Before the bar was ‘the bar’, I used spend a lot of time in duty free contemplating the ideal home bar set up. Once you have some basic cocktail making kit (or a suitable array of kitchen utensils to act as sturdy substitutes) the main question revolved around which bottles you would need to be able to offer guests (and yours truly) a tantalising range of cocktails…

Wind back 12 months and, you’ll no doubt recall, the steep second wave of corona was receding with a relaunch date for hospitality on the horizon. At the time we saw this more as a ‘grand opening’ mark II than a restart. Everyone had been through so much and the world-at-large was altogether so different it felt more like a new beginning than picking up where we had left off. With that came more challenges than opportunities: would our audience be the same, how had the area changed, people’s habits would have inevitably shifted, what would people be willing to spend when going out?

The shifting sands of the dune-scape that is COVID Britain 2020 have forced us to tweak our quarterly/seasonal menu programme. One of the biggest challenges has been to draw up a reactive weekly offering (see what we got a lot of and make it into something) to best manage back-of-house operations. Because, when you live in constant fear of being closed again, the last thing you want is a load of literal liquid assets.