Lakeside location 

Building on over four decades of tradition, Trenchers brought its award-winning fish and chips to the Lake District this summer, opening a new location in Bowness-on-Windermere on the shores of Lake Windermere

For any hospitality business, opening a new restaurant in the current climate is a sizeable undertaking. Rising food costs, higher wage bills and an increasingly cautious customer make expansion far from straightforward. For Trenchers, however, the decision to open in Cumbria – its first outside of the North East – has provided a chance to take a proven fish and chip operation into a very different market while keeping much of what has made the original Whitby site successful.

The new Bowness restaurant, some 120 miles away on the opposite side of the country from its sites in Whitby and Spanish City in Whitley Bay, opened just ahead of the summer holidays after a complete transformation of what was previously a café and gift shop. The building was taken back to the brick, with an additional floor added to accommodate preparation areas for potatoes and fish, as well as a small prep kitchen. Downstairs is now a 100-seater restaurant with an open kitchen, an eight pan frying range and a takeaway.

Although smaller than its restaurants at Whitby and Spanish City, which seat 250 and 160 respectively, it is still one of the larger restaurant spaces in Bowness. Mark Percival, executive head chef for Kymel Trading, which operates the Trenchers brand among other hospitality businesses, comments: “There aren’t many restaurants of this size in Bowness. A lot of the restaurants within Bowness are quite small venues, so we’ve done well to get such a big footprint and so many seats into it.”

And customers are filling the seats, with Mark estimating the restaurant is currently serving around 300 covers a day. Dine-in accounts for roughly 60-65% of the trade, with takeaway making up the remainder. On some days, the takeaway has even outperformed the restaurant.

The restaurant has a modern style while retaining links to its Whitby and Spanish City sites. New elements include a chequerboard floor, studded leather seating and an open kitchen, while details such as the dragonfly lighting pay homage to the original Whitby restaurant, which opened in 1980.

Powering the restaurant and takeaway is an eight pan frying range configured to retain Trenchers’ traditional use of beef dripping while accommodating customers who want alternatives. Two pans are dedicated to gluten free frying, while the business has also introduced a second vegetable oil pan.

“We started with one veg oil pan, but the demographic in the Lakes is that we get a lot of tourists who aren’t keen or don’t want to eat the beef dripping,” says Mark. “So we’ve put another vegetable oil pan in.”

As with the other sites, the batter is made in-house rather than a bought-in mix. The recipe is closely guarded, but the result is a thin, crisp coating that Mark says doesn’t overpower the fish. Potatoes are also prepared on site, with chips blanched and then finished to order, while fish is a mixture of frozen-at-sea skinless cod and fresh skin-on haddock.

“I find frozen fish with skin on doesn’t freeze very well,” says Mark. “Flesh to flesh is fine, but flesh to skin, the quality is never as good as the fresh haddock. And I find it just retains the flavour of the haddock so much better with the skin on.”

Hake has been introduced as another option as cod prices continue to put pressure on margins. Mark explains: “As everybody in the industry knows, the price of cod is just eye-watering. It’s just gone up a pound a kilo this month, and we can’t always pass that on to the customer. So we’ve had to take on a cheaper option for the customer, and also to try and improve our margins from a business point of view. We can sell hake a lot cheaper than we can sell cod, but we can make a better margin than we can on cod. It’s actually proved popular, particularly through the takeaway.”

Other items on the menu include fish pie, steak pie and fish curry, all made in-house. Vegan fish and chips using banana blossom is also available, served with a plant-based tartare sauce.

The biggest challenge in opening Bowness was not the menu or the renovation project, it was finding staff. A recruitment day attended by Mark, directors and the operations manager attracted just four people, leaving the senior team wondering how they would staff a 100-seaer restaurant with a takeaway, particularly when the business did not have staff accommodation.

“We sat there for five, six, seven hours, thinking, ‘Oh my God, how on earth do we operate this site?’” Mark recalls.

The team responded with additional recruitment days, online advertising and word of mouth, and a 30-strong workforce was eventually recruited locally. Senior members of the Bowness team then spent time at Whitby and Spanish City, learning how the brand operates before returning to the new restaurant to train the wider team.

Mark comments: “We had a couple of soft openings and friends and family evenings where there was the occasional little hiccup, but that was the point of them. We learnt from them and were then ready to open.”

The result has been the successful opening the team had hoped for, although the real test will come as the Lake District moves into its quieter months. 

“Trade has been very, very good, but Bowness is heavily dependent on tourism so we’re still not 100% certain what the quieter months are going to look like for us at the moment,” explains Mark. “We opened two weeks before the summer holidays, so the season was already in full swing. We’re hoping that it just continues into September and October. We know it’s going to be quiet through November, December and January, but then hopefully come February half term, trade will pick up again.”

The team is already considering ways to build local trade during that period, including offers and discounts, and may even close the takeaway service in favour of a click and collect offering from the restaurant.

“Click and collect is something we’ve literally just this week added at Bowness,” explains Mark. “We offer it at Spanish City and it works really well, and we’re hoping across Bowness it will work even better as there are lots of caravan sites, lodge parks, etc. on the outside of sort of town so people can order online, pop down and collect it from the takeaway. We don’t do it in Whitby as there’s no real reason or need to do it. It’s such a small place, and everybody’s already in Whitby.”

Despite the challenges facing the industry, Mark is grateful for the start Trenchers Bowness has had, adding: “Hospitality is tough at the moment. But it’s nice to still be opening restaurants and looking forward rather than looking backwards.”