I've always been a bit of a food snob. It's probably taken me quite a while to work this out, but there, I'm admitting it. From a very early age, influenced by many different friends and family, I had a desire to create food that had a level of honesty about it. It might just be fish pie, or roast dinner or even bangers and mash, but reaching for the Bisto or Oxo cubes or Chicken Tonight never featured in my culinary repertoire. Ever since I had free reign of my very own kitchen in my own house the use of such evil additions was strictly forbidden. Oven chips? Get out of here.
When it came time to look at transferring my culinary expertise, to enable me to craft food for paying customers, I desired the same approach for everything I did. Of course, for that sort of thing I really should have considered running a restaurant, not a pub. But to run a restaurant you need to be a real chef, whatever one of those is. Hence, one reason for buying a pub, as opposed to a restaurant; the food doesn't need to be as fancy.
I set about producing pub grub with the level of honesty that I believe in. It didn't matter if it was chips or custard or gravy it would be made from scratch, and really I do mean from scratch. But just how far do you take that?
I used to make a great lasagne. I even started to use fresh tomatoes so determined was I to get it right. One day a member of staff asked why, if I was so keen to make everything from scratch, I still bought in dried pasta. "Go on, answer that one" I thought. The answer had to be to make my own pasta, didn't it?
We made our chips from scratch. I've
written about that before. When done right, and I don't care what anybody says about Burger King
1 skinny chips, proper double fried chips are the best. But can you have chips without ketchup? Many people can't and so my answer had to be to make my own. Oh, and of course brown sauce had to be an option too, it is after all, just a variation of the same thing.
After a while delivering bog standard pub grub, in the sort of volumes required and with the liberal giving away of home made tomato sauce tag-lag
2 was wearing me down. I decided I was going to raise my game and make restaurant style food anyway. It would seem the level of provenance I was looking for didn't match the desires of the pub grub customer. Around the same time we had a big disagreement with Coca-Cola
3 over fridges and post mix machines
4 and decided to radically review our position.
What we decided was that we were never again going to buy any product from any company that we didn't feel had a level of honesty behind it. That ruled out Coca-Cola, Heinz and nearly every other big name in the beverage and food business. That effectively rules out ketchup and HP sauce. WE DON'T BUY THESE THINGS.
"But you are a pub, you have to" I can hear you thinking "Why?" is my reply. Why do I have to conform to some sort of unwritten rules about the condiments I put on the tables or the type of soft drinks I have on stock, or for that matter any other products I buy for consumption in my place? You can be guaranteed that whatever you get to eat and drink in my place has a level of provenance behind it. Some of my customers don't like that and don't come back; others are coming back time and again. Word is spreading and there is a tangible increase of sympathetic custom.
My last post talked about cordial in beer. We don't have cordial. It's crap and only tastes moderately good when it
is put in beer and then only because beer is good. Same applies to the chemical lemonade that comes out of post mix machines. We now stock the Fentimans
5 range of fizzy drinks, including their Victorian Lemonade in lieu of any other lemonade, it's great.
That leaves us with the quandary of shandy. Fentimans' lemonade when mixed with beer does make for an interesting drink. It's not wrong if that is what you are expecting. On a hot summer's day, on the odd occasion it happens, there is an influx of people wanting shandy. It doesn't really happen any other time. Taking time to carefully explain that the shandy they would get by mixing a half pint of beer with the lemonade we have might not produce the desired effect, but the customer can try if they wish, doing this time and time again, does wear a little thin. We tend to steer them to the Fentimans bottled shandy and decline any other type of beer mixed with soft drink. Sometimes a customer assures us that they know what they are doing and that is fine.
The reader by now will have realised my snobbery has infiltrated my whole operation here. Why does that matter? I don't think it does matter if that is what I believe in. I'm not making any more money than when we started here, but what is important is that we are not making any less either. What we are doing is running our business in a way that makes us happy, and in a year where businesses are going under tag-lag, and where the summer has yet again dealt us a blow, to be doing alright must mean we're doing something right.
More importantly we are running a business in a way that makes me proud. We use products that we trust and believe in. We trade with people who are honest and who in turn buy products from companies that operate with a level of respect. At a time when business infrastructure is backed up by governments scared to stand up to the multinationals, when large companies can be bailed out because they are so "necessary" to the very fabric of our society, I'm proud to be delivering a service that has little truck with all of that.
That my friend, is what I'm about, take it or leave it. Compromise? Nah. I'd like to think that someday more pubs will be like this.
Now, how do I make that obvious before customers cross the threshold?
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1Nearly left the "r" out of "burger" there...
2Tag-lag is a rarely used Cumbrian term to mean; in abundance, all the time or willy nilly perhaps. It's also a beer we sometimes have on the bar.
3Coca-Cola are one of those things that seems to have created a "must be there" culture within pubs. They are a great big multinational conglomerate that has no place in my pub, sorry. Don't even start me on Pepsi.
4A post mix machine is what delivers draft fizzy drinks.
5I thought Fentimans was made in Newcastle. Of course as Ann is from the N.E. I knew that there are some good things that come out of that part of the world. It turns out that at least some of the range is brewed at the Robinsons' brewery in Stockport. It's difficult to think what to write here without it sounding like a back handed compliment to Robinsons. It doesn't matter, the product is good and if it keeps a brewery going then good for them too.
