Now, we had opened, run and developed several restaurants, so we weren’t naive, the opposite if anything, after all my house was on the line and I’d left my last job after 11 years.

But come on just how hard can it be! Well let me tell you, really, truly, incredibly bloody hard. First of all we were developing and cooking the menu in our kitchens at home. The first time we made croquettes it took half an hour just to make four and let’s just say only one got eaten! (on a Saturday we go through around 150!)  So when we started cooking in the kitchen before we opened there was still much work to do. As we are a small company we didn’t have the luxury of a long training and opening programme so we had a week’s intensive slog and then opened the doors after one dry run on our friends and family.

Saturday the 10th of July at 4.30 we opened the doors of Salt House to the public for the first time…5pm and it’s fair to say our lovely new restaurant hadn’t been disturbed by a single soul! A slight panic, thoughts of impending homelessness, bankruptcy but then our first guests walk in, orders taken, drinks served and tapas going over the pass. As we got into the swing of our first week the differences between what we were used to, traditional starter, main, sweets to tapas became apparent. Instead of 3-4 plates per table we use 9-10 sometimes more. So our dishwash section was drowning under an avalanche of crockery and cutlery. As that slowed down we would run out of plates to put food on, slowing the chefs down, slowing the service down, a classic and very vicious circle.

As we got over the first weeks shock to the system things started settling down in the kitchen as the chefs got used to systems Martin really got to grips with the food and it started to wow our guests, most people loved the restaurant and the service quickly got into gear. The first few weeks were a blur but quickly we got into the rhythm and flow of restaurant life.

So as we head into our second year I look back with a lot of pride, a sense of relief that we seem to be liked, lots of gratitude to all the people who have worked so hard and supported the restaurant, and to Justine for putting up with the long hours and letting me have a lie in on a Sunday!
Thank You.

Some numbers from our first year

• 7766 portions of potato bravas (thanks lee for all your spud bashing)
• 5261 portions of prawns (that’s 26,305 prawns peeled!)
• 5367 portions of meatballs
• 61,377 guests fed, watered and happy
• 21,200 pounds raised for Alder Hey hospital (really big thank you to all our guests)

If I were able to go back In time and look down that same high street, it would be a fairly depressing place in terms of restaurants (not local shops mind, I remember my Mum taking me to a local deli called Tooveys were she bought yeast, coffee and other exotic items, I can still remember the smell, but that’s another blog altogether!).

The term casual dining didn’t exist, McDonalds were just getting going and we can all remember sitting in pub car parks with bags of crisps and bottles of pop while Mum and Dad had a pint and a baby sham, no children allowed!

The ubiquitous chippy was always there and take-aways were starting to pop up here and there but even in the metropolitan centres it tended to be hotel restaurants with silver service and over cooked meat that ruled the day.

No wonder we had such an awful reputation for food.

I left catering collage in 1986 and even then the main route to a career was in hotel kitchens or just head down to London…this is what drove me to live and work abroad in the first place!

Alongside the shocking food was the far from great reputation of the industry as a place to work and build a career (the owner of the White House drank the place dry, divorced and bankrupt).

It was the classic ‘if you have no qualifications, no hope you can always work in catering.’

My mum and dad tried to not so much dissuade me as show me the realities.

Too little too late as my heart was set. I spent the next 12 years travelling the world and returned for good in 1999. Many things remained the same but there had been a seismic shift on the high street… out of town shopping, hyper markets, the closing down of local shops and industries but most of all to me the emergence of the casual dining restaurant.

I’m sure someone far cleverer than I am would be able to point to the social, economic and political reasons behind the shift but the fact was affordable, popular mass market restaurants were popping up everywhere and you could even take your kids!

This first wave led mainly by ethnic, immigrant type restaurants such as Italian, Indian, Chinese, and Mexican brought a wonderful diversity to our high streets.

This is still found wanting in other European countries (their strength lies in the pride of regional dishes and produce which is lacking in the UK) but the first wave also made sure the industry was fragmented and run by self-taught individuals, adding to the outside perception of a slightly chaotic and unprofessional industry. Chains also started to appear…Berni inns, Pizza Express, Aberdeen Steak House, etc.

The industry has always been very entrepreneurial and always will be out of necessity as chefs look to show case their skills and do it for themselves.

That is how the whole gastro pub explosion started off. It was a cheap way for chefs with ideas and balls to take over run down pubs, give them a lick of paint and re-open as a pub serving food, only to be bastardised by the suits trying to trick us into believing our local was unique instead of one of hundreds serving the best, mass processed food on offer today.

But in the last ten years something else has happened off radar – a new breed of super professional, smart, energetic and switched on restaurateur has come onto the scene, quite often by chance, often with luck but mostly by immense hard work.

