Christmas 2001
My first ever blog post! Well here goes…
I’m going to start from the beginning of my Lytham adventure, I suppose it’s the only place to start and I want to give my readers/customers a bit of background history about us and how we got to owning the best restaurant in town!
In 2001 I moved to leafy Lytham from south of the Ribble. I was supposed to be doing a photography degree at B&F college but my heart was elsewhere. I’d already got a part time job waitressing in Portofino. A job I’d done from the age of 14. I just loved being in restaurants. The people, the conversations, the variety and most of all the food! I’d also fallen for the most handsome 21 year old Italian boy called Antonio who was the apprentice chef. This completely turned my career plans upside down.
Needless to say, the degree didn’t really get off to a great start and my career in catering became imminent reality.
We worked hard over the next few years, mostly together gaining valuable experience and learning about our industry in different restaurants, mainly on Henry Street, Lytham!
It’s now January 2009, we are married pregnant and Café de Paris on Clifton Square becomes vacant. We didn’t think twice! It was ours. Not a great time to open a business, the worst months of the recession and we were almost laughed out the bank… So we applied for every personal loan and credit card possible, mum bought the furniture and Java was established on March 4th.
It snowed that day, I can remember the first customer I served, what they had and my hands trembling as I used the till for the first real transaction. We didn’t even think about failing, it had to work, and it did. I was closing the till with my bump by the end of summer and what a summer. We’d exceeded our expectations and a lot of other people’s (they’d given us 6 months).
Our daughter Anna was born on September 11th and this was where the real hard work began!
TBC…