Josh Rhodes of Turl Street Kitchen talks about the importance of change

One of the most important (and most interesting) features of Turl Street Kitchen is change.

We change quite a lot, quite a lot of the time. Some of it we do because it makes sense to us; we change our menu every mealtime because, after all, you don’t make the same thing for dinner at home every night. We like to see what our brilliant local farmers have got for us, see how we’re feeling and then use our imaginations a little bit.

Other aspects we change, like 200 (and counting) whiskies, dozens of gins and somewhere in the region of 30 kinds of tea, are more about a slight failure to control our imaginations. It keeps our staff on their toes; this week we’re switching teapots and introducing a tea made of leaves described – by our supplier, not us – as “nibbled by crickets”.

The odd thing about it is that we’re all about permanence. We’re lucky now to be one of the longer surviving recent occupants of our pitch here on Turl Street. With our sister charity Oxford Hub upstairs we’re really hoping to become a long-term part of both Oxford’s restaurant scene and community. It’s why we like people to make themselves at home here. For a lot of us this is home and we like to have guests.

The exciting change for us now is that we’re planning for a new addition to the family. We’re in the late stages of guaranteeing a site for us to open up a bakery and speciality coffee shop. Designs are ready and there’s even a facebook page (facebook.com/ turlstreetpantry) which maybe a little pre-emptive, but again it’s easy to get carried away.

Turl Street Pantry is going to be about excellent bread. We already bake twice a day at TSK, but with the Pantry we’ll be baking a much wider variety pretty much non-stop. We want to use the amazing local meat and veg we get to make top quality sandwich fillings and bake the perfect bread to match. We’re also really looking forward to an excuse to expand our range of teas.

We’re going to crowd fund Turl Street Pantry. We’ll be offering some pretty great rewards in return – cups of coffee, sandwiches, keg parties at TSK, dinners and more. I had hoped to use this space to announce that we were starting tomorrow, but the lawyer won’t let us yet. Watch this space!

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Turl Street Kitchen,
16 Turl Street,
Oxford
01865 264171
Open: Sun-Thurs: 8am-Midnight
Fri-Sat: 8am-1am