They have created groups and chains of restaurants that are not only successful and clever but ultra-professional as well. Guys like Jones in London created the Soho House group (from small beginnings to an iconic institution). The Galvin brothers also in London not only serve fantastic food but a slick and professional operation to go along side.

Up north Steve Pilling was behind Sam’s Chop House, a unique offer amongst all the branded rubbish on offer in Manchester city centre and he’s just begun again with three individual restaurants around that same city, still sticking to his values. 

Here on Merseyside, whilst the city is still dominated by the usual corporate suspects things are starting to change. The Manning brothers have created a fantastic business along Hope Street with three completely different restaurants showing imagination coupled with smart business sense. On Hanover Street and Duke Street a number of independents have opened up creating an interesting and varied choice of restaurants in the city centre.

Is this the beginning of a new era for the industry? An industry that can offer progress, career advancement, professionalism, competitive salaries but also heaps of passion, dedication, creativity, real and relative team work and a youthful vigour, not to mention the rocking social side?!?

In a funny way, the people working in the industry are super qualified…in our restaurant I’m surrounded by graduates, smart clever kids getting on with life. They may not want a long-term career in the industry but while they are with us and jobs are scarce they bring a real vitality to our operation.

One of our senior managers has a Phd in Egyptology – her passion. Unfortunately for her there are no jobs in museums but Tutenkamen’s loss is our gain!  

As for the next ten years? I’m not one to predict the next big thing be it Eritrean, Pacific Rim Fusion or the big move to the suburbs but I do think young, professional, smart industry guys and girls will continue to have great ideas and, open independent restaurants that people will want to go and spend their free time in.

And let’s face it, there’s probably going to plenty of free, cheap space on the high street in the next few years!

My Mum and Dad still have an old, large travel chest in which all the Christmas decorations were kept and it was always with some ceremony that Dad would drag the chest in to the living room, we would all dive in to help put them up which must have driven Mum mad as it does now with my boys! On Christmas day we all had to go to church before opening our main presents and as the years went by and my brothers got older this got later and later as they would be in bed with hangovers if they had made it home at all.

As I got older the magic slowly diminished and like my brothers, Christmas became more about pubs, parties and girls rather than church, giving and turkey. After my first year cooking in a professional kitchen it soon meant long hours and busy shifts in some sort of twilight existence. I remember coming home around 7pm one Boxing Day and sitting on the sofa almost comatosed for the rest of the evening, Merry Christmas indeed!

The year before I moved abroad owing to some acute financial worries, I was working 2 jobs to try and get straight. I worked 7am to 3pm in one job and then 5 till finish in a local pub. On New Years Eve after working all night, I pitched up at a local fancy dress party just in time for midnight (dressed as a chef, I was very authentic with smells and stains!)  That night, I tried and failed to chat up a gorgeous girl dressed as a Rastafarian who had just returned from New York and Paris after working there for a few years, more of her later!

That was my last Christmas in England for over a decade as I left the following summer in search of adventures. Living abroad, Christmas lost even more of its original meaning. With no family around it revolved completely around work and partying.

I’ve spent more than a few Christmas days cooking on a beach as Santa Claus pulls up in a speedboat with elves in dreadlocks!  On one brief return to the UK, I bumped into the ‘rasta chick’ from a couple of years before and actually got a date (probably helped not being smelly or blind drunk!). That date eventually turned into marriage.

So now I travelled the world with my girlfriend but still spent every Christmas and New Year in the kitchen. One year after working Christmas eve, Justine came home very late and very drunk and insisted on a bacon sandwich even though she’s vegetarian. I tried to persuade her not to although as I had just finished a 16 hour day, I didn’t try too hard. Well, Christmas morning dawned with a rather poorly girlfriend, an empty packet of bacon and a real sense of righteousness on my part.

A couple of years later I was working in a city centre hotel in Moscow, the Head Chef there was probably the best chef I worked for but he was also an utter and complete b******d…he made Ramsey look like a pussy cat.

Even though the hotel was empty with no functions on, he made me cook an eight-course dinner for himself and 15 of his mates. I made it out of the hotel at 11.30pm determined to get to Red Square for midnight. I then bumped into an Irish fried and jumped a taxi downtown. We stopped at our local Irish bar for a very quick Guinness and a bottle of vodka and headed off into the night that was about minus 20…a bit like this week!

We got to Red Square just in time. However, there was nothing organised…we actually missed midnight and were surrounded by drunk Russians singing, playing instruments, dancing, kissing and drinking copious amounts of vodka. Probably the most memorable New Year’s Eve and also the least commercial, is that a coincidence?

So after years abroad, working long shifts in hot kitchens, the Christmas spirit was well and truly beaten out of me. This was despite the fact that I had the first Christmas off in many years as we returned home. The enjoyment was gained from being with my family and little else.

