Great food - no chef required

If you simply looked at the facts surrounding the Royal Oak and its food trade you would think that licensee Myles Ball was either an extraordinary chef or a liar.

The tiny pub, which sits on a quiet B road in the Gloucestershire village of Gretton near Winchcombe, has an annual turnover of £600,000, attracts an average of 75 covers on a weekday lunchtime and has a strong reputation among locals for its fresh, quality food.

Add to that the fact that Myles prepares his meals from a tiny kitchen, and without the aid of a trained chef, and the performance of the business seems pretty unbelievable.

But Myles has a trick up his sleeve. After nearly 30 years in the business, including stints working in hotels in the Lake District and in London, and 12 years spent running pubs he has learnt that any licensee, with any level of cooking skills or any standard of kitchen can provide a high-quality food offer.

"Over the years I have definitely found out the hard way that sometimes chefs can be few and far between or you can be caught out without one as people are not always reliable," says Myles.

"Not only that but if you're building up a new business sometimes you can't afford to pay the wages a chef is looking for, especially these days.

"But pubs are becoming so food-led that it's essential to have a very good food offering. My role was front of house but I found I had to take on the kitchen out of necessity sometimes. I learned a lesson."

Sous vide solution​

Myles turned his pub's food business around with the use of pre-prepared sous vide meals. The method, whereby pre-prepared meals are vacuum sealed in pouches and later cooked by placing them in a bath of warm water, means that no matter what the size of the kitchen, whether there is a chef or not, or however many customers there are, anyone can provide a consistent food offer.

Myles has now launched his own food supply and consultancy business called Create Great. The service is aimed at licensees who are struggling to offer food - either because they have no experience in the kitchen, can't afford trained staff or simply do not have a good or big enough kitchen.

It supplies a range of 21 sous vide meals and seven different deserts to licensees, but also offers a menu planning service, kitchen training to teach staff how to prepare the meals, and support for the first couple of weeks after the new menu is introduced.

Free advice​

Myles makes his money out of supplying the food - but the advice he offers for free.

"There are so many licensees that are totally overwhelmed or intimidated by the thought of offering food," he says.

"We've all been there. It's a hard demanding game, what we do. We work unsocial hours and you are having to offer a lot more to your customers but you are having to offer it at a lesser price to keep people coming back to you."

The Create Great service takes all the stress of running a kitchen away, he says.

"You have a core menu of a few well chosen dishes, to which you add fresh veg or some nice garlic mash on the side, and then you present it well," explains Myles.

"The nice thing is that all the dishes are the same, they're consistent, they're seasoned, there's not one chef adding too much salt or too much pepper. I have about eight or nine dishes on my menu but I can still do fresh specials to take us to 12 or 13, in not the largest of kitchens.

"My staff can then specialise in preparing them while the other dishes are quite happily cooking themselves in a water bath."

As well as cutting staffing costs, sous vide dishes can reduce wastage as the meals can be stored in the fridge for two to three weeks or frozen, so little is thrown away. They can be cooked in around 10 minutes. And because they are sealed, multiple meals can be cooked at the same time and there is very little cleaning to do afterwards.

The dishes Create Great offers include beef Bordelaise with pancetta, chicken dijonnaise, and duck leg confit with sherry and ginger sauce, as well as a range of pies. Chicken and Gloucestershire Old Spot ham pie and steak and ale go down particularly well.

Big margins​

The cost of the meals for licensees ranges from £1.40 for a beef chilli, right up to £3 for a lamb shank. However, they typically sell for between £8 and £10.

Since starting the company in April, Myles and business partner Stephen Barlow have watched business grow quickly. They now have around 50 pubs on their books and supply several thousand meals a week.

Both are being called upon to demonstrate their meals to potential new customers up to five times a week. They are also working alongside pub companies and breweries such as Marston's to help licensees perfect their food offer.

"It's not about the power of sales. We don't do hard sales," says Myles. "I think the difference with us is that we go in and show people and offer the help without charging.

"For me it is a pleasure to show someone the products and for them to take it on board and come back to me and say that it's going down a storm.

"That's where I get my kicks."

• For more information go to: www.creategreat.co.uk​