A Barbadian restaurant now operating at Limegrove Lifestyle Centre is on the verge of branching out with the investment of thousands of dollars by an award-winning Scottish chef.
Reports out of the United Kingdom indicate that Paul Wedgwood – who is no stranger to Barbados, having participated in the Celtic Festival here and being associated with Relish Epicurea – and his wife and business partner Lisa Wedgwood are joining forces with Relish proprietor Alison Kern to open a new Relish Fresh Café Warrens and the Relish Dockside café at Port Ferdinand in St Peter.
The foreign shareholders who own and operate Wedgwood The Restaurant are said to be investing $60 000 in the business to make the expansion a reality.
The partnership was confirmed in an official announcement made from Scotland, which noted that Wedgwood had visited Relish as a celebrity chef over the past two years and had introduced several dishes to local diners.
“I am very excited by this new development in my career. Our restaurant in Edinburgh has become so popular and we have won the Scottish Licensed Trade News Restaurant Of The Year for the fourth year in 2013. My skills will complement Alison’s at Relish and we can inspire each other, and offer synergy [between] our experiences of food and the hospitality business,” he said in the statement.
“Alison allowed me to use her large, modern air-conditioned kitchen to prepare dishes for the [Celtic] festival. So we were working together even before we decided we wanted to do this deal. Alison asked me to come on board as a non-investing culinary director but I told her that I also wanted to invest in the business because I believe it has a lot of potential.”
The chef also said he had confidence in Barbados despite the island’s current economic challenges.
“We’re not in this to make a quick buck – this is a long-term investment. We practically have a captive audience at both of the new sites so I think it will be hard for the cafés to fail,” he added.
Kern was also excited about the Wedgwood involvement and expansion.
“Since the first day I met Paul, when he sought me out in my new restaurant not long after it had opened, I sensed a synergy between us both. He has already brought many new ideas to the restaurant at events he ran with me during the Celtic Festival every May time,” she said.
“He has already delighted my customers with new exotic recipes such as his Hot Soup, based on a Vietnamese recipe for Pho – Bajans have never tasted the like, and it’s flying out the door at lunchtime.
“He also created an extravagant version of our . . . pudding and souse, the famous pork with sweet potato pudding which he created first in his fine dining establishment in Edinburgh to delight the palates of some Scots at a Bajan night! What we have amusingly called ‘Posh pudding and souse . . . ’.
“People on this island relish new ideas in cuisine and something which can combine our marvellous local supply of fish and fresh vegetables along with spices which give us our name,” she added. (SC)
