Pub Food: Kitchen not essential

In these difficult times, if you're running a pub it must be reassuring to read all these features and reports telling you that if you get your food offering right, you've found the key to prosperity. As food overtakes drink in terms of its total contribution to pub turnover, your priorities become clear.

Unless, that is, you're running a pub that doesn't have a kitchen.

This is the position Stella Roberts found herself in 18 months ago when she took over the lease of the Hobbit, a Punch Taverns pub in Southampton. Close to the university, with two large, sprawling levels, the Hobbit is both a traditional pub and late-night live music venue that somehow manages to co-exist peacefully, attracting both students and townspeople.

Stella inherited an events calendar encompassing six large festivals a year, including a real ale festival, a ska festival featuring an array of live bands, and a Caribbean reggae festival.

"These events have been going for years, but there's been a bit of a turnover at the pub, with various different people each adding their own twists and ideas over time," she says.

"I took over in June 2009, so the 14-hour-long Reggae Beach Party, which happens in July, was just around the corner. It's a great event - there are bands, street artists whose work we display around the garden - but the big thing missing was food."

In search of a partner

Stella went in search of a partner with whom she could create some kind of food offering. The Hobbit might not have a kitchen, but it does have a huge garden (complete with an outside stage that has hosted Bad Manners, the Wurzels and Chas and Dave) so there was space to do something if someone could bring in the right equipment.

After being disappointed by the local Caribbean restaurant, completely by chance, Stella came across a stall in the market - Chef Bernie's Caribbean Food. Chef Bernie was born in St Lucia and used to cook in hotels and charter yachts in the Caribbean, where he built up something of a reputation for his food. After meeting his English wife Caroline 10 years ago, he moved to Southampton and set up his stall selling jerk chicken, beef patties and curried goat.

"We ran the stall for a one-off weekend in the garden and it was a huge success," says Stella. "His food is just wonderful. People went mad for it."

Such was the success, the Hobbit reached an agreement with Chef Bernie for him to run a franchise from the pub garden. An old shed, which had been earmarked as a possible burger bar, was converted into an authentic-looking Caribbean shack.

"We don't have any kitchen in the pub itself. Environmental Health were very dubious when we showed them the site and told them what we wanted to do," says Stella. "But while we've kept it looking like an old shack from the outside, it's all been specially panelled inside and then fully fitted out. Environmental Health approved it immediately."

Chef Bernie's Shack now operates six nights a week, serving a full menu of Caribbean food including burgers, patties and snacks. Prices are kept very keen to attract the student population, with burgers starting at £3.60, and on weekends there's a barbecue special featuring a selection of meats with rice and peas, coleslaw and home-made sauce for £5.

As well as serving to customers in the pub, Chef Bernie also offers a takeaway service. "I don't mind the takeaway part at all," says Stella, "as when people come to pick it up they often stay for a drink. It all adds to the reputation of the pub."

The Hobbit is just one example of how pubs can create food offerings - environmental health conditions permitting - without a full kitchen. Stella Roberts was fortunate in that even though the pub didn't have a kitchen, it did have the space in the pub garden to create an alternative. But what if you don't have that kind of space?

If you've got a local equivalent to a Chef Bernie who operates from a van rather than a stall, you only need a car parking space outside the pub.

And there are other solutions. There's a pervading attitude in many pubs that customers should not be allowed to consume their own food and drink on the premises. Fair enough if that's in direct competition to what you're selling, or contravenes licensing regulations. But if you're not serving food and you allow people to bring in their own, it simply means they'll stay and have another drink or two when they get hungry.

It's particularly straightforward for pubs in urban locations to facilitate this. One pub in Stoke Newington, North London, actually keeps a selection of menus from nearby takeaways at the bar. When ordering food in for delivery, they even provide customers with plates and cutlery, and view clearing up food cartons and pizza boxes simply as part of the job. If it's extra hassle, this is more than offset by the extra income gained by keeping punters in the pub for longer.

But potentially a more profitable route for those without full catering facilities is to explore the huge chasm that exists in most pubs between a 70p bag of crisps or nuts and a full £8 sit-down main meal.

Longer drinking sessions need to be fuelled, and a packet of crisps with every other round can be a starchy, dispiriting experience. But order a meal, and suddenly the dynamic of the session changes. Cutlery and condiments on the table signal a change of pace and attitude, and create an immediate barrier between those eating and any who are not.

Little preparation needed

The Crown Inn in Beeston, Nottingham, devotes one of its back-bar fridges to cobs (or 'rolls' if you're from out of town), cheeses, pies and pasties, all requiring no cooking and little preparation beyond unwrapping cellophane. Olives and feta or a large pork pie for £2.95, a large cheese board for £3.95, or a smorgasbord featuring all the above plus a scotch egg for £9.95, provide the kind of impromptu snacking options that drinkers require on those evenings that start off as 'just the one', but develop into something longer.

And it's sharing food too - communal plates to be picked at reinforcing the camaraderie of the pub. It seems to be something of a trend in the area - other pubs nearby all sell at least a selection of home-made, cellophane-wrapped ham or cheese rolls (sorry, cobs).

This is exactly the kind of food that pubs were serving in the 1920s and 1930s - simple, uncomplicated and tasty. The advent of full meals displaced them, and left a hole. Interestingly, high-end gastro pubs - establishments with very good kitchens - have started introducing bar menus featuring scotch eggs and sausage rolls as an alternative to their heavier, pricier full plates. It seems an obvious route for pubs that don't have full catering facilities - a partnership with a local baker or butcher can reap huge dividends.

This is what Chef Bernie's curried goat at the Hobbit and the Smorgasbord at the Crown have in common: working in partnership with other local businesses to get around the difficulty of not having a kitchen. Borne out of adversity perhaps, the results often end up being more appealing than the standardised, centrally produced microwaveable fare common in many supposedly food-led pubs.