ovid-19 has left the UK’s food and drink industry teetering on the brink. But whether transforming their businesses in a bid to stay afloat or volunteering in the community, many chefs, restaurants and producers have rapidly carved out new roles for themselves. Some are even thinking, very tentatively, about the future. Here are five stories of those who came out fighting against coronavirus. Bristol Food Union The local food producers building a network to serve their community long-term For Aine Morris and her colleagues in the Bristol Food Union (BFU), it is never too early to start thinking about what British food will look like after Covid-19. For instance, given the global heating threat to stable international food procurement, Morris believes it is vital we support our threatened small farmers and producers through this crisis. “Small, organic and biodynamic food producers are custodians of our environment,” says the former Abergavenny Food Festival CEO. “If coming out of this they’ve seen a huge collapse, that’s not just a travesty in terms of deliciousness and restaurants’ ability to get good products on the plate; it’s a travesty for the sustainable food system we’ll rely on in the future. To me, that’s the opposite of middle class and foodie. It’s democratic and grounded in every individual’s right to good food.” Consequently, while the BFU – created in response to Covid-19 by Morris, chef Josh Eggleton and Bristol Food Producers’ Steph Wetherell – is raising money to cook for NHS workers, and its chefs support various community food projects, such as Caring in Bristol, it has also made saving Bristol’s independent food infrastructure central to its mission. Its website is a user-friendly shop window for small Bristol-area producers and the BFU is fundraising to support food businesses post-Covid-19. “Over 80% of our trade is with restaurants and we lost that overnight. In order to come out of this we need to increase public sales,” says Lizzie Dyer, farmer and owner of the goat meat brand, Just Kidding. “It can be very hard for individual businesses selling one product to do this. Now more than ever collaboration is key.” Similarly, in this unique moment, when Bristol’s restaurants are engaged in cooking high-quality food for groups from NHS workers to the homeless, Morris sees an opportunity to forge permanent links from the current collaboration of groups campaigning on sustainability, the restaurant industry, self-identifying foodies and charities feeding vulnerable people. She looks at Massimo Bottura’s Food For Soul outreach kitchen or ex-Noma chef Dan Giusti’s school meals project in the US, and envisages Covid-19 catalysing similar social change: “Ultimately, we’re all – hospitality, producers, community initiatives feeding the vulnerable – in the business of feeding as many people as possible nourishing produce. Bristol has this breadth and depth in different areas of the food system from Michelin stars through to FareShare – there’s a good food eco-system, here.” One which may have to change to reflect a new economic reality: “We’re not convinced restaurants where you’re spending £100 to £200 on dinner are going to bounce back and be full again in 12 weeks’ time.” Despite running six restaurants, including the Michelin-starred Pony & Trap country pub, Eggleton echoes this. The chef insists he gets “more of a kick” out of cooking for Caring in Bristol than high-end dining, these days: “I’m not a capitalist at heart. I run businesses because I love creativity. In the last five years, I’ve been watching costs spiral out of control, seeing how difficult it is to make things work and give back to staff and the community. For me, this is a complete reset. When we reopen we’ll reopen with a different set of values about reducing inequality within society. I’m not interested in making loads of money – and I bloody haven’t! – but how do I integrate the Pony & Trap into the community? How do I bake fresh bread for people every day? How do I teach people how to cook? How do I get people eating fresh, healthy food like we’re doing now? Restaurants can form community hubs to reinforce that.” bristolfoodunion.org Mary-Ellen McTague, Manchester The chef now feeding the homeless, NHS staff and parents of children in hospital Mary-Ellen McTague had an early warning of how serious Covid-19 would be. Her sister is a palliative care doctor and the grim prognosis she shared meant that, psychologically, McTague was ready to close her Manchester restaurant before the official 20 March shutdown. The Creameries had moved to delivery only and, finding social distancing impossible in its narrow kitchen, soon abandoned even that. McTague had thought about volunteering to feed NHS staff: “This