Cooking up inspiration

On the menu at Harvey Nichols’ restaurant was pan-seared turbot, salt cod brandade, buttered spring greens, confit salsify, parsley foam and red wine reduction for £18.50. Or you could have had grilled lemon sole, buttered samphire, lemon and caper beurre noisette, purple sprouting broccoli for £18. Richard Walton-Allen was not there to cook it. After 12 years as the executive head chef at one of the smartest spots in town, he has switched kitchens and instead of meeting the orders of patrons with money to burn he has opened a restaurant for the homeless. Or to be more accurate, a restaurant devised to get the homeless out of the desperate place where they find themselves and into a job.

The restaurant, staffed by the homeless and seasoned professionals, is called Create and this is its first weekend open for business.

Visiting one lunchtime when there were still 10 days to go before the opening proved an inspiring experience. Richard talked excitedly about the challenge he’d taken on and there can’t have been a more joyous workplace to be found in Yorkshire.

It bubbled with anticipation. As builders heaved scaffolding frames around, trainees in bright T-shirts with the company logo leaned over a stove and frowned at a demonstration of the standards required for the production of a perfect, golden chip.

They are in the imposing Atlas Building, originally a textile trading hall, which appropriately looks as if it was designed to make a big statement about local pride. Success in this business is about location and here they are in a good one on a corner in King Street.

It had stood empty for six months and needed a complete make-over. They have employed a local design company but the nuts and bolts of the job – the painting, decorating, tiling and flooring has been done by the homeless and other staff.

About a third of the restaurant team will come from the Create training academy, selected on the basis of the best man or woman for the job. I can vouch for the fact that they are receiving first-rate tuition here because I once slaved over a hot stove for Richard at Harvey Nicks.

It was only for one shift, but I was taken through a structured, hands-on programme that provided an excellent introduction to the realities of work in a commercial kitchen. It was the module Richard had devised for all his Harvey Nicks newcomers.

From his old job he has brought with him to the new restaurant another chef, Ed Lee. Their menu will be pitched at middle range dining: about £14 for mains, £7 for starters. Downstairs will seat 70. Upstairs there’s an overspill area for 40, where they will also host private functions, and a bar. They are soft-pedalling this bit, bearing in mind that problems with alcohol could well be what has sent some of the trainees down the chute into homelessness.

If this all seems to many Channel 4 viewers very like the fascinating story of Jamie Oliver’s 15, it is. The difference is that Jamie’s operation is directed at high-end dining and his restaurant training regime is exclusively for the catering industry.

Create on the other hand regards it as a means to a wider end. Their trainees are eased onto a skills highway that will take them, it’s hoped, into any sort of work. Not all entry-level jobs are in catering, although many are. A permanent one at the restaurant will only be available to a few of them.

One is Clair Burton, 37, who has been taken on as a demi chef at £7 an hour. She is a single parent who came back to her native Leeds after her life in Spain hit financial difficulties. She soon found herself with no prospects or hope, living in a dirty B&B. “It was very scary and I was so lonely,” says Clair. “Becoming part of this has been a brilliant journey. I could have whinged and whined and waited for the benefits to come in – I’m so glad I gave this a go instead.

“You can look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘yes, I did it’. A guy in the kitchen got offered a job here and he was in tears. He kept saying over to himself, ‘they picked me, they picked me’. You get a free bus pass that is worth £18.50 a week, breakfast and a meal and a T-shirt. It all adds up.”

Jamie Oliver’s TV series revealed how unrelenting restaurant life can be. Acquiring the necessary discipline and commitment was a hard row to hoe for people who were troubled and arrived for work grappling with all sorts of personal issues. Not all of those television trainees who tried were able to make it through.

This is work environment were you don’t tick boxes when assessing performance. An egg is cooked properly or it’s not. There’s no fudging the result.

For Gary Stott, the deputy chairman of Create, that is the value in this sort of work within this context. He is a fan of Jamie Oliver, with qualifications. “I love what they’ve done although we haven’t got a celebrity figurehead.

