Closing Ceremony
No one opens a restaurant expecting to close it. And yet, conventional wisdom tells us that the majority of them fail within their first few years. But is it a failure if that restaurant enjoyed both critical and commercial success? If it was loved by locals and kept a wonderful team of people happily employed? I closed my restaurant eighteen months ago and despite these very tangible successes, it still feels like my biggest failure.
I opened Ceremony with my husband, Joe, in September 2017. A neighbourhood vegetarian restaurant, but not a worthy one, that served great drinks with relaxed service; it was our dream realised. We put in some hard graft to get the place open; the site needed a ton of work and everything we could do, we did ourselves, with a little help from our friends of course. Blood, leave the power tools to the professionals; sweat, digging out the garden in the peak of summer; and tears, anyone who’s ever owned a restaurant has shed a few.
On our opening night we celebrated a fortieth birthday with a full house of industry friends and family. The lights were too bright, the portions were too big, and the place still smelled of fresh paint, the final coat having been applied only hours earlier. Everything about that first service was ham-fisted, a curious way to describe a veggie restaurant for sure, but accurate nonetheless. Maligned metaphors aside, the doors were open, and the feeling was great.
We never set out to please the critics; vegetarian restaurants in NW5 without a named chef at the helm rarely attract the reviews. We actively chose not to do any PR, partially due to limited budget and partially due to the fact that we weren’t ready – surely critics are like vampires, they can’t come in if you don’t invite them. But fortunately for Ceremony they did come in, partially because what we were doing was decent and partially because a very famous national restaurant critic happened to be our neighbour – we didn’t invite him, but he couldn’t pop to the shop without passing our front door. Six weeks after opening we celebrated a review so glowing and so glorious that we could hardly believe it was our little restaurant receiving all this praise.
The next morning our phone rang non-stop with customers desperate for a table when the online booking system told them we were full. Our 38-seat restaurant went from bright, pungent, and clunky to vibey, in-demand, and slick seemingly overnight. People travelled the length of the country to try our crispy duck egg and warm polenta, certainly a delicious dish, but worth the trip from Darlington? I’m not so sure. Another national critic came in; we were more prepared this time but had more to lose. The reviews remained positive and we were nominated for Best Breakthrough at the GQ Food & Drink Awards alongside some truly outstanding restaurants. We didn’t win, but we definitely didn’t deserve to; losing to two-Michelin starred Moor Hall was about as good as it gets.
We rode that crest for months; tables were always full, guests were mostly happy, and our team was making money. We were offered a cookbook that never did get written because the day-to-day of running the business was all-encompassing and never stopped.
Six months after opening I found out I was pregnant, and surprise, it was twins! Maternity leave isn’t part of the package when you own your own restaurant, so I made a naïve plan to carry on working right up until the babies arrived. My pregnancy was filled with anxiety; partially because of the higher risks associated with carrying two, and partially because I could feel Ceremony losing momentum. We were no longer the hot new restaurant on the block, reservations were still steady, but the phone was no longer ringing off the hook. We ran promotions, improved our digital presence and got lean with costs. We were efficient and the turnover was decent, but in the restaurant business margins are tight, a few quiet weeks and it can get tricky.
That first summer things got harder – record high temperatures plus the World Cup meant that people wanted beer gardens with big screens, not sweaty restaurants lacking air con and the requisite TV. We opened windows, turned on fans and completely revamped our menu to suit the sizzling summer. But adaptation is exhausting and the Yelp reviews rolled in, armchair critics desperate for an audience to hear their cries of, ‘very pricey, very salty, very noisy!’
Modern convention tells women that we can have it all, the business, the babies, the body, and the energy to enjoy all of those things as well. But as I stood there, eight months pregnant, scrubbing dishes – our pot wash had called in sick and we had no one else – I felt desperate and resentful of the responsibility that comes with owning a restaurant. The babies arrived a few weeks later and I remember sitting on my hospital bed doing payroll 24-hours after the birth, the panic I felt that my team might be paid a day late.
As I stepped away from the business to focus on my new family, the realities of motherhood set in; spoiler alert for the non-parents out there, it’s really tough. Ceremony carried on and the team did the best they could with the limited information I had left them before my departure. From inception I was involved in every aspect of the restaurant, from the build to the brand, the menu to the marketing, jobs I did mostly for free because it was my business and I needed to protect our cashflow. It felt impossible for me to hand over the reins, to ask someone to instinctively understand the decisions I wanted making, and even more impossible for me to allow them to make those decisions for themselves. Beyond that, how could I expect someone to take on a mountain of burden; deal with difficult customers, pander to chefs, manage the Instagram, plunge toilets, and work seven days a week for the compensation we could realistically offer? The business plan only worked when I was there to do the dirty work, for free.
Six months after the twins were born we closed Ceremony. My priorities had shifted and I lacked the energy, the passion, and the drive that it takes to run a successful restaurant. It feels strange to be writing this piece in the current climate, knowing the obstacles and hardships operators are facing, knowing the struggle and determination it will take them just to stay afloat. The restaurant business is character-building at its best, soul-destroying at its worst; it is punishing and gruelling and to those of you who are making it work, you’re made of tougher stuff than I am and you deserve your every success.
A ceremony, defined as an event of ritual significance, is a feature of all known human societies. Essential to survival and deeply symbolic, virtually every culture has rituals surrounding food, from the mundane to the exotic. We eat when we’re happy, we eat when we’re sad, we eat to celebrate and we eat to survive, this emotionally significant practice can be both routine and theatrical, but it is inherently ceremonious. And whether we love a particular restaurant for the food or the service, the atmosphere or the design, we return because of how it makes us feel; it’s a departure from the ordinary, respite from the everyday. For a time, Ceremony was that respite, until it wasn’t. Failure has taught me a great many things, resilience, humility, and chief among them, that I would rather be a guest in your restaurant than a host in my own.