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What made you want to become the sales
and marketing director of Five rivers
catering company, and subsequently its
restaurant offshoot?
I’d studied business and marketing at
university and one of my dreams had always
been to have my own restaurant. So when
the opportunity came up to join Five Rivers,
it seemed like the perfect culmination of
various things I wanted to achieve. In any
case, I’ve always been very passionate about
food.
As a catering operation, the company
started in 2004 in the West Midlands,
with you joining in 2007 just as you were
fi nishing university. Then its fi ne dining
restaurant, the £1.1m Five rivers A la Carte,
opened just over a year ago in Walsall. Did
you feel you were thrown in at the deep
end?
It wasn’t the work ethic that bothered me
because I’d been working from a very young
age, but more so that I was entering an
industry that I knew almost nothing about.
Then again, that was an exciting prospect.
The one aspect that I came up against were
the long hours. Doing a 13 hour day was a
bit of an eyeopener for me!
How do you fi nd working for both the
catering end of the company and its
restaurant?
On the catering front, my diary gets really
full-up between the months of June and
August because that’s the prime summer
season, particularly for weddings and various
other events. We have a massive team
of people to oversee, with just the chefs
numbering up to 18. We’re contracted and
approved to cater for the Hilton and Marriott
hotel groups as well as a host of prestigious
venues such as Blenheim Palace. The work
is very fl uid and you are having to build a
whole event to fi t into the brief of your client,
and putting it together very quickly. The
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restaurant is very much an extension of our
catering business, operating like a showcase
for our client