Russell Up » Project Updates

Cheers!

Russell — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 17:09:39 +0000

To say that 2015 was a big year for the team behind Russell Up (ie: me) would be an understatement to say the very least.

The year began the way all good ones do, with a great many beers and burgers from the good people down at Teuchtar’s Landing. From these beers came ideas and inspiration, which thankfully hung around far longer than the fuzzy heads which followed. To move the business forward I needed a kitchen to call my own and all of the kit to fill it. Of course this step would not be the cheapest, but it was either make the leap or stay standing still.

Working mostly from home in the three years since launching Russell Up, and with a series of pretty pokey domestic kitchens, I’ve had to improvise. What was once a hallway became the dry store, lined with shelves stocking everything from turmeric to tonka beans and back again. What was once a car garage became an equipment store: plates, cutlery, fryers, water baths, dehydrators, the list goes on. More often than not, preparing food at home was a bit of a nightmare, but the other option was to do it all on the job, arriving at the venue ahead of schedule and preparing everything in the onsite kitchen, which came with it’s own set of pros and cons.

When it comes to kitchens I’ve seen it all: from stunning expanses of marble worktop with every gadget under the sun to temperamental AGAs, a severe lack of wooden spoons (doesn’t everyone have 17?) and self-cleaning ovens stuck in a perpetual cycle of rinse & repeat. Sometimes we get a wonderful treat, more often than not it’s more of a challenge, but each kitchen I have the pleasure of cooking will always be new and different and hopefully never disastrous.

Launching my second venture, The Edinburgh Catering Company, in Spring last year was an incredible high. Our Kickstarter campaign raised 115% of it’s total – a staggering amount, especially considering how apprehensive we were about using this platform in the first place. The support I received from friends, family, fellow chefs along with a fair few complete strangers was overwhelming, and I cannot even begin to thank everyone enough. Our stunning kitchen, now almost a year old, allowed us to make our first dent in the wedding market, host the inaugural Unit 12 pop-up and also gave me a pretty good reason to finally get my hands on a vac-pack machine.

And so here we are. Already early four months through 2016 and with our first employee on the books. Claire has joined us from Innis & Gunn, where she was working as their Brand Ambassador, representing their delicious oak aged brews around the UK and Europe. For Russell Up and TECC, Claire will be taking care of much of the event organisation along with some marketing bits & pieces, including taking care of this somewhat neglected blog, freeing me up to get cooking and developing: dry-ice ice-cream anyone? A woman of many talents, Claire also moonlights for spirits brand Sipsmith, spreading her love for gin up and down the east coast, meaning this year we are delighted to be offering gin masterclasses and cocktail workshops alongside our foodie offering.

With eight weddings already booked in for this summer, several pop-ups in the pipeline, alongside planning our own wedding, it’s looking to be another action packed year. We’ll cheers to that!

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The Edinburgh Catering Company Launch Party

Russell — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 10:28:21 +0000

Saturday 4th July: Independence day, right?

Well this year something else also happened. We held the official launch party of our new production kitchen for the Edinburgh Catering Company and Russell Up.

Many of you joined us for the night, but for anyone who is not up to speed, I’ll fill you in:

Nearly three years ago, I returned to Edinburgh having worked in France and Portugal. I set up this very website, Russell Up, working as a private chef in Edinburgh and all over Scotland. Much fun was had, and I built up a reputation and took on more and more exciting jobs. However, the more I took on, the harder it became to juggle everything out of a very small production space.

Fast forward to October 2014. I viewed unit 12, New Broompark. A lot of back and forth, solicitors, and waiting, I finally got the keys on 20th February 2015. Around the same time I launched our Kickstarter campaign. I needed to raise some extra money to help fit out the kitchen. Kickstarter had helped other Edinburgh businesses, and was becoming more widely known. It was tough, but we surpassed our target, raising nearly £14500.

The next four months was spent ripping out the old office, floor, and fittings, and building a new production kitchen. We managed to do a lot of the building work ourselves, and have ended up with something I am very proud of. I still run Russell Up, and love cooking privately for people. This new space allows me to do even more interesting an exciting things in these situations. However I decided to launch a new brand at the same time. Welcome The Edinburgh Catering Company. The ethos is exactly the same; bespoke menus of fantastic produce cooked from scratch by skilled chefs. The only difference is that this new brand will be able to cope with large events; weddings, hog roasts, business events, and corporate functions.

So to toast this occasion, we invited about 80 people who have helped us along the way. Some people supported the kickstarter, others helped with promotion or offered invaluable advice. We also had some current wedding couples along. I’m happy to say that everyone who attended contributed something to the development of the business.

So to give back to them, we had a (huge) hog roast, and magician, and frankly a ton of alcohol. We dressed our humble kitchen up, and partied until the wee hours. I’m going to be eating leftover pulled pork and cheese for a while, but I can live with that!

I’ll upload some more photos as I collect them from everyone, but I like to think the evening was a huge success. I would like to thank everyone who attended as well as everyone who helped set the party up; I certainly couldn’t have done it without you.

The kitchen has returned to normal, and we are pressing on with the business development. We are also busy working on the outstanding Kickstarter rewards. The new website will be live in the next week, and we are very excited for the year ahead.

Please get in touch if you have any questions, or indeed any ideas for an event.

Russell

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Misson Kickstarter: Succesful!

Russell — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:27:32 +0000

2015 is already shaping up to be a fantastic year, and after only two months.

I hope you’ll all forgive my silence this past week, I’ve been recovering from a rather frantic February, by topping up my goggle tan in the Arlberg mountains and having someone else do the cooking for a change (more on our fantastic experience with Scott Dunn in a later blog).

First things first – thank you. A massive thank you to everyone who supported our Kickstarter campaign. We had our target of £12,500 in the bag 62 hours before the deadline which is incredible, and although we didn’t quite hit our ‘stretch goal’, the final sum raised amounted to £14,487 which is again, incredible.

Hitting our target early meant all 80 backers bagged themselves an invitation to our ‘Pig Day Out’ – a day of great food, drink and company, hopefully in the sunshine but more than likely under umbrellas. We’ve had some extra post deadline support so can now ‘go the whole hog’ (too much?) and get our hog roaster ordered asap.

Didn’t manage to pledge in time? Fear not, we shall be making tickets available to purchase online, once we have a date set which suits our backers.

In the meantime, a quick catch up on where we are with ‘The Unit’ aka Russell Up/TECC HQ:

We managed to get our hands on the keys a little earlier than planned so along with some easily persuaded muscle, we have been pulling up floors, breaking down walls and filling up skips with all the garbage from No. 12. After that, the priority was: kettle, mug, coffee.

The current challenge is removing dried on carpet adhesive from the concrete floor. This is even less fun than it sounds. Once the new floor is down, we can paint, clad the walls, plumb in the sinks, and finally get the extractor canopy fitted.

The fact that I can condense this process into one sentence does not mean this is simple. There are a lot of little steps, and hidden obstacles for us to overcome in the next few months; we can’t wait!

Thank you once again to everyone. We are looking forward to seeing all of you at one of the events.

Russell

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