is going to get really hard. They’re probably not going to have time to eat, and definitely not time to cook.” But in the final hours of the Creameries, a gift of surplus produce from another Manchester restaurant, Hispi, prompted a new plan: “They refused payment and it dawned on me that there’s loads of food businesses closing, loads of empty kitchens and all this fresh produce in fridges they won’t be able to give to food banks. Here’s an opportunity to do something with food that could end up in the bin.” An initial social media appeal for donations left McTague “swamped with offers”. Almost overnight, she became the lynchpin of a network now producing 1,000 meals a week, mainly for NHS staff, the homeless charity Back On Track and Emmie’s Kitchen, which helps feed the parents of children being treated in Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. “I’ve spent time in hospital with my son, and mum’s care packages were a life-saver,” says McTague. “It’s a treat when things are difficult. Hospital food is gross.” Coordinating these production kitchens has been a stretch. McTague first created a Google doc so interested chef-owners could pledge time, space and resources. “Initially, it was me running around with produce, cooking, making phone calls; a total scramble.” Then the Manchester brewery Cloudwater stepped in to act as a distribution hub for the food cooked at volunteer restaurants such as Hispi, Honest Crust, Erst, Where The Light Gets In and by Baraxturi chef, Rachel Stockley. At the time of writing in late April, this collective had only just found time to decide on a name, Eat Well MCR, now formalised as a community interest company, but in testament to the power of decentralised, volunteer action, within a fortnight of its foundation it already had online stock inventory, allergen labelling, ordering and distribution systems set up. “Cloudwater has been amazing,” says McTague. “It has given over storage space for freezers and its drivers are delivering. Chefs order ingredients and takeaway boxes online – everyone is desperate for containers! – and Cloudwater delivers the next day. It’s mad but, logistically, we’re getting there.” Chefs thrive in chaos, says McTague: “We’re adept at pulling things together on short deadlines and weekends mean nothing to us.” If feedback to their first dishes was mixed (“We all had restaurant stock left, and salsify and pork belly might not have been what people wanted”), the kitchens have quickly found their comfort-food groove in curries, roast dinners, frittatas, soups, pizzas and cottage pies: “Stuff that you’d have for tea at home. Good nutritious food stripped of all bullshit and ego.” Personally, McTague is finding the project a welcome distraction from worrying about the Creameries’ future: “Reopening is feasible. We have wage support for three months but if we’re closed for six, and there’s no support, I don’t know how we’ll continue. I can’t spend too much time thinking about it. “Like everyone, I’m having days where I’d definitely rather be under the covers all day. Basically, I’ve created a series of obligations that mean I have to get out of bed in the morning. I’m not doing any self- or home-improvement things. My garden isn’t becoming beautiful. I’m not exercising. But I am busy. I’m fortunate to be doing something that feels genuinely useful when so many feel helpless.” @MaryEllenMcT The Moorcock Inn, near Halifax The pub-restaurant now supplying its local area with groceries and takeaways You will have read a lot recently about hospitality’s “pivot to takeaway”. It is a perhaps disingenuous phrase which implies free choice and smoothly maintained revenues. In fact, for rural pub-restaurants like the Moorcock Inn near Halifax, its shift from new Nordic-influenced bar food and tasting menus to pizza and grocery delivery is, as co-owner Aimee Turford says, “a fight to survive”. Asked how it has worked, she laughs: “It’s madness, a shit-show, trying to set up two new businesses in days. This has not been a wholesome, mindful experience.” “It had to happen,” agrees Turford’s partner, chef Alisdair Brooke-Taylor. “But it wasn’t ‘who’s up for a fun challenge?’” Anticipating the restaurant shutdown, the couple worked 20 long days in the run-up, in an attempt – by selling off their wine stock or formulating their pizza offer – to generate enough cash to pay their suppliers and staff in full for March. Despite receiving a £10,000 emergency business grant, those payments required Turford to “dip into money I’d saved for next quarter’s VAT”. The Moorcock will then need to pay furloughed staff in April and May before recouping that money. In April, Turford was “cautiously optimistic” that this was possible: “Not paying staff is