Part 11. Knit One, Purl Two.

A couple of days before opening the restaurant, Dillon the driver and knitting patterns. Plus, a recipe for Savoy cabbage and mature Cheddar pudding with sticky ale.

Right, lets go again, its a good ’un! You’re now reading about the final week before we opened to the GP, and believe us it was a busy one. The results of Donna’s Bric a Bracking and auction house finds were making their appearance, bubble wrap off and ready to garnish the restaurant.   

We hung clipped edge mirrors, rescued from car boot sales and charity shops, onto the freshly painted walls. Then old pictures in oak frames were placed in the spaces between them. A Dutch cigar retail marketing box, found a little home in the men’s toilet, because men like smoking cigars. And some 60’s knitting patterns were hung in the women’s loos, because women like knitting. Only joking, it’s the other way around. 

Actually, we remembered something recently, a diner once told us that she recognised her grandmother in one of the retro knitting patterns. Turns out her granny was a fashion model and often featured on knitting patterns. Isn’t that nice? Of course, Donna gave her the knitting pattern as a little gift.

Strangely, on numerous occasions the knitting patterns would disappear from the loos during service, strange that isn't it! We took it as a compliment, although the cigar box remained in place, probably because it was screwed to the wall.

Donna sketched out a table plan with numbers, and an order of service to follow, to help service go smoothly. A table for two in the window, a four in the other window, and a mix and match everywhere else. I spent hours in the kitchen preparing the dishes, from memory, cabbage for puddings, banana chutney, cinnamon butter and loads of other stuff which have melted from memory after twenty years. So all in all it’s going pretty well. 

So, just in case you haven’t been following, we would be open for lunch with a simple menu, and evening with a more adventurous menu, like the French bistros of old. A lot of work, but we figured tourists wanted a quick lunch, and evenings were for something a bit more special. So, we’re focused, and nearly ready, it’s taken a number of months to get to this point, and a pallet load of Pot Noodle lunches.

Then, on a particularly ordinary day,  there was a knock on the door. A quick peer behind the sheets of the Evening Gazette stuck to the window, and we see that it’s him, donkey boy. AKA, our alcohol licence solicitor. We welcome him in, and see that he has that apologetic look on his face, so we know something is wrong. After much stuttering and back peddling, it appears that he has managed to have the office turned to restaurant use, that’s good, but he’s struggling to get the alcohol licence in time. He assured us it would be ready, but not by the 2nd of December, two days away, our opening day. But more likely the week after!

We were feeling quite dandy now, the restaurant was looking good and we felt positive, so we forgave him and let him loose. But he promised to have the license in place very soon.

Now, to give you an idea of how strongly we wanted to shed the stereotype, which was padlocked to vegetarian restaurants, we didn’t want to open on an evening without an alcohol licence, if we did, we could hit the Bring Your Own, BYO, subject. The practice of bringing your own booze to a restaurant. You see, BYO was strongly associated with vegetarian restaurants, no idea why, something to do with saving pandas. We were OK with opening lunchtimes without alcohol, but evenings, no.

Plus, restaurants rely on selling alcohol to make money, yes that’s right, restaurants are a business, and need to bring in the cash.

So that’s how determined we were, we could not follow the same path as others. We would open lunchtimes, only for a week, then after that, we would open evenings also.

This was a bit of a hiccup, but we put a positive spin on it, and saw it as a way to ease ourselves into the swing of things.

So we cracked on with operation Open Day. Drinks arrived which were loaded into fridges. Locally brewed ales were displayed on the bar, so people could Ohhhh and Ahhhh. But they couldn’t drink them for a week.

The furniture arrived, ready for action after its little holiday in a warehouse in Hartlepool. A small selection of vintage, Country Life magazines, were hung on a wall so that people could look at the  property pages and say, “Wow, look, you could buy a mansion house for twenty four quid in 1972”.  We woke the boxes of crockery, cutlery and glasses form hibernation. Donna said we should wash everything, I disagreed, it had been wrapped up and nobody had touched it, so there was no point.

But she insisted, but was then a bit miffed when it came to the cutlery, every single item was wrapped individually. Fun and joy. Let’s not ramble on any more about this stuff, but yeah, we were garnishing the restaurant ready for opening.

But wait a minute, quick funny story. There was an intercom system installed in the property, it was there when we took over, it was controlled by a keypad in the office, or kitchen as it had now become. What it was supposed to do was this. Let’s just say that Dillon the delivery driver is dropping off some, errrrr, potatoes. He can’t see anyone in the restaurant, and the door is locked. Now, Dillon just wants rid of these spuds, so he presses the intercom button, then someone hears a buzzing in the kitchen, asks who it is, realises it’s Dillon, then presses a switch and the door opens. There we go Dillon, drop of those spuds lad.

But it didn't work. The only thing it did was allow you to hear Dillon speaking at the door and you could speak to him, it didn't actually unlock the door.

Now that's not funny, but what we ended up using it for, was funny. We had put a menu up in the window of the entrance lobby, just so people knew what they were getting themselves into. Now, when people were looking at the menu, you know those who look, but never come in, we could press a button and hear what they were saying. It was brilliant fun. Bob and Barbara from Barnsley would be stood staring and reading it out loud to each other, “Look at that Babs, smoked potato croquette, what are they playing at?”.

