A | D | C - an origin story

“O Albatross around my neck, be gone!”

This Saturday, we started an (almost) sold out month of preview dinners that will see guests get up close and personal with my new restaurant, A D C. As guests get a peek behind the curtain, it felt timely to offer the wider world a few words as to the what and the why. There will, naturally, remain a lacey little shroud draped over the finer details – because what is life without a little titillation – but I trust that which I will tease is sufficient to whet the appetites of the curious and repel the close-minded. Something we always hope to achieve with our creative projects.

The A in A D C stands for Albatross. A monstrous and looming sea bird with a poetic past. Speaking of monstrous and looming, it is impossible to consider the origin of this project without passing comment on the colossal, angry, possibly drunk, elephant in the room. This is a project that replaces our former cocktail bar and drinks studio. Some will have visited, some may have intended to, for the greater majority reading you may never even have noticed its existence. It was a short-lived bar mighty in ambition, edified on paper, but scant in soul and fundamentally, a mismatch of ambitions for all well-intentioned and talented players involved. It was one of the city’s most beautifully designed bars, which in its compromise between all parties, satiated neither my vociferous creative vision nor that of its very talented custodian. An over-qualified dud. I feel a guilt, tinged with sadness, for the city that lost something that should have been tremendous, and then of course all the practical, emotional, and financial ramifications of a professional divorce and a closed bar/restaurant.

Now, whilst the bar’s former custodian has moved on and opened something utterly singular and in their own inimitable style, I myself have remained stuck. For the majority of this year, I have been utterly incapable of re-imagining this space. I have spent more hours than I care to recall sat alone in this beautiful shell contemplating, well, what’s the point of this. At my lowest ebb, what’s the point of any of this. This space has become an albatross around my neck. The name of my new restaurant is a poetic (or crass, depending on the narrator) nod to my new restaurant’s origin story. It’s an earnest wish that, through the creation of something tremendous enough, bold enough, ambitious enough, and pure enough, I may be able to exorcise the tremendous weight – emotional, creative, financial, and practical – I have carried for far longer than I ever felt able. I believe in the radical power of reinvention in both the individual and in business.

And radical has been at the heart of the ideation of this concept. My previous blog post detailed how The Wilderness came to be. A whimsical insight into the rudderless ambition of a young punk that somehow yielded a restaurant that I, and many others, love and believe in. Now make no mistake, I am not 26, I am 35 and Albatross is a more intentional beast. Equally, please don’t be fooled that my age and experience means I am ready to deliver on a toothless, easy-listening sort of restaurant. Its purpose is to give me another space for ideas that perhaps don’t fit The Wilderness, to give a freedom that a new brand alone can offer and, simply put, to extend our pursuit of alternative and experimental luxury in an entirely new direction. The years may have been kind enough to allow The Wilderness to progress from garage band, but sometimes, we all need a little unedited noise.

Albatross will be entirely built around chef’s table dining – all our guests will sit in the kitchen, seated at a monolithic counter gathered around the pass. It’s a chance for an intentional and intense break of the fourth wall – where the meal exists as a conversation between chef and diner. Guests are sat at once and sit together; early trials of the concept have yielded multiple groups of guests starting their evening as strangers and finishing as friends in The Queen’s Arms. Albatross is as preoccupied with how and why we dine, as what we eat – and I am deeply interested in how informal or interactive service could become.

As for the food, well, the canon of chef’s writing about their food is far too often tedious, so I’ll be brief. Albatross is rooted in seafood and coastal ingredients, but I hesitate to label it a seafood restaurant. Across a 14(ish) course menu, there’s ample scope for us to offer a broad church of things we think are delicious. Delicious is as complicated as I wish to make the Northern star guiding us in the kitchen. Some will, I am sure, attempt to extract like tiny little teeth convenient sound-bites – “something something local produce” – but we are interested only in extracting maximum flavour from a pantry that is rooted at sea.

With a forgiving eastern wind, I expect to launch Albatross fully at some point next Spring. If any of the above speaks to you, we have a few final spots available for the December previews here, and will be operating a wait list for early access to reservations once we have a 2024 launch date confirmed – email us here to get on it.

And for those who can’t stand the suspense… The full name is Albatross Death Cult. It will fail, or it will fly. Either way, it’s my last chance to finally kill the curse of the albatross around my neck.