Setting up Shop 1.1
And so, our new shop is called The Waiting Room Grocery Department - and we have a new sign to prove it. We may well have called it the Waiting Room Bakery… and indeed maybe we will in due course as the bakery, and the artisan bread that we will produce is at the heart of the shop. However, for now we’re riffing on the idea of an old fashioned village store as a department of The Waiting Room, which resonated with the thought of local community and more innocent times, as the pandemic first took hold in 2020, and we all went back to basics. The old original shop sign that we found is now hanging inside the shop.
We are though firstly and foremostly opening as a bakery, but expect the shelves of the shop to develop over the coming months as we find and try more and more great products that fit alongside the fresh and wholesome ingredients that we use within our culinary vegetarian cookery next door.
Here’s a few of the exciting things we’ve found so far;
First-up, these Eaten Alive Kimchis, Krauts, and Sauces are really great - and fermented foods are so good for your gut (as is our sourdough). This Eaten Alive stuff is so good in fact that we’re going to use some of them in our pizzas and in our bakery-fresh deli sandwiches.
We’ll be serving a Kimchi Hot n Spicy Pizza including this Classic Spicy Kimchi.
Next up is this Artisanal Cultured & Aged Cashew Nut Product, a raw and vegan cashew-butter ‘cheese’ made up the way in Tyneside.
We have never yet served a vegan cheese within our restaurant - this is mainly because we have avoided processed products that pretend to be something they’re not, and we already serve a lot of vegan dishes that don’t rely upon being an inaccurate interpretation of a recipe that does contain dairy, developed as a particular culinary experience.
However, we have now tried this cashew nut cheese-like product, and we must say that it is good. (It’s not cheap mind you - but worth its artisan price)
And second lastly for now, is Acorn’s beautiful organic creamy, salty, yellow butter… The perfect partner to our organic bread.
The shop has a dairy fridge and a fresh veg cabinet, yoghurts, milk and kefir are all also available.
Richmond Blue, Delicious creamy vegetarian Stilton from Laceys in Reeth
We’ll be building up our featured small producer artisan cheese collection in the coming months, first up is this delicious Blue from Laceys courtesy of a customer/reader responding to one of our blog posts last week. We’re going to use this cheese on our Liquorice Pizza.
Sourdough a-go-go; Bread, Pastries and Pizza now on