West Berkshire Lifestyle Jul - Aug 2021
The high summer edition is here! And this issue is packed with amazing features, including delicious slow cooker recipes, an unbelievable garden transformation and a competition page brimming with prizes!
The high summer edition is here! And this issue is packed with amazing features, including delicious slow cooker recipes, an unbelievable garden transformation and a competition page brimming with prizes!
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Man of the sea<br />
Mitch Tonks<br />
Mitch Tonks, image courtesy Steve Haywood<br />
Sally Thomson was<br />
delighted to catch up with<br />
chef and entrepreneur -<br />
Mitch Tonks who she has<br />
known for over 25 years....<br />
SALLY: HOW ARE YOU DOING?<br />
Mitch: We are doing great! We are looking<br />
forward to finally getting the restaurant<br />
open. I think we are going to have a nice<br />
bounce back, but what a strange time.<br />
I’m one of the people that has benefited<br />
and enjoyed it to be honest. Getting to my<br />
age and not really taking any time off, I’ve<br />
had lots of time to spend with the kids and<br />
rethink things to make things better.<br />
I’D LIKE TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT YOUR<br />
BEAUTIFUL BOOK THE DISHES LOOK<br />
MOUTH-WATERING. MY FIRST QUESTION<br />
HOWEVER, IS HOW<br />
HAVE YOU ADAPTED TO THE LOCKDOWN?<br />
I must say that the first 2 weeks were<br />
scary; I didn’t really know what was going<br />
to happen, I knew how much money was<br />
in the bank and how long that would last.<br />
I had some truly beautiful and humbling<br />
experiences where my children took care<br />
of me, cooked for me and said: “Dad, you<br />
just concentrate on work and we are going<br />
to look after you and cook for you.” My son<br />
Ben is a chef and works in The Seahorse<br />
and so does my daughter along with Ben’s<br />
partner who is now the general manager.<br />
FANTASTIC, WHAT A LOVELY FAMILY AFFAIR!<br />
It is, and it was lovely being at home with<br />
them. When we started to think about<br />
survival, “I thought this is it we are going to<br />
survive this” We had 274 staff and I thought<br />
we are going to get through this and I’m<br />
going to take care of every single one of<br />
you and come out the other side.<br />
There was a lot to think about and we really<br />
took care of people. During the time we<br />
thought about, “How can we make this<br />
business<br />
better” and we started<br />
pulling apart everything that was wrong<br />
and thought how can we make it better?<br />
These are things that we couldn’t do when<br />
we were open, so we did a whole lot of<br />
things like shortened inventory, better<br />
shift patterns, closed the restaurant for an<br />
hour in the afternoon, went down to a 4<br />
day week in the winter, all the kind of stuff<br />
that we didn’t have the foresight to do<br />
previously.<br />
WHEN SOMEONE IS SO ENGROSSED IN<br />
MANAGING A BUSINESS IT’S SOMETIMES<br />
HARD, THIS MUST HAVE GIVEN YOU THE<br />
OPPORTUNITY TO CREATE A NEW VISION?<br />
I think it was a bit of that, but I’m always<br />
very outward looking with my business<br />
any way but I think one of the challenges<br />
was trying to get people to go along with<br />
it as they would be like we’re too busy or<br />
that’s not the way we do it. Everybody was<br />
great, and I think I realised that we were<br />
a lot more capable as I thought we were<br />
which was great and hugely uplifting, so I<br />
thought right I’m going to write a book. We<br />
wrote the book in November after a really<br />
good summer obviously we didn’t know<br />
that we were going to be in lockdown the<br />
first quarter. We were also working hard<br />
on getting the planning permission for our<br />
Salcombe restaurant which should be<br />
ready next year. Then we started sending<br />
8 | www.minervamagazines.co.uk
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