Baz Hunter (00:00)
Hello and welcome to At the Table with Baz, the show where local stories are served. Welcome to episode zero, our very first episode. And why is it called zero? Well, as you can see, there is nobody in the seat opposite me today. I thought it'd be really nice to come on and to tell you not just what At the Table, the podcast, is about, but what At the Table is about as a whole, because it's much more than just a podcast. There's a lot to reveal.

And I thought I'd just  come on and reveal a little bit about that today but also tell you a little bit about your host. My name's Baz and this is what I've been up to. So, going right back to when I was 14 years old I started working as a butcher in Leeds, Kirgate Market on Butcher's Row. There were 24 butcher shops next door to each other which was an experience in itself as you can imagine. Some fantastic memories I made, some friends for life and I gained a lot of skills - not just butchering skills, to be fair a lot of those came  later but - selling, and  life skills.

You know, I learned so much, like I learned about the streets and I learned about what goes on and I learned everything in Leeds Market that you can imagine. So some fantastic, fantastic times there. And I butchered there right until I was 18. And then I went and did a season in Tenerife, living abroad.

Living away from home for the very first time, which again was a fantastic experience. Met a lot of friends, Two of my, (I had two best men at my wedding), a little bit greedy! and both of them I met when I moved over to Tenerife the first time. I did move another time, which will come later down the line. And then I came back and I went back into butchering again. I was managing a shop in Leeds and then I had an opportunity arise. There was a shop that came available in Selby, my very own butchers shop, which I grabbed the opportunity with both hands. I was 21 years old. It was like a little old shop and it needed a lot of work doing. I remember my grandad painted the whole shop. I was on the hands and knees scrubbing it. And yeah, we opened and I think the first week the vacuum packer blew up and the second week the sausage machine blew up and...

It was  real testing times, but fantastic times as well.  everything I was selling was  the best of the best. I really wanted to go down the quality route. And yeah,  a fantastic five or so years doing that. I then moved back to Tenerife and I lived in Tenerife for the next, nearly nine years. That's where I met my wife Lora. I was an area manager of a group of bars and restaurants and Lora came to work for us and she worked her way up to be a manager and a fantastic manager at that. 

Me and Lora ended up getting together and well , the rest is history. Now married with two fantastic kids, little Alfie and Lotte. Lotte's eight months old and Alfie's three and a half and they keep us on our toes but give us a lot of joy every single day. When we moved back from Tenerife, it was while COVID was happening, it was 2020. We weren't moving back because of COVID, we was moving back anyway.

We was already planning to move back, it was sort of, well, it was delayed, if anything. We were meant to come back in May and eventually we got back in the October 2020. But yeah, we wanted a bit of normality. The biggest question, or one of the biggest questions I always get asked when I tell people I used to live in Tenerife, they all say to me, why did you move home? And the answer was  for a bit of routine, for a bit of normality.

I quite like the winter, I like shutting the curtains and putting a film on with a fire on, right? The simple things. I quite like a little weekend away or when you go on holidays, you know, when you're living there all the time, obviously you take certain things for granted. But I've done nine years of it and a fantastic nine years.

There's so many memories for life. I was in the entertainment scene,  hiring a lot of live performers and entertainers. We brought Roy Chubby Brown over from England. We brought Jimmy Cricket over. We brought Mick Miller over, some of the old school proper comedians. And yeah, and we used to put live entertainment on every single night in multiple of the bars that I used to run, which is something I've brought with me to the Clock House - we have our live entertainment events about once a month.

They always go down an absolute storm, but it's just something that I'm really passionate about. And it's something that I will always continue to do. While I lived in Tenerife, I also had my own radio show, Baz Hunter, live on Power On FM. So this is not overly new to me, it is something that I've done before, and it's something I really enjoyed, and it's something that I did for myself.

So there you go, Baz Hunter Live on Power On FM. Now, it's Baz Hunter Live at the table. So we moved back from Tenerife. I was back into butchering, working for a very good friend of mine, in Leeds. He's got a group of butcher shops in Leeds and he needed some help. The butchering game went through the roof during COVID. I think it's the first time in history that people have ever had three meals a day at home. The only thing we had to look forward to, wasn't it, what we were having for our tea? So yeah, so it was extremely busy, extremely demanding. We were working five in the morning till nine at night. And yeah,  I was thinking, is butchering what I want to do forever?

