Fox & Grapes: Our Proud of Pubs Diary, second year running
What a week! Exhausting but well worth the effort...
MONDAY: RADIO INTERVIEW & QUIZ
Tune into Chester's Dee 106.5 for the Gavin & Becky breakfast show at around 7.45 am, where I will be taking a helicopter flight with Mark Lampkin from Lampkin solicitors & Estate agents, we will be chatting about Proud of Pubs week, the Fox & Grapes events and the Bluebell refurbishment.
Monday evening: come and join us for our weekly quiz, with free sandwiches and chips and a chance to win a gallon of beer.
Yes friends, family and customers tuned in to listen to me make my debut on the radio station, what a nerve racking experience, I had invited the local press down to take some pictures. As promised a photographer turned up at 8.00am to take pictures of us outside the helicopter. As there was a spare space on the flight, Mark Lampkin the sponsor asked the photographer if he would like to join us for the flight. He was delighted as he had not been on a helicopter before. We took off in the small 4 man machine and first flew over the two pubs the Fox & Grapes and Bluebell, we hovered for a while and the photographer Simon took some great aerial pictures of the pubs, it was great to see the pubs from the air and the size of the buildings side by side, the Bluebell at the moment is being refurbished and so showed the scaffolding outside. We then did a small tour of our local Chester city and then did the radio interview, I talked to the DJ Gavin about Proud of Pubs week, the smoking ban and supermarket loss leaders on selling cheap booze. A write up was then produced with the Evening Leader, our local newspaper and can be found on www.eveningleader.co.uk/news. Later on we had our proud of pubs quiz which went down a storm, with 22 teams and every table taken in the pub. It was another successful night.
TUESDAY: GOOD OLD BRITISH PUB GRUB
Booking in for Lunch or Dinner at the Fox and sample our Proud of Pubs specials menu where we have created for you a choice of traditional homemade food with old favourites like Steak and kidney pie, Toad in the hole, Faggots & onion gravy, Bread & butter pudding, Treacle tart and jam roly poly.
People loved the traditional menu, the Faggots sold out on the first day. People complimented us on having homemade desserts and said they tasted better than they could remember previously, which was thankful as the last time I had eaten jam roly poly was in primary school with lumpy custard.
WEDNESDAY - CHEESE & WINE NIGHT
We will be holding a Cheese and Wine night from 8pm with tasting of local produced cheeses from the Hawarden Castle farm shop and samplings of wine from our new wine menu with special offers on end of bin lines on favourites from our old wine menu.
The local farm shop gave us over £40.00 worth of locally produced cheeses and Punch Brewery supplied us with some samples of wine from our new wine menu. Wednesday is the hardest day of the week to fill and you would think giving away free food and wine that everybody would come. Not always the case, but we were still busy, our local football team and friends came along and we educated them in our new wine menu, some of them had never eaten brie or drunk red wine before, so not such a lost cause, perhaps we have now sold wine to some new customers. Perhaps another day would havef been better for the Cheese and Wine night, next year we may try it on a Saturday night.
THURSDAY - SPORTS QUIZ
Join us for a fun sports quiz with prize giveaways and raffle with a free meal for two for the winning team.
This was the first time that my manager Gemma and I had written our own quiz, our usual quiz on a Monday is compiled and compared by friends who have done it for years. We downloaded a free sports quiz from the internet and then downloaded some pictures for a picture round. We had five rounds altogether - I tried to make the picture round a bit harder by having to guess the sports person and the year they were born; this did sort out the men from the boys. A good night was had by all with our usual weekly brain boxes winning again
FRIDAY - BBQ
Come and join us for the ever popular BBQ & Cocktail bar with a late bar till 1.00am
What a night, our takings exceeded those taken last New years eve, thankfully the weather held up it was a good job as we could not fit any more people in the pub so people moved to outside. By nine o'clock, we did not have a glass on the shelf and with nine staff working behind a small bar and still not being able to keep up, it was a hard job but all the staff worked really hard and we got through it. We sold out of BBQ food by 11.30 after only an hour and a half. The bar stayed open till 1.00am and by the time we all finished and cleaned up it was after 3am. A long night but well worth it.
SATURDAY - NEW SUMMER MENU
We will be launching our new summer menu with new dishes like Sizzler fajitas and a new vegetarian range.
The new menu was launched and we were fully booked up since the previous week, by 8pm every table was full and people were even obliging enough to move into the bar once they had finished their meal so others could be seated, people were also sitting outside to eat as there was no more room inside. Our new sizzling fajitas were so popular that we ran out of sizzler dishes. At the end of the night we had served over 180 covers, not bad for a small community pub.
SUNDAY - CELLAR TOUR (ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK)
Book in for a cellar tour of the Fox aT 2.00 pm, learn how your pint gets from delivery to your glass, change a barrel of beer and tap and vent cask ale. (Bookings only as limited space).
We had intended to hold a cellar tour, but with our cellar being empty of all beer from over the weekend there was nothing to show customers. We had a christening for 70 people and with all the regular customers the Fox was full once again.
Overall summary...
It is now next Tuesday morning and our dray men have just delivered our beer and said we were the biggest drop they had done, which made all the hard work seem worth it. Proud of Pubs week is now being recognised as a yearly event on our events calendar and it has shown with a bit of effort and hard work the benefits of customers supporting their local has paid dividends.
