2020: a chef’s diary
Two years ago, in December 2018, I was driving across the country when my car was hit by an HGV. I was spun through 90 degrees, pressed up against the front of the lorry and shunted several hundred metres up the road at fairly terrifying speed until the truck’s brakes finally brought us to a stop. While holding the steering wheel tight I was struck not only by the inconvenience of the situation, but also the overwhelming powerlessness, and the strange sensation of travelling forwards whilst facing in completely the wrong direction.
I was a little shaken but the car was still drivable so I returned home, booked a train ticket and headed for the cooking demonstration I was due to give later that day. I have almost no recollection of the journey there or the engagement itself and in fact, were it not for a publicity photograph I would doubt that it had ever taken place at all. But at no point did I consider cancelling: it’s an unspoken rule of my profession that you extract yourself from the weeds in whatever way you can, and get the job done even if the route you must take is an unconventional one. Moreover, I needed the money: a self-funded restaurant build was several weeks behind schedule and seriously over budget.
Vanderlyle interior, March 2019. Photograph by Charlotte Griffiths
March 16th 2020 Fifteen months later and that restaurant, Vanderlyle, is exactly a year old. We have been full for every service since opening and are consistently booked out three months ahead. Our vegetable-focused, no choice tasting menu has begun to attract national attention, and our approach to balancing life and work has resulted in a small, but fiercely talented team. I am standing in the dark with my business partner and fellow chef, Lawrence Butler along with our general manager, Sam Adams and my wife Charlotte Griffiths. Less than an hour ago we watched, blindsided, as the Prime Minister told the public not to go out to pubs or restaurants but, staggeringly, did not order those businesses to close.
Like schools, restaurants are unsettling when they are silent: their essence lies in the familiar sounds of hospitality. Cancellation requests have already begun to fill our inbox and we know we have to make a decision. Our reservations system, Tock, requires that guests pay in full in advance to secure their booking, like tickets for the theatre. This has been working brilliantly but now presents us with an unforeseen problem: the prospect of having to issue tens of thousands of pounds in refunds, far more than is in our bank account.
Having seen national lockdowns shutter restaurants across Europe, we are almost certain that the UK will follow suit. Rather than place what could become unnecessary orders for food and wine, we pull the plug and decide to close. First thing in the morning, Alice Park, our assistant manager, will call all the reservations that we have for the coming week and ask them if they would like to move their booking, or would prefer to have a refund.
A few hours later, we are back. It is daylight and the space already looks less like a restaurant and more like the operations room it will become. Overnight, I’ve realised that doing nothing is not an option. Not only would it be financially disastrous, we also have full fridges. We hit upon the idea of creating a short menu of dishes that can be taken away, reheated and eaten at home, alongside pantry staples, bottles of wine and local beers, and organic veg boxes to help our supplier, whose restaurant customers had, like us, cancelled their orders overnight. We envisage a pop-up shop with produce laid out on tables for customers to browse whilst they wait for their order to be prepared in the open kitchen.
Vanderlyle team, March 2020 L-R Alex Rushmer, Camila Marcias, Alice Park, Sam Adams, Lawrence Butler, Jo Kruczynska. Photograph by Charlotte Griffiths
I also have a list of phone calls I need to make: to our accountant, to our landlords, to our insurance company and many more. Anticipating a lengthy time on hold, I begin with HMRC, and am brought to tears when I finally get through to a woman with a gentle Manchester accent who tells me not to worry, that outstanding payments can be deferred, and to concentrate on salaries. Further relief comes with the announcement of the furlough scheme which, mercifully, means we don’t have to make any redundancies.
Late that night - mid afternoon Chicago time - Sam and I join a video conference call with Nick Kokonas, the founder of Tock, where he reveals that they are rushing forward the release of new software, Tock To Go which, although unpolished, would immediately enable us to become a takeaway and keep serving. He advises us to keep our offering as simple as possible, giving examples of restaurants in the US who had been overwhelmed with complicated orders after they put their entire menus online. We decide to scale back our offering, reject the shop and focus on what we call Vanderlyle To Go.
Two days later we are the first restaurant in the country to be listed on Tock’s new homepage. In a moment that makes me catch my breath, we are featured alongside restaurants and chefs that I have admired from afar for many years including Alinea and Manresa. Our opening menu is hearty comfort food that we hope retains some essence of the kitchen it is from: smoked yellow pea hummus, butternut squash & mushroom lasagne and lime & basil tart suggested by our incredibly talented pastry chef Camila Marcias who is just 48 hours into her new job with us. These exquisite, handmade creations are worthy of a Parisian patisserie’s window, and yet they are destined for cardboard clamshell boxes: just one of the many types of packaging that are building up in drifts around the restaurant.
Less than 24 hours after Boris Johnson finally tells all hospitality businesses to close, we hand over our very first bag of takeaway food and resolve to stay open seven days a week until we are told to stop. That stubbornness carries us through even when the first full national lockdown is announced and, rather than asking people to leave their houses, we load up our cars and drive the meals to customers through deserted streets, placing paper bags onto door steps rather than plates on tables.
