli during the day and at night time it becomes the Bronze Pig”, British food with a European Twist.

It’s an interesting name, “The Bronze Pig”. How did you come up with it?

Well….I wanted a name that could mean anything. There is a Bronze Boar in Florence, in Firenze, where I love to go and lots of tourists rub its nose. It’s a place you have to go to, you know, when you’re in Florence. Also I’ve got a sort of little lucky half an Irish “D” with a little pig on the back of it, and it’s just all those things mixed in together. Pompeo and I just wanted to come up with a name that could mean everything, anything or nothing at all. We thought it sounded like a strong name that could mean anything.

So all the food you serve here, all the ingredients are locally sourced?

Yeah, the menu changes with the seasonality of the food. Obviously there are exceptions to that rule, I haven’t seen a vanilla pod tree growing in Lincoln of late, but where we can we source locally. We use local butchers, local fishmongers, for instance we’ve got beef fillet on the menu at the moment and I could take you to the field where they’re growing in. How far their food’s travelled, let alone where it’s been bought up, how it’s been brought up is becoming increasingly important to people and rightly so. I think the least you can do with a beast if you’re going to kill it and eat it, is Look after it while it’s alive and give it the best.

What do you enjoy so much about cooking?

I think it’s as much the process as the end result; alchemy’s a very good word for it. Yes you start off with six or seven ingredients all of which have a flavour, a taste and depending on how you cook them and what quantities you put them together in, if you’re lucky, you can create something a little bit special. And a lot of people, myself included will say that sometimes you have no idea how.

So do you have a signature dish or something you most like to cook?

We’ve only been open for seven or eight weeks, so it’s a little too early to be talking about signature dishes. There are a couple of dishes which, the moment we take them off the menu, regulars are coming in and saying: “get that back on again.” But as far as food I like cooking, I like anything that’s fresh. Obviously I love cooking with fish, my time on Masterchef people saw me blooming covered in mackerel week in week out. It would have to be fish, but no it’s a tricky one to answer.

You said in an interview with Radio Times that your earliest memory was eating pilchard pizza, but what is your favourite food

There you go, back to fish again. Well you see that pilchard pizza actually, my mum used to make that. She had a family of four to bring up and it was a very cheap way of giving us nutritious food. She was working as well so it was a quick dish and to be honest if you gave it to me now I’d thank you for it. There’s something about it which is actually rather nice. But as far as fish now is concerned, crab I suppose. I’d say my favourite seafood would have to be crab. I don’t know what I’d do if crab didn’t exist.

So overall you’re just a big fan of seafood then?

Yeah, and I find myself living in Lincoln in Lincolnshire miles away from any coastline really. Yeah, I am a big fan of seafood. We’ve got relatives in Cornwall and every time we go down there it’s just fantastic, literally pulling mussels off the rocks and eating them raw.

So what has been the biggest challenge so far in running this restaurant?

That’s a good question, the biggest challenge in running the restaurant. Well obviously I co- run it with Pompeo. Pompeo deals with front of house, I’ve just been dealing with settling into a kitchen that’s new to me and when it gets busy, because of the size of the kitchen it can get a little ferocious in there.  Keeping that control on every single plate of food that goes out, that’s my biggest challenge.

You’re getting good reviews; I’ve heard good things about this place.

That’s very kind of you. We’re passionate about food, passionate about service and we just want people to come here and thoroughly enjoy themselves. You’re only as good as the last plate of food that went out, but of course we’re nothing without our punters so we’re eternally grateful to them. We just hope they keep coming back.

What are the main kinds of clientele that you get?

Hopefully happy ones, contented punters.

What do you think the future holds for you and Pompeo and your business?

Well we always said that we would stay here for a year and, at the end of the year if we didn’t kill each other, we’d sit down and see what we’d do, whether we’d stay, whether we’d move on, whether we’d separate but so far so good. I think we just want to concentrate now on the next year, I’ve got my ideas but I’ll keep them close to my chest for the moment.

So you just want to take it a year at a time?

That’s right, one thing I will say, The Bronze Pig isn’t a cathedral to food where you speak in hushed tones and gasp at the plates as they show up. It’s a place where we want people to come and enjoy themselves and god forbid but have a laugh. We’re just going to concentrate on spending the year really honing that, you’ve got to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run.

Okay, thanks for talking to me.

Adam that’s not a problem mate, anytime at all. You can come in and have a taste of the food, see what we’re about.