Yesterday was week six of our volunteer Thursdays at The Warren, and for the first time it felt like we’d properly moved from getting the Warren ready to actually starting to work out what this new version of the Warren might become.
The first five weeks have involved a LOT of cleaning. Scrubbing kitchens, moving furniture, fixing things, sorting things and generally trying to bring a restaurant that had been closed for months back to life. Last week especially was slightly ridiculous, with volunteering happening pretty much every day as we raced towards our 10th anniversary party on Saturday.
So this Thursday felt different. Calmer. We could actually cook, talk, eat together and start thinking beyond the next emergency.
Still buzzing from the 10th anniversary
We started by talking about Saturday’s 10th anniversary party, which somehow completely sold out. The food was amazing and the whole building felt alive again.
A massive thank you again to Tracy and Alex for pulling off the food, and particularly to Cassandra, Mia, Emrys and Zoey who volunteered on the night. I genuinely don’t know how we would have done it without them.
We’re really interested in what volunteering at events like this actually feels like for the people giving their time. Was it enjoyable? Did it feel worthwhile? Would you do it again? What could we do better? These are things we need to learn as we go rather than just assuming something works because it worked for us.
And, of course, there was another fairly big piece of news this week.
The Warren is reopening.
We finally announced it publicly on Wednesday and the response has been pretty crazy. After months of uncertainty, suddenly we’re talking about actual Sunday lunches, Friday and Saturday nights, menus, wines and people coming through the doors again.
Apples, pears and a working coffee machine
Thursday was also Tracy’s first proper day leading the volunteer kitchen, and it became something of an apple and pear day.
We got stuck into prep for our first Sunday lunch, making pear compote and preparing apples for the apple, blackberry and hazelnut crumble. This is much more like what we always wanted Thursdays to become. Cooking, preserving, using seasonal produce, learning from each other and turning ingredients into things we can actually use at the Warren.
Anyone who wants to get involved in the kitchen will need Level 2 Food Hygiene, but if you don’t have it, we’re happy to pay for the online course so that more people can safely get involved.
And perhaps equally importantly…
THE ESPRESSO MACHINE WORKS AGAIN.
After months of sitting there looking slightly sad, it has been serviced, cleaned and is finally producing coffee again thanks to our friends at Coaltown Coffee. We’re going to use volunteer days as an opportunity for people to learn how to use it properly too.
A couple of special visitors
We were also joined by a couple of special guests during the day.
Ru from the Climate Shop on King Street came over for lunch. Ru has been really supportive of a lot of the community food work we’ve been involved with in Carmarthen, so it was great to have him around the table and start talking about how he might connect with what we’re trying to build at the Warren too.
We were also joined by Andrew Davis, who supplies us with our Golden Grove venison.
We’ve bought around 40kg of venison recently and, while it’s in season, it’s something we’re really excited to have on the menu. Having the people who actually produce and supply our ingredients come through the door and meet the volunteers using them is exactly the sort of connection we want to encourage.
That relationship between the people growing, producing and supplying our food, the people cooking it and the people eating it has always been a massive part of what the Warren is about.
The new Warren team is starting to take shape
We also introduced some of the paid team who are going to help us take this next step.
Tracy is leading the kitchen, Pete is coming in to support us across the restaurant, particularly front of house, and Mia, who originally came through the door as a volunteer, is starting to move into some paid work too.
We’ve also asked Meleri, our former manager, to come back in and help with some training and support. She knows this building and how the Warren works better than pretty much anyone, and was absolutely invaluable at the anniversary party.
It’s still a tiny team, deliberately so. We’re reopening differently this time, with fewer services and hopefully a much more sustainable way of working.
But why are we actually doing Thursdays?
This was probably the most important conversation of the day.
It’s very easy to get caught up in the excitement of reopening the restaurant. Sunday lunch! Natural wine! Seasonal dishes! Coffee!
But that isn’t really the whole experiment.
The Warren probably wouldn’t be reopening at all if people hadn’t started turning up six weeks ago and giving their time to this place. I certainly wouldn’t have done it on my own. We probably wouldn’t have found Tracy either, because there wouldn’t have been anything happening here for her to walk into and think, yeah, I want to be part of this.
So the question now is: how do we make this bit sustainable too?
At the moment the Warren is still a limited company. We’re not a charity or a CIC and there isn’t a big pot of grant funding sitting behind what we’re doing. Thursdays cost money. Training costs money. Having staff here to support volunteers costs money. Going out foraging costs money. Community meals cost money.
We need to find a way of paying for that.
The Warren Community Pot
One of the things we’re introducing with the reopened Warren is a different approach to pay and tipping.
Everyone working here will be paid the same hourly rate, whether they’re cooking, serving wine, washing pots or cleaning the toilets, and that rate will be above the Real Living Wage.
We also won’t be accepting conventional staff tips.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the idea that customers should be expected to top up hospitality workers’ wages. If you work for the Warren, it should be the Warren’s responsibility to pay you properly.
Instead, if somebody has a brilliant meal or receives great service and wants to give something extra, we’ll invite them to put that money into the Warren Community Pot.
That fund can then help pay for Thursdays and everything we want to grow from them: training, preserving, foraging, community food projects, shared meals, learning new skills and finding ways of making this building useful and accessible to people who might not otherwise be able to afford to eat here.
We’ve built a proper Community Pot page on the website where you’ll be able to see how much has been raised, where the money has gone, what it has made possible and what we’re hoping to do next. People will be able to make one-off donations or contribute regularly if they want to.
Right now the pot contains the grand total of… £10 donated by us lo
So we’d better get started.
Our first Community Fund night?
One idea we talked about was opening the Warren for a special evening on one of the nights we would normally be closed.
The whole thing could be volunteer run. Someone might volunteer to cook, other people might run front of house or the bar, and everyone involved would know they were donating their time. Once we’d covered the actual costs of putting the event on, everything else would go straight into the Community Fund.
It could be us cooking, or another chef might want to take over the kitchen for the night. It could become something completely different. That’s part of the fun of it.
We also talked about bringing things like People Planet Pint back into the Warren and, more generally, making sure we don’t hide all of this away. Equal pay, no staff tips and putting that generosity back into community activity are things we want to properly test and talk about.
So, what happens now?
This Sunday we serve our first Sunday lunch.
Then Friday and Saturday evenings begin, with seasonal dishes and natural and low-intervention wines. And no, you don’t have to come for a full meal. You can come in, sit at the bar, have a glass of wine, eat a few things and see where the evening takes you.
But Thursdays will continue too.
Hopefully there will be considerably less scrubbing.
More cooking. More preserving. More learning. More sharing skills. More people coming through the doors. More visits from the people who grow and supply our food. More eating around the table together. And probably quite a lot of ideas we haven’t even had yet.
Six weeks ago we were standing inside a closed restaurant wondering whether we could bring it back to life.
Now we’re starting to ask a much more interesting question:
What could we actually do with it?