Starting Up with Jack Greenall @ Smoke and Thyme

My new venture, Smoke and Thyme At The Garden Café, is a pay-what-you-want pop-up restaurant in partnership with Restore, an Oxford-based mental health charity.

My menu changes every month to feature new ideas I’ve been developing, and my guests give feedback so that I can perfect the dishes.

Three years ago, a friend called me asking if I wanted to help him run a pop-up restaurant in Soho. I wasn’t a chef – just a guy with an expensive hobby and a big stack of cookbooks, but I said yes anyway.

I didn’t find out until six months later that he’d been expecting me to talk him out of it.

But the pop-up went great, so great in fact that my friend got a real job off the back of it. Our plans for starting a catering company together were toast.

Outside of that brief stint, I had no professional food experience, no formal training, and no contacts in the food world. I also had no intention of turning back and even less of starting at the bottom in the restaurant industry, so I did what any lost and directionless 20-something would do. I started a blog.

Blogging about food is great. You make peace with how much money you’ve spent on an overpowered camera and start cooking.

I cured sides of salmon with beetroot and orange zest, churned up rhubarb and toast-flavoured ice creams, glazed whole pork bellies with honey and mustard and perched deep fried soft-shelled crabs on top of crab meat curries. I was in heaven and had the photos to prove it.

Quickly though I realised that making food and taking pictures of it all by myself was going to leave me overfed and underpaid.

I called some friends up to see if they wanted to come for dinner, try some new dishes, and pay me for the privilege.

Maybe I didn’t have enough confidence in my own abilities, or maybe my friends are just that much more awesome than I thought, but I was a little surprised that not only did they come, but they wanted to come again, and they wanted to bring others.

My guests were all friends, so I set the price for these dinners at pay-what-you-want. I didn’t realise at the time how much this idea would become a cornerstone of what I do.

Not having a fixed price gives new guests the confidence to try me out for the first time, and right from the start, people have paid more than I would have dared to ask them for, especially in those early days when things were a bit rough around the edges.

The best part of the night for me is always when, exhausted and food-smeared, I can finally sit down with a glass of wine and talk to people about the food. I get asked where my ideas come from and for cooking tips, and I find out what people liked and what they want to see on the next menu.

Some great word of mouth and a few free ads down the line, I’ve found myself needing not just more dates but a bigger venue.

I learned about Restore’s Manzil Way Café when they asked me to run a barbecue at their “In The Garden” fundraising festival. Their garden and café are both such beautiful spaces and just down the road from my house.

Partnering with a charity seemed like the natural extension of my pay-what-you-want model, and the more I learned about Restore’s work with people with mental health issues, the more I wanted to do something that would support them too.

We’ve committed to run at least until Christmas, and are already adding new dates in September and October as our first batch filled up fast.

TRY IT
Smoke and Thyme At The Garden Café is taking reservations for the September to December season.
For available dates and upcoming menus, see smokeandthyme.com