Some of our usual suppliers stop delivering so trips to the cash & carry, which now has bouncers on the door, become a daily occurrence. Local pubs and restaurants that are closing offer us the contents of their fridges and soon we are one of the only businesses still trading. We are buoyed by the support we receive from local customers, many of whom, in an act of incredible kindness, refuse our offer of a refund and continue to reschedule their bookings. Our meals sell out in seconds but we are quickly at capacity, both in terms of what the kitchen can cope with and what we can cope with.
Lawrence Butler, March 2020. Photograph by Charlotte Griffiths
Nevertheless, we cook our way through lockdown, changing the menu once a fortnight and keeping the dishes a secret. This allows us to continue surprising our guests, but also enables us to make small changes when we run out of supplies or realise that one of our hastily constructed recipes doesn’t quite hit the mark. We introduce gluten-free and vegan options to mirror more closely the menu changes we were able to make as a restaurant, and find a way for Sam to start making and bottling his soft drinks pairings to match each dish. In a symbolic moment, we pack away our plates, and repurpose some shelving to store the thousands of foil containers, paper bags and plastic pots that we now need. We invest in an extra fridge to house the massive quantities of food and borrow industrial-sized pieces of equipment from chefs with closed restaurants. We are swiftly realising there is a huge difference between cooking and catering.
Sam Adams, March 2020. Photograph by Charlotte Griffiths
It’s now early summer and gloriously hot. The end of lockdown is rumoured and then confirmed, but with it come new restrictions that make reopening virtually unworkable for Vanderlyle. I also have concerns about the impact of test and trace on restaurants, and am worried about the prospect of a resurgence of the virus in a few months. I explain these concerns in a blog that quickly goes viral and the next two days are spent being interviewed by press, radio and TV, as well as receiving dozens of messages of support from others in the hospitality industry who are publicly excited to open but, privately, are as worried as I am.
An unexpected consequence, and undoubted highlight of the summer, is a review of our new picnic boxes in the Sunday Times, which appears just as our resolve to remain shut is being tested. Although the whole team agree that takeaways are still the best course of action, fuses are inevitably getting short and tensions mounting as a result of seeing restaurants around us open up, feeding the public’s appetite for helping out by eating out. ‘We’ve gone from looking like pioneers to looking like stick in the muds,’ says Sam, with a level of frustration that we all appreciate.
Inevitably, bookings slow down, and what used to take minutes to sell out now takes several days. At every staff meal we return to the question of whether we should open and if so, what that might look like. We have the same conversation dozens of times a week with customers and have to find new ways of saying the same thing: we’re just waiting to see what happens when the students return to the city; we can’t make the business work financially for dining-in under the current restrictions; we’re worried about the winter. Lawrence summarises it best: ‘Whilst there is so much that is out of our control, why would we give up the one thing we do have control over?’
Meanwhile, across the country, case numbers are gradually increasing and a second lockdown seems ever more likely. When it comes, we sigh deeply and push on, and, although we decide not to reintroduce the delivery service, the rise in bookings is swift and it becomes clear that our takeaway is a lockdown product. We also need to make a decision about December, and Christmas. Ordinarily, we might consider opening up for an extra couple of services a week or squeezing in another table to help the finances ahead of a quiet January. These options are evidently impossible, so instead we add new items to the menu: handmade chocolates and a breakfast bag with granola, clementine marmalade and a loaf of treacle sodabread. By the start of November, we know that we won’t be opening the restaurant again this year.
Soon, there are just a couple of working days left. We send the final Vanderlyle To Go meals of 2020 out of the restaurant on Christmas Eve, before taking a break. In total we have had less than ten days’ holiday since January, and the wear is beginning to show: not just on our little kitchen but on our hands and faces, and somewhere in our souls.
Vanderlyle Team, December 2020 L-R Camila Marcias, Alex Rushmer, Lawrence Butler, Sam Adams. Photography by Charlotte Griffiths
Chefs open restaurants because they believe in hospitality, in the importance of celebrating moments with great food and wine. That is our destination. Back in March we were spun off course by forces far more powerful than we could fight against and we - like so many other industries - had to accept the things we could not change and quickly find an alternative route to where we wanted to be.
Vanderlyle has been incredibly lucky so far: we have been able to adapt, and make our own decisions at every juncture. Though it isn’t a version of hospitality any of us would have recognised, we’ve managed to make it work: we’ve catered lockdown weddings, graduation celebrations on Zoom, remote office Christmas parties or simply served dinner when people couldn’t face the prospect of cooking. We’ve shared our food with a far wider community than we ever expected, and have been overwhelmed by support, seeing the same faces order week after week and month after month.
At some point, we will re-open. At some point we will put our food on plates, instead of into paper bags - but the winter months are yet to come, and there is no neat ending on the horizon just yet, especially on the eve of a third full national lockdown.
All we can do is pull together, push ahead, and hold on tight.