A family affair
The Fox and Hounds has always been a real family business. It’s been our home and our life for the last 15 years. Our son was born just a few days before we opened in 2005 and our daughter followed a couple of years later. Being born into the crazy world of hospitality, and living above the pub, they’ve been involved since they were young and have always helped out at weekends and in school holidays.
But during the lock-down with schools shut, and sadly all our staff furloughed, the children have become a vital part of the team running our twice-weekly pop-up terrace shop. Now they are 15 and 13 they’ve been very much part of the journey. Between their school work we’ve kept them busy with washing up, labelling, packaging, helping with deliveries around the village and helping with the shop on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
In exchange for their hard work they have had some nice treats to show our appreciation. Its good for them to keep busy – has stopped the boredom setting in! And although the preparing meals and running the shop has been hard work, for the first time since we’ve been here we’ve had evenings and Sundays off to spend as a family, which we’ve been enjoying perhaps a little too much!
What does the future hold?
Our world of hospitality has been really badly hit by the corona virus pandemic. It was the first to close and likely to be the last to open. As lock down begins to ease it’s still too early to say when or how we will re-open the Fox & Hounds. We are closely following government and scientific guidelines to understand the changes we are going to have to make to stick to new social-distancing regulations in the interests of both our customers and our staff. Even when lock-down ends there will be major challenges.
We did a little bit of take-away before but our meals to prepare at home and pop-up shop on our terrace selling fresh fruit & vegetables, meat and steaks, wine has been incredibly popular with more and more customers every week. This new way of working has had its ups and downs and we had to adapt quickly – but we have really enjoyed it. It’s been lovely to meet new people from the village who weren’t customers before but now understand a little bit more what we are about.
It’s felt important to give something back to our community during this difficult period in everyone’s lives.
We have had lots of requests from customers to keep our shop and take-away meals service open and it’s certainly something we have been giving a lot of thought to.
It would be crazy not to use this experience to adapt our business for the better and to continue to serve our local community.
So watch this space for news!