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Catering Scoping Project for The Stove – Open Jar Collective

Catering Scoping Project for The Stove – Abridged version to accompany Catering Tender

Original version by Clem Sandison, Alex Wilde and Hannah Brackston

Outline of the Project

The aim of Open Jar’s work with The Stove Network was to gather ideas and viewpoints about the creation of a catering enterprise at The Stove. Following a period of targeted conversations with key stakeholders and pop-up engagement activities with the public, Open Jar Collective produced a report. This will now inform how the space is developed and used by the public and forms part of the tendering process to appoint someone to deliver the catering enterprise at The Stove. From December 2014 to February 2015, we surveyed the food businesses local to The Stove building, spoke to eleven individuals/groups, and ran a public “Feeding Creativity” event, attended by 20 people.

Identified Needs

By The Stove:

  • To provide a welcoming space that is a community resource, a hub for the arts community, and a space for people to share and connect.
  • To provide a flexible space that can be used for a range of events, workshops, meetings, or other ways of engaging people.
  • To ensure that the functioning of any café element in the space is operated autonomously.
  • A catering enterprise would serve as a stepping stone to the wider programme of The Stove and activities within the building—a way to signpost people.
  • An income stream as part of the social enterprise of The Stove Network Ltd charity, integrated into the charity’s activities.
  • A desire to offer something different with its own unique identity.
  • A desire for the approach to be ethical in terms of operation, production, and supply.
  • To connect to the wider aim of regeneration and attracting people into the town centre.
  • To engage with the street outside The Stove and activities in the square.

In the Meetings:

  • Training opportunities in the hospitality industry for college students.
  • Somewhere to go after 5 pm in the town centre.
  • Addressing the lack of activities for 14–21-year-olds in Dumfries.
  • For people to collaborate to rejuvenate the town centre.
  • To create a destination.

At the “Feeding Creativity” Event:

  • A place to meet and space for groups to hire.
  • Connecting with local food and food producers.
  • A platform for exchanging knowledge and produce between small-scale growing projects/allotments/community gardens.
  • Mindfulness around food—simple menu, good food, affordable prices, nourishing environment, and sharing tables/spaces.
  • A space that is accessible to young people.
  • Promotion of transparent and ethical buying.
  • Collaboration—supporting a range of local businesses.
  • Avoiding displacement of existing businesses—offering something distinct.

Opportunities

  • Goodwill and excitement surrounding The Stove and the new building’s potential.
  • Offering something distinct, as most places in the town centre are similar.
  • Collaborating with the college to cook food off-site.
  • Establishing a multi-functional arts venue to meet the needs of diverse groups.
  • Alcohol-free venue—responding to stricter drink-drive limits and creating a pub-like café atmosphere.
  • Experimenting with a waste food catering model.
  • Growing hub—connecting allotments, barter schemes, and knowledge exchange about growing.
  • Providing education on growing produce and cooking methods.
  • Bringing food production into the town.
  • Profit-sharing with pop-up guest chefs and food producers.
  • Creating a community within the building, which has its own momentum and attracts different audiences.

Challenges

  • Avoiding alienation of people who are not attracted by a specific focus, such as local food.
  • Maintaining quality as a priority.
  • Balancing social objectives like local, fairtrade, and ethical sourcing while generating profit.
  • Avoiding competition with other food businesses in the town.
  • Encouraging support for small, independent businesses over chains and multi-nationals.
  • Preventing burnout or lack of revenue for the operator within a year.
  • Creating a viable enterprise given limited space and kitchen facilities.

Considerations/Restrictions

Prep/Serving/Storage Area:

  • Limited space allows only basic preparation of drinks, cakes, and soup.
  • Pop-up event catering would need to happen off-site due to insufficient facilities for cooked meals.
  • Conversion of the courtyard space into dry storage is essential.
  • Permanent fixtures such as a double prep/washing-up sink, hand wash sink, coffee machine, and electrics for fridges are necessary.
  • Cold storage requirements include at least three undercounter fridges for milk, cold drinks, and food.
  • Space design should include a counter area for serving and preparation, with flexibility to reconfigure for events.

Design/Fit-Out:

  • Balancing the café brand with The Stove’s aesthetic vision.
  • Serving drinks and food in compostable paper plates/cups due to space constraints.
  • The integration of an industrial dishwasher and china serving ware would require additional staff and storage space.

Further Thoughts

Sourcing/Pricing Policy:

  • Balancing local/fairtrade sourcing with affordability to avoid being seen as a niche market.
  • Defining “local,” “ethical,” and “sustainable” clearly in the tender document.
  • A “preferred supplier” list could include producers such as Loch Arthur for cheese, Earth’s Crust for bread, and Greencity Wholefoods for dried goods.
  • Seasonal vegetable soups could showcase local produce and provide a good profit margin.
  • Maintaining competitive prices for quality meat, cheese, and bread may be challenging.
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Feeding Creativity in Dumfries

Dampers and Jam
Dampers and Jam were cooked

From Andrew Gordon

Many have suggested simple solutions to the French Paradox, the apparent contradiction that the French can eat rich, fatty foods while maintaining a lifestyle much healthier than many their counterparts in the western world. Could it be all the red wine? Or maybe its something in their genetics? The answer, as Will Marshall explained in his introduction to the Open Jar Collective’s “Feeding Creativity” event, is likely much more complicated than that, and is a clear indication that our attitude towards food has a fundamental effect on our everyday lives. From how we socialise, to how we interact with our surrounding landscape and, importantly, how we create, Will understands that our relationship with food shapes us as individuals and as a community, capable of bringing us together and prompting what he calls “unexpected interactions” across all sorts of social and cultural boundaries. For him and the rest of the Stove team, the prospect of opening a cafe Dumfries town centre is much more than a simple business venture. On the contrary, the Stove sees its future cafe not just as a place to drink nice coffee but as lively hub that will bring the community together, be it to participate in the events or activities facilitated by the Stove network or just to enjoy good quality local produce, sourced from across the region.

