A Little More

Hello me again. Firstly sorry I know I had promised another instalment but I have been so busy ferrying Andy and Elaine about in preparation for their new shop that I have not had time. I have found out lots more about it though so I will tell you some more now and more when I next get time.

Well firstly I will tell you a bit about them. Andy, my driver, is very passionate about food and ingredients. He believes food should be produced properly and prepared freshly and with passion. This is no surprise really as his mum and dad are from Italy. He was born here but his mum and dad came over in the 1960’s. Good food in those days ironically was cheap as they reared and grew it themselves. They then prepared everything fresh and did the best with what they had.

Andy was brought up with similar principles and he still believes in this today. It has only ever been a hobby or interest but now he wants to do it everyday with the shop.

Elaine, who is from Scotland, actually grew up in a similar way in a family with similar ideals – making the best with what they had and everything always prepared from scratch. Elaine has also worked in lots of shops over the years but it was when she was working for a supermarket that she decided that some things were not right and she wanted to find a nicer way of selling food. She got a job in a farm shop and learnt lots about good and real food – food she only remembered from her childhood. Andy was intrigued by this as over the years he had forgotten some of his principles and relied on much cheaper and mass produced ingredients although he always cooked from scratch.

This is when the idea of the shop was born. They decided to look for premises and start a shop selling the best products they could find. They did lots of research and decided that just selling it was not enough they needed people to try the difference in a nice environment so that people could really taste the difference. This is when they came up with a joint deli and coffee shop idea. At the time they had not seen anything like this so they took themselves off to London to see if there were any places like this thinking that if there were they would probably be in London. They found a few like this and so they decided if it was good enough for London it was good enough for Cambridge and so they set out to look for suitable premises for this new format. This next bit is a very long story so I will just say that about 3 years later they signed up for the premises they are going to be in very soon. So now we are up to date I will say goodnight as I have to get up very early to take their kids to the airport as they are going to Spain for a week.

Next time which I hope will be sooner I will tell you all the exciting things they have planned for the shop and how they decided on the way it has finally ended up.

By the way I have not got the writing on me yet but I hope to get it in the next couple of weeks. I also haven’t had a wash yet!!!

Take Care

Cheeky