Creating the kind of foodie destination, we wanted to go to
Sometimes the best way to create something is to start with the question, what would we like to see in the world?
Coming up with the answer meant weeks on research, designs, business plans to convince our lovely investors (Oz, David, Kassie we thank you) and our bank (Nat West you were surprisingly good!) to help us turn dreams into reality.
From what was an old garden centre / tearoom, the Hathersage Social Club put its first tentative steps into the world. A restaurant, café, bar and mini cinema in the Peak District village where we lived. We wanted to create somewhere that was about more than just the food on the plate.
A place where local ingredients mattered, where food had a story, and where the people who grew, made and cooked it and those that came to eat with us were part of that story too.
Food with a story
The menu was personal. The wine all came from the part of France where Simon’s parents lived, and the waffles were inspired by those made by Lucy’s German father, served with Black Forest fruits.
But it wasn’t just about our stories. Our blog post format website for Hathersage Social Club we still keep live to remember some of them.
The menu changed almost daily, with guest chefs invited into the kitchen to share food from their own lives, families and traditions. Japanese, Italian, Greek, Singaporean, Zanzibari, Indian and many other influences found their way onto the menu.
You can see some of the many changing foodie events in our menu archive.
There was no single definition of what ‘The Club’ should serve. It became a place where different food cultures, memories and people could meet.
Part of the community
We wanted the Club to feel genuinely connected to Hathersage and its community.
Local gardeners and allotment holders often had more produce than they could use, so we created a simple exchange: allotment gluts for club credit.
Courgettes, tomatoes, fruit, herbs and whatever else was flourishing could be used in the kitchen rather than going to waste. In return, growers could spend their credit at the Club.
It was a small idea, but it reflected something important, that the Club should be part of our community, not simply operate within it.
Quality mattered
It wasn’t designed simply as a commercial exercise. It had to be viable, pay people properly and provide living wages, but profitability wasn’t the only measure of success.
We wanted to work with producers and suppliers who cared about their ingredients as much as we did. That meant thinking about not just how something tasted, but how it had been grown, farmed, made or produced.
For us, quality wasn’t an extra. It was part of the business model.
Creating a different kind of place
The Hathersage Social Club became a restaurant, café, bar and cinema, but those labels only tell part of the story.
What we were really creating was a place for connection, between producers and customers, local people and visitors, different generations and cultures, and food and the stories behind it.
…and we loved our staff!
It was a business, but it was also an experiment in doing things differently. Could a food business be commercially responsible without being driven entirely by commercial thinking? Could local relationships shape the way a business operated? Could food bring people together and help us share something of where we came from?
You can read our love letter to the Club here