And then something happened. Benjamin, my oldest boy was born and as if a light had been turned on, all those memories and feelings slowly returned as we enjoyed celebrating Christmas with our longed for son.

As this Christmas fast approaches with four children writing to Santa, making lists, talking about their dreams, I feel the joy of Christmas again and look forward to waking up at four in the morning with the little ones dragging bulging sacks of presents into our bedroom as the mayhem begins for another year!

Merry Christmas indeed!

www.salthousetapas.co.uk

The first thing we got right was the site, fantastic location, beautiful building, next we had to lineup over 25 suppliers from air handling to credit card machines, tills and waste removal. If you get it wrong you don’t open. I found dealing with any company with British at the beginning a complete nightmare, We employed British gas to supply electricity and gas to the restaurant, what should have been a fairly simple exercise became a surreal nightmare, if they could find a way to get things wrong they did, we came to within 4 days of opening before we got our gas supply to the kitchen,this had taken almost 5 months!

I only had a very limited budget which was in many ways a blessing but meant we had to do as much work as we could ourselves; it also really concentrated minds when looking at the costs, by shopping around and buying smart we were able to stretch the budget further. I spent a week up rickety scaffolding stripping, filling and painting the ceiling, one of the dads from my sons school is a web designer and his wife designed Soho house in London which is one of the most imitated restaurants in the country, they both proved invaluable (thanks Jill and Keith) the choices we made on shopfitting were often happily the cheapest option.

Amid all this we were writing the menu, cooking dishes in our homes, recruiting a team with no base to use (spent a fortune in Pret a Manger! Where the staff are fantastic) meeting food suppliers,refining the look, searching for tiles, paints, light fittings, (we needed wall holders for wall down lights and found the perfect thing in a John Lewis bathroom display!) and a million and one other things. A typical day would be spent getting to site around 7am, paint until midday, meet suppliers,deal with shop fit issues, hold interviews and paint some more. Get home around 7 put the kids to bed, have dinner, work on the menu, wine list or financial forecasts and then work on the play list on itunes by which time I’d have had a couple of glasses of wine which resulted in some weird tunes!Then it was off to bed for very restless sleep having nightmares about horrible things happening in restaurants.

Slowly but surely things started to come together, kitchen walls built, bar built, mezzanine up, toilet fitted, phone lines working, orders placed, wines tasted, menus ordered. Before opening we had very fixed ideas on most aspects of the restaurant others areas less so, the team we recruited being one area we were less fixed on. At the beginning I thought it would be great to have a lot of Spanish staff working for us but as we held interviews I realised it was important to get the right people for us no matter where they came from. We had over 250 applications for 15 positions! We had our work cut out looking for 15 people who matched our view on how restaurants should be run; we wanted a team with empathy, energy, great smiles, with a dash of scouse wit!

Alongside all this the funding from the bank was still going through final checks, very frustratingly the deal had been agreed for a while but as we all know getting any money out of a bank is hard enough but during the worst credit crunch for a generation, almost impossible. I was in a very uncomfortable position where the money was already spent but it was not sat in my bank account,more sleepless nights!!! Finally on the 9th July we opened the door to the world, to come and try us out and tell us what they thought.

It made two things very clear, the restaurant group that barely 6 months ago prided itself that all the food served was produced fresh, on site in each kitchen was going down the route of the vast majority of chain restaurant groups of deskilled kitchens were chefs mainly re heat and serve food produced on an industrial estate. The second thing was that I was very clearly not in control of my own destiny, after helping to build up the restaurant group over 10 years from its first restaurant it was time to move on.

I started to think long and hard about the kind of restaurant that I wanted to run, I don’t mean French, Italian and Spanish I mean what kind of place it would be. I knew it would be fresh food cooked by skilled chefs but how would the service be, what rules would we have, if any? How would guests feel coming into my restaurant. After cooking professionally for 20 years I thought my focus would be on the food but the more I thought about it the more I focused on the service side of the restaurant. All the things that annoyed me about eating out, being told what I could do and couldn’t do, irritating ‘check backs’ mid conversation, waiting on staff not knowing the menu or wine list, identikit restaurants designed on a drawing board with no soul plus many more.

I also thought long and hard about the things I loved about restaurants, there’s nothing better than returning to a restaurant and the staff remembering who you are and using your name, waiters who once you walk in make you feel as if you don’t have to worry about anything for the next 2 hours, interesting design, fantastic food, smiles the list is a long one! I started to piece together the feeling I wanted.

I left my job in October 2009, I viewed around 20 sites, came close to a couple but none really felt quite right, I guess the feeling was a little like nice girl friends, nice but not the one, I then viewed number 1 Hanover street, within 5 seconds of walking in I fell in love and knew that it was the one!! I could visualise an urban tapas bar, where the bar would go, kitchen, mezzanine and how it would feel once open. The unit had been empty for many years but was basically beautiful, large picture windows, graceful curves, high ceilings and lots and lots of soul!