“Eeee ah no Bob , and look at the price of that bloody bay leaf crème brûlée, who’s gonna pay that for that?”.

The best was when they would get half way down the list of dishes, and then it would suddenly dawn on Jim from Jarrow, “Ow man, there’s no meat on ‘ere. Come on, Jean, we’re off”. I’m been negative here, as usual, there were lots of people who were impressed by our offerings, but that was just an ego boost, there’s no fun in that.

Only downside was, we had to be careful when we were chuckling because it was a two way system. Imagine that eh,  “Babs, are you laughing at me?”.

And there we go, the internet cafe looked like a restaurant, but the restaurant didn’t look like a vegetarian restaurant. Everything was in place, fridges were humming, the paint smell had drifted out the back door and joined the pane of glass, and the bespoke flooring was being regarded as a unique piece of art. Well we thought it was anyway. Little green glass vases, which were actually Ikea soap bottles, were sat on the tables waiting for the flowers, the sign writer had done his job excellently, and Orcs hadn’t knacked him and our Keanu had a handful of flyers ready to hand out the next day. He was more excited than us.

We ripped the Evening Gazette curtains from the windows for the big reveal, and let the world have a little looky. People peered in as we flattened packing boxes and did the last little sweep, we felt like we were on the stage. Ta-dah! We even had a visit from World Peas Cafe, who told us that they were a bit concerned because we were competition for them. We took this to mean that the restaurant was looking decent, but they were informed politely that we were not competition as we were very different. So, we locked up for the day and headed back to Stockton on Tees. And there we go, we were so relieved that the hard slog was over and done with. From now on life would be like sailing serenely on a still sea. Or so we thought……..

Right, a recipe. Remember, lunchtimes were a more basic offering than evening, so we needed some interesting, filling, and cheap, I mean cost effective, dishes to make. We were watching TV one night and there was one of those cheffy, travelling around type shows on. This one was about the late Antonio Carluccio, just caught it by chance. He was trudging through Italy, looking at peasant dishes, you know, cheap stuff and easily made. Anyway, he made a dish using cabbage, butter, cheese, stale bread and chicken stock. Ingredients which were easily available to peasant farmers, and all layered in a big pot. So I had this idea that we could do something similar, but in individual portions. Oh, and without the chickeny bit. Bought some little pots from Wilko, did a few test runs, and that was that.

And you know what, people were obsessed with them, they would ring to book a table, and pre order a cabbage pudding, just in case we ran out. All thanks to to Antonio. Oh, did you know that Terence Conran was Antonio’s brother in law? Or was it the other way around.

This recipe is straight from our cookbook, Vanilla Black, Fresh Flavours for your Vegetarian Kitchen. The recipes aren’t actually from the restaurant, although a few bits are, it’s more like stuff you can do at home. You could probably make it dairy free and wheat free if you feel that way out.

Probably enough for 4. Deffo use stale bread, I mean, like rock hard stuff, it soaks up the liquid and you get a firmer pudding. You can make these the day before, then either pop in the oven or microwave to heat.

Mature Cheddar and Savoy Cabbage Pudding

Sticky Ale

Ingredients

1 Small savoy cabbage

150g Unsalted butter

6 Slices of very stale white bread, snapped into rough pieces

300g Very mature Cheddar, you know, the stuff with crunchy bits in it

400g Dark ale, you choose which one

75g Granulated sugar

Splash                 Vinegar, malt will do

Salt

Method

-Cut the cabbage through the top, into quarters. Remove the core, then separate the leaves, give a quick rinse, then add to a saucepan.

-Add some water to the pan, don’t cover completely, maybe just a quarter of the way. Put a lid on and cook until soft, check now and then. It needs to be soft, none of that al dentè stuff.

-Meanwhile cut the cheese into blocks around 1cm size, don’t be too fussy.

-When the cabbage is cooked, add 150g of the hot water to a bowl with the butter. Allow to melt, or microwave it to melt. Or do something to make it melt.

-Add the stale bread to the buttery cabbage water and turn to help it become absorbed.

-Now, take four bowls, something like a cereal bowl will do, or if you prefer, one pudding bowl. Line the bowls with one layer of the cabbage leaves, try to use a mix of dark and light leaves.

-Next, add a few pieces of bread, then sprinkle with a little salt. Then add a few pieces of cheese.

-Keep layering in this manner until everything is used up. At the end, using your hands, press the ingredients down as much as you can. This helps the pudding to stay as one at the end.

-For the sticky ale, add the vinegar, sugar and dark ale to a saucepan, simmer until the amount has halved, roughly, don’t be getting a spirit level out. Add a pinch of salt. Done.

-To serve, you can keep them in the fridge until required or either cover the puddings with a little foil and warm in the oven at 180c, 160c fan, or gas mark 4 until hot, around 15 minutes, depending on the size of your puddings. Or, put a loose lid on the puddings and microwave  for a minute, turn upside down to jiggle the liquid, don’t get burnt, then give them another three minutes, or until they’re dead hot. When hot, turn out onto a plate so they look like a pudding and serve with the sauce and whatever else you have kicking around.

-Eat it.

Next week we finally open the restaurant and start trading, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy. So join in as we make a date with Uri Geller, meet Mr Upholstery man and get absolutely hammered!

Cheers, Andrew and Donna