“The first thing we’ve got to be is commercial, we’ve got to deliver. If the customer doesn’t want to pay it doesn’t matter how lofty your social aspirations are. Customers may come once out of curiosity but they won’t come again if the food or the service is rubbish.

“With the trainees we are helping to build a new personal life. We take a shattered identity which may have been caused by a whole range of things and rebuild it so they can then go into interviews and sell themselves. It’s about aspiration, ambition turning up on time – all the things we call having a job.”

Gary spent the best part of 20 years in homeless services with people trapped in a web made up of social exclusion, addiction and the criminal justice system.

He helped set up Create and one of its first projects was a production kitchen at Holbeck in Leeds which met its social objects and was a resounding sauccess.

It now prepares 1,000 boardroom lunches and is also the depot for a service providing large volumes of free food sourced mostly from redundant supermarket produce which otherwise would be destined for landfill.

They also have a training academy in the city – 102 trainees have passed through in a year and moved into mainstream employment. Morrisons supermarkets have agreed to give jobs to 1,000 Create trainees over a three-year period.

Create has also opened similar academies, or is about to, in Doncaster, Sunderland, Liverpool and Manchester with a target of 500 trainees in their first year.

There may be more restaurants in those places if the flagship in Leeds works out. “The challenge was to give trainees a rounded, customer facing experience – otherwise known as a restaurant,” says Gary. “So that’s what we’ve done.”

Most of the menu will be locally-sourced. But Gary is from Accrington and so there’s a lively banter with food boss Richard about the rival merits of the red rose and the white and their respective produce.

There’s a face-off over a restaurant table of Yorkshire-Lancashire cheeses. And then another serious matter requires deep thought. What is the best thing you can possibly eat for afternoon tea - Eccles cakes or Yorkshire curd tart? The question hangs in the air, heavy with regional significance.

Create works with 30 local charities. In this process they channel people they are helping and who are deemed ready to start preparing for the world of work, towards Create. To have someone taken on becomes an aspiration for them.

Typical trainees are not addicts living in skips. “Homelessness is a lot broader than rough sleeping, that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” says Gary. “An 18-year-old who has fallen out with his parents and is sleeping on friends’ sofas is homeless.”

Does he see this as part of the Big Society agenda and what does he think of that anyway? “It’s a brilliant idea badly communicated. There’s a risk of tarnishing it.”

By tonight, Regis Runtaganda, 33, will be working as a waiter. He came here from Rwanda three years ago, got in with the wrong crowd and into trouble. He was convicted of money-laundering and served a community service sentence. “I split up with my wife and two kids,” he says. “Everything was going downhill and falling apart. Create is like a family. They change your life. I’m really up for this – really excited.”

Regis has worked with Create before in a cafe and his experience has also given him another role as mentor of 24-year-old Musab Ahmed who arrived in Newcastle last September as a refugee from war-torn Darfur in Sudan.

Unable to find work he came to Leeds and is still living in a hostel for the homeless. “I don’t like it because there are many people with problems like drugs,” says.

“The difficult thing is when you haven’t worked before and you don’t have a CV and you are homeless.”

His new full-time job as a kitchen porter is just beginning. “Now I can control my life. I can start my life. This is very serious to me.”

Sarah Dunwell, the chief executive, founded Create in 2007 as a social enterprise having previously run a family catering business. “It’s a big step forward for us to open a restaurant,” she says.

“It is something different and the way we have invested in the local community sends out quite a powerful message.

“With Richard at the helm for the food offering we know the people here are getting the best training which is what they deserve.”

Richard, the national executive chef, says they looked at a number of premises before settling on this one. “I knew quite a bit about it – I’d seen it open and close twice as a restaurant. It was the right size and the right footprint. The interior was very Mediterranean and dark. and we’ve had to lighten it up.”

There only remains the matter of Yorkshire or Lancashire for tea. What’s it to be, for this new restaurant in the heart of Leeds, Eccles cake or curd tart? “Eccles cake,” says Richard.

Create Restaurant, 31 King Street, Leeds, LS1 2HL. Tel 0113 242 0628; email: [email protected]

Open August: 11.30am–10pm. Tuesday–Saturday Mondays September onwards: 11.30am–6pm