A CARLISLE chef is hoping a tasty array of Yorkshire pudding wraps and open roasts will be the recipe for success at his new takeaway.
Dave Haddock’s vision for the Cumbria Roast Company, which he and wife Pamela are due to open later this month, has been almost 17 years in the making.
“In about 2004 or 2005, we bought a catering van and I was doing the markets,” recalls Dave. “I did Wigton on a Friday, Penrith on Saturdays, Silloth on Sundays, and we were doing Yorkshire pudding.
“When I first opened it, I had everything and anything on the menu, which was enormous. I’d had a really good weekend but came back and realised all the wastage there was.”
Thereafter, Dave decided to keep it simple by offering baguettes and Yorkshire pudding wraps.
Then, prior to the arrival of his youngest child, Dave returned to cheffing.
He had previously been head chef in the Penrith area: at Center Parcs and then the town’s Agricultural, Royal, White Horse and Waverley.
Now living in Carlisle, he had stints in kitchens at Crosby Lodge Hotel north of the city, Aztec Soft Play, the Royal Oak at Scotby, Crown & Mitre, Blue Rare and, currently, at Medusa in Carlyle’s Court.
Now aged 45, he reflected: “I’m getting to that age now I need to do something that’s more sustainable.”
And that has seen the creation of Cumbria Roast Company, which is set to open in premises at Fisher Street in Carlisle city centre on October 31.
“We sell Yorkshire pudding wraps or filled open Yorkshire puddings, along with baguettes. Everything is home made and locally sourced, with a small, compact menu and we’re not going to deviate from that,” says Dave, who actually hails from Bolton in Lancashire.
“Just by chance, my eldest child, Jade, ended up going to York University. We visited her and there was somewhere doing exactly what I was doing on the van years ago.
“The Carlisle premises came up and it was just ideal. We’d been going to the Shambles in York with all the little cobbled streets with buildings close together, and Fisher Street gives that feel, gives that effect that we were looking for.
“All the feedback has been really positive. We’re just so excited and so positive about it that I’m not worried in the slightest about failure. I think I’m hitting it at a perfect time and we’re just going in and doing it together as a family.
“Fresh in our heads is the pandemic where the takeaway scene kind of took off; it flourished from adversity. Takeaways have never done as well as they have the past few years; and with what’s going on at the minute this is definitely the way forward.”
Dave and Pamela, a nurse who works at Carlisle’s Spencer Street Surgery, have three children — Jade, 22; Corey, 16; and Millie, 15.
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