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The Project Cafe in Glasgow, one of the cafe’s cited by Open Jar in their exploration of Creativity and Food

o fulfil this vision, the Stove has enlisted the expertise of the Open Jar Collective, a group of Glasgow-based artists who specialise in all things food. Open Jar have been carrying out extensive research to in order formulate an operational plan and identity for the cafe, analysing similar projects undertaken by other arts organisations in the UK (Glasgow’s Project Cafe was offered as one such example) and meeting with local producers such as the Loch Arthur Farmshop.

Feeding Creativity represented another stage in this process, a 2-hour event held at 100 Midsteeple in which they invited anyone with an interest in food and creativity to have their say about what they’d like to see from a new eating spot in the town centre – and to share some tasty soup and bread in the process.

Attendees included caterers, health workers, business owners and civil servants amongst other professionals, all interested in leveraging the cafe’s prime location and the region’s ample culinary resources to enrich the town and the lives of its denizens alike. Splitting into groups, they identified problems currently ailing the town and suggested some ways these could be addressed, resulting in a sort of mission plan that might inform the functioning of the cafe in its finished form.

Chief among these was the need for a place to meet after shopping hours that isn’t a pub, giving young people a chance to get out of the family home and giving community groups somewhere amenable to convene on a regular basis. Another was the desire for a knowledge centre where townsfolk can share their passion for food, be it cooking skills, growing techniques or healthy eating advice.

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The Bakery at Loch Arthur Farmshop

All in all, Open Jar were met with an enthusiastic response and left with plenty of ideas to work with, ending the night by assuring that further public consultations are in the works. With the cafe due to open in time for Guid Nychburris, the Stove is keen to get as many people excited about food’s potential to bring about positive change as they can in the coming months, ideally resulting in a space that the people of Dumfries can feel invested in and responsible for, and which gives the town centre a whole new lease of life.  If Feeding Creativity is any indication, it’s off to a great start.

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Musings News

What did we eat before baguettes, toasties and Panini?

From Open Jar Collective

Dumfries, in common with most Scottish towns, has a particular lunch time snack – the toasted Panini.  First referenced in a 16th Century Italian cookbook, Panino (which comes from the Italian pane meaning bread) is traditionally a grilled sandwich made with slices of porchetta, that is popular in Central Italy.  Panini became trendy in Milanese bars called Paninoteche in the 1970s and 1980s, and then subsequently in New York.  Paninaro came to mean a fashionable young person who was very image conscious.

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Through the dominance of American fast food culture, Panini have become ubiquitous in Scotland, alongside white sliced bread toasties, and french baguettes. All of these breads are made from highly refined strong wheat flours which are very difficult to produce in Scotland.  Due to our shorter growing season, the wheat grown here has a much lower protein content which is fine for baking but lacks the elastic gluten required for conventional bread making. Scotland’s most successful cereal crop is Barley, once used in almost every home to bake bannocks.

According to the NFUScotland, out of the 2 million tonnes of Scottish barley produced in 2013, 55% was used as animal feed, 35% went to Whisky malting, and only a small proportion was sold as pearl barley or milled as flour for us to eat.

Bere (pronounced ‘bear’) is a form of six-row barley which has been grown in Scotland for thousands of years. Bere is quite possibly Britain’s oldest cereal grain still in commercial cultivation and was likely to have been brought here by Viking settlers. It has adapted to growing in soils with low pH and in areas with long daylight hours which makes it particularly suited to Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles. It grows rapidly, being sown in the spring and harvested in the summer.  Beremeal was one of the earliest flours to be used to make bannocks.

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Robert Burns once described southern Scotland as a “land o’ cakes”. He didn’t mean desserts, but oatcakes and barley bannocks that would have been baked on an iron girdle over the fire.

“In Scotland, amongst the rural population generally, the girdle until recent times took the place of the oven, the bannock of the loaf.”  F. Marian McNeil, 1929

In The Scots Kitchen, F. Marian McNeil suggests that the name bannok occurs in 1572, and derives from Latin panicum, probably through the influence of the Church. It may have referred originally to Communion bread.

Bannocks can range from soda breads, scones, or pancakes to a sweet fruity tea loaf in the case of the famous Selkirk bannock, but they usually have some barley meal in them.  After testing numerous recipes, I think the best turned out to be F. Marian McNeil’s “Modern Method” using Beremeal from Barony Mills in Orkney (which is available through Greencity).

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Bannocks o’ bear meal, Bannocks o’ barley,
Here’s to the Highlandman’s bannocks o’ barley.

Wha, in a brulzie, will first cry a parley?
 Never the lads wi’ the bannocks o’ barley.

Bannocks o’ bear meal, Bannocks o’ barley,
Here’s to the Highlandman’s bannocks o’ barley.

Wha, in his wae days, were loyal to Charlie?
Wha but the lads wi’ the bannocks o’ barley!

Bannocks o’ bear meal, Bannocks o’ barley,
Here’s to the Highlandman’s bannocks o’ barley.

Robert Burns, 1794
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