How it all started

My whole family is passionate about food and cooking. I have many great memories of my Grandma’s lamb breast stew with lentils, eating bowl after bowl with crusty bread and butter. Every Friday my other Grandma used to make homemade fish and crinkle cut chips, I can still remember the excitement I felt coming down her drive and smelling the chip pan going! There was always beef dripping and a left over roast chicken in her fridge. Along with a tin of working class treats, blue ribbonds, viscounts, wagon wheels and penguins. There were never many left after my sisters and cousins and I had raided it!

I started cooking myself when I was about 8 years old, learning from my mum, my aunties and my grandparents. At 13 years old I was cooking dinner for the family after school before my parents returned from work. My mum used to complain that I made such a mess and why did I have to use every pan in the house? Things haven’t changed much since. However they always praised and encouraged my cooking, you should be a chef they said.

At 16 I got my first work experience in an Italian restaurant in my home town of Doncaster. I absolutely loved it there, they gave me all the rubbish jobs like gutting sardines, grating big blocks of cheese and peeling huge sacks of onions and garlic. I didn’t complain I kept quiet, the Chef was a bit of a drinker and used to drink the marsala in the walk in fridge, he often set fire to himself! I was terrified of him!

They soon promoted me to making the chef’s salads, then onto Napoli sauce then my favourite, they put me on the pizza station. The sous chef taught me how to spin pizza dough. Although I loved it there, I knew split shifts 6 days a week wasn’t really what I fancied doing. My other big love has always been languages and art.

The next couple of years I dabbled with sixth form and Art College. I finally decided to go to Uni to do French and Media studies, sadly I couldn't afford to put myself through university. Despite having a part time job my debts were spiralling and I didn’t take to the course at all. Being the first female in both sides of our family to go to university, and coming from a good school where it was drummed into you to stay in education, I always set my sights on going. I found out you got paid a bursary to go to uni to do nursing. I remember my dad getting made redundant in the recession in the late 1980s. "Go into a profession like nursing or teaching", my dad advised, "you'll always have a job". I witnessed how my dad had been devastated to lose his job, how he wore a suit to the job centre, sat at the table with the job adverts from the newspaper every thursday. We had to sell our large four bedroomed house and move. Being a miner's granddaughter too I can recall the devastation of the miner's strike and the colliery at armthorpe closing, at the back of my grandparent's pit house. All this gave me a great fear of being jobless. I'll become a nurse, I decided.

For 18 years after qualifying, I worked in various hospitals. I loved the husltle and bustle and working with people and the camaraderie and dark humour with the team, I've yet to find in another profession. However, as everyone knows it’s an incredibly stressful career. My partner, Lionel Strub had been asking me to work with him at his pub, The Clarendon Hotel, as long as I had known him. After coming home in tears after work one night too many, he said to me enough is enough now you come and work with me. I have to say I’ve made some pretty daft mistakes in my life but this wasn’t one of them. I can honestly say it’s been the best decision I’ve ever made. I have never been happier.

I have many roles at the pub, assistant manager, housekeeping manager, PA to Lionel, dog walker to the pub dog, Larry, but my main one is to manage the events and marketing which I absolutely love.

Lionel is involved in quite a few projects as well as running the pub he teaches cookery courses at Cooks at Carlton, is the consultant chef for RHS Harlow Carr, works with the French embassay for the Gout de France project and is also a published author of his autobiographical cookbook, ‘From Alsace to Yorkshire’.

In the first week of work I had been to a function at the French Ambassador’s private residence and the Yorkshire Food and Drink festival at the millennium square in Leeds, to watch Lionel doing a cooking demonstration on the main stage with his friend Stephanie Moon.

The Gout de France project is organised by the French Embassay. Lionel and 24 other prominent French chefs in the UK are involved including Raymond Blanc and Pascal Aussignac. We were there to discuss how we can work together to promote French cooking.

It was while I was at the food festival in Leeds and brainstorming ideas for the Gout de France, as I walked around, that I realised that there were stalls from many different countries but no French ones there. I walked around the stalls, chatting to all the owners about their food and our hotel. “We should do this next year”, I said to Lionel, “The Clarendon should have a street food stall”. “No”, Lionel replied, “You are going to have a street food stall, you fit right in with these people, they are so creative like you and I can see you’re at home here, You are going to have your own street food business and I am going to help you set it up!” How on earth am I going to do that I thought? But here I am now days before the official opening of my van!

My next post will show how we transformed an old burger van into Très Bon Raymond and how I decided on the name and the brand logo and the people who helped me, supported me and believed in me, along the way. I owe all this to them, I couldn't have done any of it without their help and dedication.