What matters most is how well you walk through the fire

Words by: Alex Claridge Head Chef and Owner The Wilderness

2020 is unprecedented. Unprecedented. What a word – I mean, naturally, that’s what we instinctively do right? We cling to the buzzwords and clichés like the dispossessed to driftwood. Wrap our pursed little stressed lips around its syllables with the hope we can normalise, codify, understand. Yet that’s the problem – I know the sounds to make, but the more words I try the less they seem to fit. There’s still so much I don’t, and can’t, understand about this year. Let us try to organise our year to date – this is our pandemic retrospective.

It gave me the time and headspace to design a gin – in collaboration with my long-time friend, colleague and collaborator Robert Wood. There are worse lockdown projects and it kept me from baking any more banana bread and contributing to the lesser spoken of national crises – overzealous home-bakers. Our gin was crafted with support from an experienced distiller, Jordan Lunn (top tip that – find someone with more talent than you) and is, fundamentally, a London dry style of gin, but with a selection of culinary inspired botanicals. We focused our efforts on creating a remarkable product with limited availability. It sold out shortly after release.

I’ve also never had occasion to read as much and think as much. Over-thought can be a demon in these trying times, but we are 100% a better business than we would ever have become without this disruption. Maybe not financially but, as outlined in the compelling ‘Small Giants’ one of my favourite lockdown reads, there is much more than pure profit to running a business. I’ve also read and enjoyed ‘Oversubscribed’ by Daniel Priestley, which has provided a comprehensive framework for a lot of the little, disparate ideas and actions we’ve done to date. In the context of leadership, I know I may sound simple – many much better leaders than me read daily. I think I was just struck by how transferrable this sort of “business” book was to hospitality, restaurants and even how I think about food.

Community has always been part of what we do – but lockdown has strengthened our resolve. When we re-opened, we launched our own riff on Eat Out to Help Out instead donating to SIFA Fireside to support the homeless – we’ll have raised over £5k in the first two months. Even though we have financial challenge, the emotional rewards for team and guest alike in doing something positive is massive. I think positivity is going to be so crucial to business recovery over coming months and years. We have to look at business as more about people and community than ever.

Post our strongest ever Q1 trading, in the midst of a full occupancy run, the Covid-19 pandemic shut us down. Dead. Full stop. Down. We went dormant – leaving our restaurant, the beast, at rest for far too long. Through one of my other companies I did cookery lessons to fill the void, to give my hands something to hold. I slept in my restaurant sometimes, I needed to be near it. To hear the creak of the century’s old beams, the way it smells, the gentle hum of fridge extraction fans. There is a poetry that, I guess gets lost in the movement. My restaurant is beautiful when it’s sleeping, but even with furlough this has been a hugely costly nap for the business.

Like many of my peers, we dipped our toe into home delivery – diversification is a feral beast when it’s a forced not strategic choice right? We found, for us, it wasn’t possible to maintain our brand values and diversify in that way. I’ve tried to put into practice this year some of the guiding principles of Daniel Priestley’s books that made a profound impression on me – see the good list above. If we can’t do something in a remarkable way, it’s not something we’ll do. And that might mean saying no to opportunity where we could still make the sale. We’re not infallible and we still have times where we stray, but it’s a great guiding principle. I’m excited to see who finally cracks the “chef box” format – balancing making it remarkable and profitable. It wasn’t us, we missed both.

We also launched the right product, but at the wrong time. Our patron scheme launched in August – a membership model built around unique experiences and a weekend away with the restaurant team is, I firmly believe, an interesting offering and will have a market eventually. Only problem is in a pandemic with no ability to commit to future plans, the market just wasn’t ready. We secured maybe a quarter of the expected uptake – which is still a brilliant level of support for a product that has no market – but we learnt our lesson. Whatever fear and panic I’m living with; it turns out demand and supply remain untouched!

As I sit here writing this, we do so with the loom spectre of another lockdown and the fresh off the idiot press tier 2 measures for the city. I’ve continued working with the Mayor and regional policy makers and I’m trying to channel “the fear” into helping both my own business and the city.

I need to be clear though – the current status quo will kill this industry. There is only so much adapting and evolving that any business can do, particularly when the core of our industry is people, connection and sharing. How do we keep the hospitality in hospitality? Against the raft of draconian measures, we are in real danger of removing so much from the industry that all that is left is but a shell. As restrictions tighten so many of us will have to tap out long before formally mandated close.

What we need, right now, is comprehensive and pragmatic support packages that recognise that being open isn’t enough. We must, together, navigate our way back to normal, but if there isn’t the right support for hospitality there will be nothing left, and, I don’t know about you, but if there’s no restaurants or pubs for me to return to, that’s not a normal worth fighting for.