the last thing we’d want to do.” Meanwhile, there is still rent to pay and, while repayment holidays are possible on business start-up loans or utility bills, Turford says: “Utility companies might wait for payment but they won’t waive it, and all these things add up. If we amass debt during this period it’s going to cause future problems, so we’re trying to pay what we can.” In short, for businesses like the Moorcock, takeaway pizza is a fragile lifeline rather than a lucrative new business model. The couple are lucky the pub could move into something so popular. Brooke-Taylor does a lot of outdoor wood-fired cooking and had a brick oven. One of those multi-talented artisan-maker chefs, he is capable of producing 72-hour fermented sourdough bases and was sitting on a cellar of homemade charcuterie. Instantly, he was able to create exciting pizza. Think: wild garlic pesto, homemade ricotta and culatello. Purists may balk at Brooke-Taylor’s attitude – “essentially, it’s a flatbread with toppings” – but immediately the Moorcock was serving around 150 pizzas on a Friday night, for collection or local delivery. It is also delivering groceries: homemade bread, butter, bacon, pates, soups and ready meals, alongside local milk and cheeses, and vegetables and pulses from suppliers such as Organic North and Hodmedod’s. Having prided herself on running a community-minded venue (the Moorcock’s no-bookings bar is unusual in its commitment to accommodating its regulars and keeping its beer affordable), Turford has been “really heartened by the reaction and support”. Nonetheless, it has been a steep learning curve. Initially, with only one phone line, no one could get through to order pizza. “People were just showing up in the car park and shouting orders to us at the pizza ovens,” says Brooke-Taylor. A friend has since built them an ordering website. The grocery delivery, meanwhile, has required them to turn the restaurant into, “a big production line to pick orders”. “It very much wasn’t that last week,” says Turford. “The workload is extreme but we’ll keep fixing things and getting better,” she adds, while already thinking about how Covid-19 might change the Moorcock. “Will these elements be incorporated in the future? I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t look exactly the same on the other side.” moorcockpizzas.co.uk Tappers Gin, West Kirby The artisan gin distillery now making hand sanitiser “I’m not ashamed to say that last week I cried almost every evening. It’s the stories I’d heard and the struggles people are facing, but also because I feel powerless to help everybody,” says Tappers Gin owner Steve Tapril. “It’s been traumatic and humbling.” In February, Tapril was on the up. This “gin fanatic” quit his job in IT in 2016 to launch Wirral nano-distillery Tappers and had seen his traditional compound and copper-pot distilled gins gain a cult following among connoisseurs. They were stocked in 10 Michelin-star restaurants. Then Covid-19 happened. Given its reliance on trade sales to hotels, bars and restaurants, lockdown put Tappers in immediate peril: “That was 70% of sales wiped. We’d just secured a new listing with a wholesaler – and put stock into them – who can’t sell it. My world collapsed.” Just as shocking and unexpected was that by mid-March – after BrewDog and some distilleries announced they would make alcohol-based hand sanitiser from the raw ethanol used to make gin and vodka – Tapril found himself fielding desperate calls from the public, care facilities and hospitals asking if he was making hand sanitiser. Initially, he was baffled and preoccupied: “I thought it was a bit gimmicky. And, at that point, HMRC hadn’t said it was permitting [the release of ethanol] into the market without paying excise duty on it. There was no way we were going to be able to produce sanitiser and pay excise. But then we had a call from a terminally ill cancer patient who told us that at the hospital where she was receiving chemotherapy the sanitiser was going missing. The inference was people were taking it and it was being sold online, where it was going for £25 a bottle. “That call changed it all. It put everything in context. I felt guilty making nice little gin’n’tonic sets to sell online and getting calls from desperate nurses and care-home workers crying out for sanitiser. But, at the same time, this is a business not a charity. How do I make this work? I can’t just give the alcohol away. My business has to survive through all this, too.” Tapril settled on a price, £7.50 for 200ml, which meant for every bottle of hand sanitiser sold to the public he could donate one to a local care provider. He Googled a World Health Organization recipe for improvised medical-grade sanitiser – a