Maybe not the greatest times to test that out in. Lora was over in Tenerife with our dogs at the time and we was apart for five and a half months which was extremely difficult and of course as soon as the flights were running again I was on the very first flight back over to Tenerife and that's where I proposed as soon as I got back. We got a fancy hotel and I was down on one knee while the sun set. But yeah we eventually moved back, we made the drive, it was a five day drive home, the dogs in the back and all of our luggage and we had already sent a big van with a load of luggage the week before as well. We drove all the way through Spain and all the way home. When we got to Plymouth, we got off the ferry and were driving, (we'd sold my car over there and we drove Lora's car back and we sold that here. A Vauxhall Mokka, so a Spanish one, left hand drive.)

And because it never used to rain in Tenerife, or very rarely, (maybe three times a year), you never used to use your windscreen wipers. Well, it's only when we got back to Plymouth we realised we had a squeaky wiper, so that was a bit of a...

A bit of an annoying six hours back from Plymouth!
But anyway, yeah, we made it back. I went back into butchering, as I mentioned, I'd already been back doing a lot of butchering, but I stayed in the butchering trade for quite some time. And then me and Lora started to look for the perfect place, something that Lora had done for many years and loved doing, which was hospitality. And something I'd done for nine years of my life, of course, in hospitality in Tenerife. 

So we were looking and there were places that came available around Yorkshire. I'm from Leeds, Lora's from Scotland so you know Lora's family are all in Scotland and mine are all in Leeds but we sort of ended back in Leeds just simply because I was working you know, and that I had the money coming in as a butcher so yeah we was looking for something, we was looking at some pubs and some bars and one came available in Gainsborough, the Clock House.

As soon as we walked in, we just fell in love with it. We felt that Gainsborough, (I spent a lot of time in the town) and we felt there was maybe a gap in the market for something a little bit nicer. Now, by all means, we're not high end. We are a lovely venue, a lovely venue and we serve superb food and it's all local and it's all quality. But yeah, we wanted to do something that we loved doing and when we walked into the Clock House we both agreed this was the place that we was going to buy and that's what we did  and we've been here for, it'll be five years this year. 

But of course when we launched our food it would be silly to go buying from a butcher when I've butchered all my life so we built an in-house butchers inside the Clock House, we dry aged our own beef for our steaks, made our own sausages, cured our own bacon, pressed our own burgers, and butchered whole animals. We use the bones for the gravies and everything in between.  Of course, we do a varied vegetarian and vegan menu as well. But yeah, my passion obviously is the butchering industry and traditional methods, doing it properly, doing it as I've been taught all my life, doing it from scratch and doing it ethically and locally.

And yeah, so we built a fantastic reputation by selling the very, very best, by offering really good service. And we've not always got it right, you know, but we've always had a very good go. And yeah, I think people sort of respect that whatever we do, we do 110%. And if we don't get it right, we'll always make it right!

And I think that's really key. 

People were obviously wanting to buy our meat and we didn't want people to come into the restaurant and do the shopping while other people were having a meal. So we continued with our in-house butchery but we weren't selling meat yet apart from Christmas when we started our meat boxes which were absolutely phenomenal. 

Next door to the Clock House, (we also took next door and we knocked through and built a cocktail lounge and we wanted to extend a little bit.)

...At the front there was a unit that was front-facing and it was just a store room. It made no sense at all just having fridges and freezers in as we did. So we applied to the council for planning permission to turn it into a shop, a food safe shop, and we gutted it all out. Our son Alfie had just been born, so we opened Alfie's, which was Blyton Ice Cream and coffee, artisan really nice coffee. And it worked really well because we had the winter trade, which was of course the coffees and the warm doughnuts and the topped waffles and things like that. And then in the summer, we had the Ice Cream trade and the iced coffees and everything else.

