Thinking about making some extra cash with a pop-up
restaurant? Horton Jupiter has been running his Hackney-based
enterprise,
The Secret Ingredient, since the beginning of
2009.
"I've run a weekly restaurant from my front room since last
January - I was inspired by a couple of Swedish situationists
called Benrik, who wrote a book called 'This Diary Will Change Your
Life'. It gives you a new task to perform each week, and at the
start of January last year, it said 'open a restaurant in your
front room'.
"I got the back of an envelope, scribbled down some numbers and
worked out if I could squeeze 12 people into my front room, I could
make about £50 - which at the time seemed like quite a good
thing.
"I'm a reasonably good cook so I just started it. It took me
about 15 minutes to plan the whole thing. After about three weeks
it started to take off really quickly. The first one was six
friends, the second was 10, the third was 10 friends and two
strangers - by the fifth week, I had 24 strangers, which was a bit
weird, but I love an unusual situation.
"Pricing is completely arbitrary. In the instructions for the
book, it said 'restaurants usually get two-thirds back', so what I
spend is about a third of what I get back on a good day. On a bad
day, it's more like double. It's not a living but it's OK. I try to
do my bit by giving some of the money to Save the Bees.
"I haven't been approached by health and safety regulators - I
figure it must be legal, I've had enough publicity. If it was in
any way illegal, they would have come by now. To be honest, if
someone did come knocking, I'd tell them to fuck off. Cooking and
eating are such natural things - we all do it. I can't believe
there's regulation against it.
"I start preparations the day before - it makes it easier when
it comes to the day of the meal. The guests start arriving at 8pm.
I used to do two sittings, 7.30 and then 9.30, but it made it hard
to hang out with anyone at the end of the first sitting because I
was trying to prepare for the second - now I'm just doing one,
which is more relaxed.
"It's a nice social occasion: people are forced to make friends
with each other because my front room's so small. We get lots of
different groups of people who wouldn't necessarily speak to each
other if they were in a proper restaurant.
"I've had a surprisingly small number of idiots. I can count
them on four fingers. One girl walked out mid-meal when she found
out there wasn't any meat, and said 'I'm hungry - I'm going for
some proper food'. I was thrown, but the rest of the guests were
great - and took the piss out of her for the rest of the night. Out
of more than 1,000 people who have come through, four idiots is a
result.
"Very rarely, I wake up and I think 'I can't be bothered'. It's
a very rare occurence - most of the time, I enjoy doing it so much.
This morning, though, I had to get up at 8.15 after just three
hours' sleep and did kind of wish I wasn't doing it. But you have
to soldier on, don't you? And I know I'll love it in the end."