Causing a scene

Shortly after we moved back to Sevenoaks, I walked past a boarded-up sushi restaurant on the High Street. I sighed. Plus ça change.

I grew up in Sevenoaks, and moved back again 11 years ago as an adult. I was 95% happy with this decision, but there was 5% of me gripping tightly onto something we were going to lose. It was certainly nice to be a little further away from the guy who had hacked up our GP’s waiting room with an axe. But I missed the food of city life, oh I really missed it. The Turkish flatbreads, the delis, the neighbourhood restaurants. Places that knew how to do flattering lighting and comfortable chairs! Buzz and chatter. It can’t be that hard? Don’t other people want this too?

That same week I saw the following headline in the Sevenoaks Chronicle, and boy did this sum things up

It was 2014 and my hometown had rejected sushi. This shouldn’t have been surprising, as it had rejected Cafe Rouge a few years earlier, so someone clearly hadn’t read the room.

I became desperate to find someone - anyone - who was Ready For Sushi. Or at the very least, ready for something more bold than a Costa panini.

For a long time I kept a 2011 Evening Standard article folded up in the back of my diary. It was about the growing street food scene in London. At that time, street food - in the way we know it now - was only on the fringes. There were a handful of people blazing a trail, and the person who really caught my eye was a woman called Petra Barran.

Petra bought a van, learned how to make incredible chocolate, and drove her van around the country trading as Choc Star, selling out-of-this-world hot chocolates, sundaes and brownies, and swapping bed and board at strangers’ homes in return for making the pudding at dinner. What an adventure. I wanted this.

One day, in my new life in Kent, and still seeking adventure, I heard about a woman called Kay. Kay also had a van - a beautiful army green vintage van - and was a talented cook who made delicious things I really really wanted to eat. Slow cooked meats in umami marinades, soft brioche, zingy salads. And the best thing? Kay was in Sevenoaks!

Standing by Kay’s van and shovelling deliciousness into my grateful face, I felt a culinary excitement for the first time since I’d left London.

I have channelled this excitement into every part of my own business. From rolling up my sleeves to bake the bread I couldn’t find in my town, to selling it for cash, to growing my customer base, to putting my business out onto the street on my massive tricycle and peddling/pedalling in all senses of the word. It took me a year of cycling to realise that I had made my 2011 daydream of running a street food business come true. It wasn’t a van, but I was on wheels!

Last week there was an article in The Times about what’s great about living in Sevenoaks. One of the things they mentioned - aside from the beautiful green spaces and pleasing lack of axe-wielding gentlemen - was the

tasty sourdough scene

and they namechecked me, and my bakery. My one-woman bakery that I run from my tricycle.

It is 2025 and Sevenoaks has a scene. The town that turned its back on sushi has now embraced it. The town that in 2018 had nowhere - NOWHERE - where you could buy sourdough, now has a SCENE. And you know where that scene started? It started in my kitchen, and I’m bloody proud of that.