Market Forces

It’s a rare restaurant that survives lockdown by transforming itself into a One Stop Apocalypse Shop. Absolutely finds out how Jesse Dunford Wood’s Parlour weathered the storm

Words PENDLE HARTE

If the events of the past few months have been bad for business, they have been terrible for restaurants. Going out to eat and drink was the first thing to stop when the pandemic hit, and the consequences have been dire: closed eateries, unemployed chefs, bankrupt suppliers. There have, however, been some businesses that were quick to adapt to the situation and are now emerging from the crisis with new strengths – and you’d be hard pressed to find a better example of someone adapting to unprecedented circumstances than Jesse Dunford Wood, founder of Kensal Green’s Parlour. Instead of closing during that awful week in March, Parlour immediately transformed itself into a One Stop Apocalypse Shop and has been regularly reinventing itself ever since.

How did Dunford Wood set about weathering the Corona storm and what made him do it? “Survival instinct,” he says simply. It’s clearly not in his nature to simply let his business slide, and anyway, there are bills to pay and a family to support. “We never closed. To begin with it was about emptying the fridges, which were full because we were gearing up for a big weekend. We sold everything.” This was the week in March when people were posting pictures of empty supermarket shelves on Instagram, scenes that we never thought we’d see in our lifetimes. There was no rice, no flour and definitely no loo paper – apart from at NW10’s Parlour. “In the first week we did a full takeaway roast duck, but it was too much work. We needed a full team, but with no service charge and no drink spend we were taking less than half the money. So we furloughed 30 staff and kept five.” On the Thursday before lockdown, he spent £2,000 on takeaway boxes “not knowing whether it was a stroke of genius or a terrible idea. I had to do something.” Of course he has reordered multiple times since then.

From then he had ‘seven amazing weeks’ as word spread through social media and organically. By the second week there were queues forming outside – and by week four they were doing more revenue than they would have as a pub, with just a six hour trading day. The offering quickly expanded to include everything that people were struggling to get hold of. At first they had vegetable boxes, smoked salmon and bread, then they added vacuum-packed meat and fish (‘our butcher was surprised that we were still ordering – in fact at one point we were ordering eight times as much as we usually would’). And of course, loo paper. They never ran out of loo paper. ‘Our entrance was a 10 foot pile of loo rolls for the first few weeks. Our regular chemical supplier’s business had exploded and he had no other route to market for all the loo roll, so we took it.’ Flour, also, they never ran out of – they had 25kg bags delivered and couldn’t put it into 500g bags quickly enough. While some suppliers were going broke or closing, others were hobbling on. Soon the offering expanded to alcohol – ‘people still needed gin and tonic, even though they could get it cheaper elsewhere’ – and they bought all the draught beer from the neighbouring closed pubs and sold that too. Puddings, signature frozen chicken kyivs, cow pies and soup were all packaged up with instructions on how to heat them up at home. And when the yeast ran out, Jesse sold small tubs of sourdough starter with basic instructions on the label informing people to ask google. There just wasn’t time to give everyone a lesson in baking sourdough bread, says Jesse. ‘I expect about 70 per cent of people’s efforts were a disaster but at least they tried. We sold so much of it.’ The other great lockdown success was cookie dough – frozen rolls of dough ready for slicing and baking were always a staple item for Jesse’s kitchen but when they offered them for sale, he really hit the zeitgeist. People clearly wanted the feeling of having baked their own cookies – and the smell – but without the actual messiness of butter and eggs. Cookie dough is one of the things that he’s planning to keep on, post-lockdown.

People want the feeling of having baked their own cookies – and the smell – but without the actual messiness

The whole venture has been very much about community; interaction with locals has been very much part of the appeal for Jesse and his team. ‘We’re not the most obvious place, so it’s been good to have a spotlight on us,’ says Jesse. He’s learnt a lot about his customers – people have brought in loaves of bread to barter and photographs of their cookies, which he has loved. He’s also learnt about their limitations – ‘it’s amazing when a 40 yearold woman lifts up a chicken and asks you how to cook it – you think, how can you have got this far without ever putting a chicken in the oven?’

As we speak, we’re looking at the imminent reopening of restaurants and pubs after more than three months’ closure – and the weather forecast is looking iffy. Jesse is about to reinvent himself again, something he clearly enjoys doing. ‘Parlour hasn’t really changed much in the past eight years and now this sudden spanner in the works made us constantly adjust. I quite enjoy it – I like thinking on my feet.’ He has shown some impressive qualities during this strange period, including resourcefulness, decisiveness, courage and flexibility. Maybe things would be looking different now if Jesse were prime minister?