This worked really well and it was so popular we ended up moving the shop up into Gainsborough Marketplace. A lot of investment was being done in the town. The council had put a full redevelopment plan and were really upgrading shopfronts and places of interest in the town, the marketplace, the riverside,  and putting some green space into the town. And we just felt that it'd be great to be a part of that journey. So we moved Alfie's into a much bigger shop. We employed more staff. We expanded our selection, and Alfie's grew into Alfie's Deli, which is what it is today. It's been in the marketplace now for a couple of years. 

Jacket potatoes are a big trade for us. Breakfast, sandwiches, salad boxes, still all your doughnuts and your coffee and your Blyton Ice Cream. Blyton Ice Cream is a local Ice Cream company with a fantastic reputation. So of course we wanted to serve the very best and that's what we did. We built a bake House upstairs and a coffee roastery so we can roast our own coffee beans in Alfie's. We make our own sausage rolls. We bake our own pies and pasties and yeah what a fantastic little shop that is that's grown into into something really special. 

Of course when we moved Alfie's, the room at the shop at the front of next door to the Clock House front-facing was empty again and it made no sense to leave it empty so due to popular demand we started selling our meat from there which again grew extremely quickly and I think there's a real pattern emerging as if you do something well and you do it properly, full traceability you know, we know where the animal was farmed, what it's been fed, when it was killed, we know that it's all been done properly and then it comes to us. We don't deal with any religiously slaughtered produce. When it comes to us we then butcher it properly and traditionally and then we sell it at a fair price and it grew so popular that we ended up moving the butcher's shop next door but one to the deli in a much bigger butcher's shop, The Meatery which is now  in the marketplace. Now, I have had another baby, like I say, she's eight months old, little Lottie Mae.

Who's an absolute diamond! And she's not got a shop named after her, so I don't know what the future holds, but we do have our work cut out at the moment, as many people that know me and know us will know. But yeah, we just wanted to tell a little bit of a story, and we wanted to speak to local people, and we wanted to keep with that ethos of local and quality. And... 

Here we are, At The Table has been born and we're going to be doing this every two weeks. There's going to be a new podcast released every other Sunday, which is something I'm really looking forward to. I'm not going to release the name of the first guest yet, but it's an absolute corker, really tying in to the whole theme of what we do here with local, backing British farming. And yeah, we've got a fantastic guest lined up.

But as I mentioned before, it's not just a podcast, isn't At The Table. We are also going to be releasing a monthly episode of "A Meatery Masterclass". Now, what this is, we're going to butcher some meat, we're going to cook some meat, we're going to do it together, me and you. And we're going to talk you through the whole process. And we're going to get you interested a little bit in terms of less popular cuts, cuts that you may not know, traditional cuts that have sort of gone out of fashion a little bit that we want to bring back in and we want to show you some cost effective ways as well in terms of eating some of the best quality produce.

We want to do some comparisons and show you the difference between buying meat from a local butcher shop and then buying meat from a supermarket. So we've got all that to come. The very first episode is going to be released the first week of February, "A Meatery Masterclass" So there you go. That's a little bit of an insight into what we're doing here.

If I could sit at this table with anybody, with anybody, then who would that be? Well, I've got to say it would be my grandad. My grandad would be the one that would be sat opposite me. A man who I've looked up to my entire life. Somebody that's always encouraged me, that's always supported me. Sadly he passed away just over a year ago, in January last year.

And I always wear one of my granddad's ties, you'll see. So every time you tune in, you'll see that I've got a different tie on. And it's one of my granddad's. There was 47 of them in his drawer. And I have been very, very grateful to receive all 47. So I always change the ties. And it's always going to be a good day when I've got one of my granddad's ties on. But yes, what I would do to have a conversation with him.

That's my choice. That's who I'd be sat at this table with. And he was always so proud. You could open three butcher shops in Gainsborough or you come second in a race and he'd still be so proud of you. And he'd be telling everybody about this. So yeah, that's who I'd be sat at this table with.

So there you go, that's what At The Table is, that's what we're all about. A new podcast every two weeks. The first one will be in two weeks time, episode number one with a fantastic guest. And then don't forget, At The Table, A Meatery Masterclass is coming very, very soon as well. We've got some great things planned. We're very grateful for you tuning in. Thanks for listening, thanks for watching, and we'll see you soon.