recipe aimed at developing countries – and started mixing glycerol softener and a tiny amount of hydrogen peroxide into 96% ethanol. By early April, Tapril had produced 75 litres of sanitiser, donating 40 to Arrowe Park Hospital, and was poised to make further donations to 10 GP surgeries, two care homes and another hospital. “It’s not going to solve the shortage,” says Tapril, who was still receiving calls from hospitals. “I wish there were 10 of me and I had premises five times the size but, within our means, that’s what we’ve been able to do.” For the record, Tappers makes 20-30p profit on each sanitiser sold. “A drop in the ocean,” says Tapril, as is the modest uptick in his online gin sales that media coverage of his donations has generated. Fundamentally, like many small businesses, Tapril needs the lockdown to be short or his insurer to pay out. Tapril has explicit pandemic insurance but has been told to claim retrospectively and then only if he can directly demonstrate how Covid-19 caused a downturn in sales: “We cannot make a claim until this is all over – by which point it may be too late for the business. It feels like only being allowed to claim insurance six months after your house burned down.” tappersgin.com James Sommerin, Penarth The Michelin-starred chef living in his restaurant to help feed frontline workers As a fine-dining chef suddenly mass-catering in a one Michelin-star kitchen, James Sommerin is, as he puts it congenially, “plagued with problems. Little things we never dreamed would be an issue, like cooling stuff. We’re going through huge amounts of water and ice. We haven’t got enough big pans, and the utensils we have aren’t long enough to hit the bottom of the pans because we’re not used to cooking 30kg of rice. The logistics are fun but challenging.” This is not how Sommerin imagined he would spend 2020 at his Penarth restaurant with rooms. But the week after his final pre-lockdown service on 20 March, he immediately began donating cooked meals, 3,000 in the first week, to NHS staff at Cardiff’s University Hospital of Wales, known locally as the Heath: “This was turning into a nightmare fast and they’re putting their lives on the line. What better way to bring a smile to someone’s face than to give them a little bit of food to say, ‘we’re thinking of you’? That’s the crux of it.” Fronted by actors Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory in collaboration with the restaurant chain Leon, the Feed NHS fundraiser has grabbed national headlines but, locally, a small ad-hoc army of chefs has stepped up to feed frontline workers. Sommerin has now joined a coalition of venues led by Waterloo Tea owner Kasim Ali (@FeedTheHeath), which is staffing a temporary canteen in the Heath’s social club and raising money to cover its costs via a GoFundMe page. The operation is pretty slick. Sommerin places orders with suppliers who are paid from that centralised fund and a refrigerated delivery van picks up his meals at 9am daily: “I’m willing to give my time but I couldn’t afford to keep buying produce. The fund pays my suppliers, which is great, as it keeps that chain of support for the delivery companies and suppliers.” Working at least four days a week, Sommerin is applying the same principles to the hospital meals as he does staff meals at the restaurant: “It’s the only proper meal we have during the day and it has to be bloody good. We’ll do lasagne or shepherd’s pie but make a really good tomato sauce, not use some off-the-shelf jar full of sugar and shit. That’s important for me, that the NHS guys get something well-balanced and nicer than you’d normally pick up in the staff canteen. The supermarkets have been amazing donating but, if I was a doctor, I wouldn’t want to be munching crisps and sweets all the time. I’d want a tidy, hearty meal – to give you that energy boost to do another three hours in PPE equipment.” If Sommerin’s shift into fish pies, cauliflower pasta bakes, beef stews and banana bread has required some readjustment, so has family life. The five-strong Sommerin clan, including eldest daughter and sous chef Georgia, have all moved into the restaurant, with two dogs. “It’s been,” laughs Sommerin, “… interesting. It’s quite hard when you want a quiet five minutes after knocking out 500 meals. You can’t switch off.” Like many chef-owners, he is coping with all this while worrying about paying his furloughed staff (“we’re not massive but we’ve 11 households to look after”) and navigating a labyrinth of bills and potential business support. “We don’t want to take loan after loan. Why would you want to open up into a negative account for the next two years? We’re trying to ride it out. And we will. That’s my positive attitude. But it’s very hard.”