My family comes from Liverpool, I got my education on the kop as they say, standing on a milk crate so I could see. My Dad worked out of the India building, starting at 14 running messages around the docks for a shipping company. We moved away before I was born (my 4 elder brothers still like to refer to me as ‘the manc’) but I’ve always felt Liverpool was my city, where I came from and as I always told my brothers I had as much scouse blood in my veins as they did!

So to open a restaurant in Liverpool in many ways felt like coming home, and I had the chance to create a unique restaurant that fitted into its location and the building itself. The shape, size and feel of the building added to the fact it’s in L1 made tapas the obvious style. A long bar, big mirror behind, tables close together, open kitchen, informal, friendly service, the owners of the business on the floor and in the kitchen every day. The beginning was over; to come was blood sweat and tears!

I was the group chef for a small, North West restaurant group. A selection of sample desserts came into one of the restaurants, we had always made our own up until that point, it wasn’t so much the fact that we were obviously going down the road of bought in desserts it was the fact that I hadn’t been told of the decision to do so.

It made two things very clear, the restaurant group that barely 6 months ago prided itself that all the food served was produced fresh, on site in each kitchen was going down the route of the vast majority of chain restaurant groups of deskilled kitchens were chefs mainly re heat and serve food produced on an industrial estate. The second thing was that I was very clearly not in control of my own destiny, after helping to build up the restaurant group over 10 years from its first restaurant it was time to move on.

I started to think long and hard about the kind of restaurant that I wanted to run, I don’t mean French, Italian and Spanish I mean what kind of place it would be. I knew it would be fresh food cooked by skilled chefs but how would the service be, what rules would we have, if any? How would guests feel coming into my restaurant. After cooking professionally for 20 years I thought my focus would be on the food but the more I thought about it the more I focused on the service side of the restaurant. All the things that annoyed me about eating out, being told what I could do and couldn’t do, irritating ‘check backs’ mid conversation, waiting on staff not knowing the menu or wine list, identikit restaurants designed on a drawing board with no soul plus many more.

I also thought long and hard about the things I loved about restaurants, there’s nothing better than returning to a restaurant and the staff remembering who you are and using your name, waiters who once you walk in make you feel as if you don’t have to worry about anything for the next 2 hours, interesting design, fantastic food, smiles the list is a long one! I started to piece together the feeling I wanted.

I left my job in October 2009, I viewed around 20 sites, came close to a couple but none really felt quite right, I guess the feeling was a little like nice girl friends, nice but not the one, I then viewed number 1 Hanover street, within 5 seconds of walking in I fell in love and knew that it was the one!! I could visualise an urban tapas bar, where the bar would go, kitchen, mezzanine and how it would feel once open. The unit had been empty for many years but was basically beautiful, large picture windows, graceful curves, high ceilings and lots and lots of soul!

My family comes from Liverpool, I got my education on the kop as they say, standing on a milk crate so I could see. My Dad worked out of the India building, starting at 14 running messages around the docks for a shipping company. We moved away before I was born (my 4 elder brothers still like to refer to me as ‘the manc’) but I’ve always felt Liverpool was my city, where I came from and as I always told my brothers I had as much scouse blood in my veins as they did!

So to open a restaurant in Liverpool in many ways felt like coming home, and I had the chance to create a unique restaurant that fitted into its location and the building itself. The shape, size and feel of the building added to the fact it’s in L1 made tapas the obvious style. A long bar, big mirror behind, tables close together, open kitchen, informal, friendly service, the owners of the business on the floor and in the kitchen every day. The beginning was over; to come was blood sweat and tears!

In Southern Europe, they’ve been doing it for decades, maybe centuries! It’s so much a part of culture in France, Italy and Spain to match local wines with local foods or ‘what grows together goes together.’

Wine culture has been imported less successfully than wine into the UK but times are changing as we as a country become more knowledgeable.That also means that we as restaurateurs need to be quite relaxed about how we offer wine with food, i.e. suggesting rather than insisting.

It’s not our job to deny guests their pleasure, if they fancy a certain wine with an untraditional matching dish.

That said, as a chef of 15 years, I still wouldn’t suggest heavy reds with fish but I would recommend a Chardonnay for a dish with a cream sauce.

There’s no such thing as a perfect match either, it’s really about creating lots of flavours for the mouth.

What’s worked well for Salt House Tapas is to be able to offer an extensive choice by the glass so that guests can drink a variety of wines during their meal.

We’ll be hosting a series of frequent wine nights from September 2010 and it will be an opportunity for people to choose from our tasting menu in which each tapas course is linked to a certain wine. www.salthousetapas.co.uk