Mendip Living Aug - Sep 2021

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