When award-winning chef Gary Usher was turned down by the bank for a loan to open a second restaurant, he set up a crowdfunding campaign. Now he’s about to launch his fourth restaurant
All restaurants have a coming-of-age moment, the point at which they survive and thrive, or go down fighting. For Gary Usher’s Sticky Walnut, in a two-up two-down house in Hoole, just outside Chester, that moment came in 2013, about 18 months after they had opened. Usher, like any ambitious young chef starting out on his own aged 30, had ploughed every penny he had into Sticky Walnut. He had gone back to Chester to open the restaurant – not far from where he had started out working in pubs – after successful stints in London at Michelin-starred Chez Bruce, and running Gordon Ramsay and Angela Hartnett’s kitchen at the York & Albany. He couldn’t afford to fail.
Sticky Walnut had started well. He was getting good local reviews, doing healthy evening business and was packed at weekends. But the busier he got, the hotter the two rooms of the restaurant became. Usher couldn’t afford air conditioning and in the heat of the summer, diners literally started passing out. “We were essentiallycarrying people out, Fridays and Saturdays, mostly older people,” he says, “which obviously wasn’t ideal.” To install air con upstairs and downstairs would cost £10,000. Usher went to the bank and told them how Sticky Walnut had quadrupled the turnover of the previous restaurant in the building, but how they really need this small loan so they could stay busy and people didn’t keep fainting. The bank said no.
Related: Sticky Walnut, Hoole, Chester: restaurant review | Marina O'Loughlin
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