Every week, without fail, people stride into the café looking around eagerly for a roasting pig. When confronted with the menu of tofu, lentils, vegan cakes and freshly grown salad, the carnivores’ disappointment is obvious. “What, no meat at all? Not even chicken?”

Sometimes, they cave to their hunger and agree to sample some vegetable soup or caramelised onion tart. Sometimes they’ll decide to just have a coffee. Sometimes, they leave abruptly, with an expression akin to betrayal etched on their faces. On such occasions, I wonder what possessed me to christen a vegetarian café ‘The Hog Roast’, and eventually decide it must be a manifestation of the exhaustion-induced delirium that preceded the café’s opening. The Hog Roast opened in June 2013, in a pavilion on an old sports ground in South Oxford. Our aim with The Hog Roast was not only to create the most eco-friendly café possible, but to establish a community space where events, workshops and skill-shares, all with an environmental focus, could be held. In short, we strove to maximise our social impact while minimising the effect on the environment. As The Hog Roast developed, each day presented a new difficulty. Determined not to buy furniture in order to be as eco-friendly as possible (not to mention save every penny of our dwindling budget) we resorted to scouring freecycle for chairs and rescuing furniture from street corners. On one notable occasion, having exhausted all alternative avenues, I attempted to convince a friend he had no real need for his dining room table. As a social enterprise, part of the challenge of setting up the café was our exceedingly limited budget. Unable to afford to pay for people to do jobs we could do ourselves, Google became my oracle, teaching me to paint walls, upholster chairs and sand floors. The café steadily began to take over my life.

I began to consider essay-writing as a break from real work, and frequently had to crawl under the table in the library to frantically whisper instructions to a plumber or kitchen fitter. The gravity of the situation became apparent to me when, one night, I dreamt of food hygiene standards. Our priority when establishing The Hog Roast was to create a café which used, as far as possible, locally-sourced and ethical food. Some things are easy. On Sunday mornings we can harvest salad, and many other delicious vegetables, from Oxgrow, Oxford’s community garden, which is right next door to The Hog Roast. Eggs are a little trickier. I am very keen to get a flock of Hog Roast hens, and perhaps even a cow, but I am told this is overly ambitious, and plus, what with still being in the middle of my degree, I don’t really have time for animal husbandry.

Setting up The Hog Roast has been an incredibly steep learning curve. At the start, I had no knowledge of setting up a café, not to mention running one.

I frequently burnt my hands on the coffee machine, put the fridge on freezer setting, and almost every week we ran out of something. Things are going a little more smoothly now, though our biggest challenge is recruiting volunteers.

Everyone involved in The Hog Roast is a volunteer, and we are always looking for people to join the team. It’s fun work, in a beautiful setting, and we always have leftover cake! If you can volunteer, even for a couple of hours on a Sunday, please get in touch.

  • TRY IT The Hog Roast is on Hogacre Common (off Whitehouse Rd) and is open on Sundays from 11-4pm. For more info visit thehogroast.org