Our New Shop and Old Shop Sign
The old shop sign at number 7 Station Road
As I write this post on January 2nd 2022 the restaurant is closed for a few days following our New Year’s Eve exertions. Our NYE dinner involved an incredible amount of work for our amazing kitchen crew - who made everything from scratch all day from 8am (having finished at 10pm the night before) - before serving up 100 New Year’s Feasts until late… then (some) dancing in the bar to I Feel Love (Summer ‘77 Re-Eq ‘95) with our last customers standing, in the early hours of New Year’s Day.
We had also offered the New Years Eve Feast menu to eat at home anticipating that many people would prefer to stay in as omicron cases rose before Christmas, meaning that half of our Feast bookings were boxed up for collection in the early part of Friday night. This was effectively our first go at running two kitchens as we assemble a new vegetarian hot food takeaway setup next door. See our NYE Feast antipasti recipes of Balsamic Cacao Beetroot Pate, Fennel with Lemon and Basil and Orange Zest Mascarpone.*
In January 2020, just before the pandemic took hold and we all went into lockdown, we had just taken on number 7 Station Road - next door to the restaurant, with various ideas about what we might do with it. We have mulled the idea of having a bakery over the years, and when we first opened The Waiting Room in 1985 we also had some shelves of wholefoods before running out of time and space within the busy restaurant - but actually at the beginning of 2020 we were firstly thinking of creating a yoga studio in the old MOT garage at the back of the motorbike shop. The pandemic lockdown turned everything on its head of course though - and by March 2020, just as we had commenced building works, we had to close the restaurant and wonder how we would pay to do anything with our adjoining dilapidated motorbike shop. Tempting as it was to have a break after 35, or 20 years* - we decided to offer our restaurant menu to eat at home, and ‘popped-up’ an art installation provisions store - selling beans and bog roll - in our new vacant space next door.
With the support of our regular customers and the help of my refugee grown up offspring,* our pandemic Eat-at-Home restaurant takeaway service was super busy from the off - so that in amongst the diy and rubble of our ongoing building works next door - we had cause to begin formulating plans for a vegetarian fast-food takeaway alongside our s l o w food restaurant once we could open again.
Meanwhile, as these plans were taking shape it was time to fix up the front of the building, and to take down the layers of shop sign erected by Clarke’s since the early 80’s. And lo and behold - what should we find…
Most amazingly though, as we swung from the scaffolding excavating the old sign above, a man walked past - called David… who told us that he was born above the shop in 1947 and that his Dad had been the green grocer of the old post war co-op grocery department. What are the chances that he would be walking past just as we unearthed the sign). David also asked us if his mural of the Beatles was still on the wall of the top floor landing (circa 1963-67 I’d imagine)… and as luck would have it we had peeled away the damp wood chip to reveal this just a few weeks earlier.