New barbecue food shop in Chesterfield is opened by couple who launched takeaway business at home during lockdown

Fat Pig BBQ on Saltergate, across the road from the Donut roundabout, will be opened on Friday by Stuart and Karen Hutcheson who launched a successful takeaway business during lockdown.

Stuart said: “We’re offering generous quantities of really nice barbecued foods. I like my food and I like to think that if I purchased anything from our place I wouldn't be hungry afterwards.”

The offering in the new shop will include individual burgers priced from £7 to £11 and a meal deal consisting of two burgers, two fries and two drinks for £22.

The most expensive item on the menu is a ‘meat sweat’ platter for two to three people featuring smoked turkey, pork belly, beef brisket, pulled pork, barbecue chicken, smoked sausage, mac and cheese, beans, fries, coleslaw, pickles and barbecue sauce for £45.

Kids portions will include a small burger, small pulled pork with fries and a drink for £6.

The takeaway will initially be open on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 4pm until 10pm. Stuart said: “The hope is to eventually open at lunchtimes when we’d maybe offer a slightly smaller menu,. We’re a little bit nervous because energy prices are going skyward and we've got no idea how much this building is going to cost us to run. We're going to see how it works."

Stuart, 50, and Karen, 48, will be assisted by three part-time workers in the shop which was formerly a chippie. The couple signed the lease in April and have ploughed nearly £50,000 into the premises where they have installed a new kitchen including a chargrill and new extraction system.

Food will be smoked at the couple’s home on Kirkstone Road, Newbold. Stuart said: “I do the smoking and barbecuing in the back garden. Smoking a brisket can take 12 to 14 hours so we do it a day or so in advance, cool it down and vacuum seal it then bring it back up to temperature in the shop.

"Our smoker is far too big to fit in the shop – she’s big and weighs over a ton. I was in the bad books with my wife because I forgot to measure the width of the smoker before it arrived. We had a brand new composite and metal gate installed only a few months previously and the smoker was a foot wider than the opening. We had to cut the wall to make the entrance wider to get the smoker in and the gate had to be replaced.”

The couple started a takeaway business from their driveway during lockdown after bookings for their home-registered events catering company were hit by the pandemic.

Stuart said: “We’d got a busy summer booked up, bought a trailer, then Covid cancelled the bookings. What we noticed was that the government was relaxing the planning laws to allow catering businesses who hadn’t done food previously. Restaurants that couldn’t open were allowed to do hot food takeaway without going through the red tape of getting the necessary applications in with the local authorities.

"We were advised by the National Caterers Association that it also covered people who were registered at home. We’d been inspected by Chesterfield environmental health and we’d scored 5 out of 5. At the end of March we started doing pre-ordered takeaways on site. The business became busier so we employed a part-time member of staff to help us in the trailer on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. On Fridays and Saturdays we had to stop taking orders at 6.30pm when we’d got to the maximum we could take in a catering trailer.

"With the threat of Covid subsiding, the planning laws are rescinded and go back to their original state meaning that we can’t continue to do takeaways where we are. We had a decision to make, do we concentrate on event catering which may not happen, such as being affected by the weather, and let the takeaways stop or do we build on what is now a two-year-old regular business?”

Commenting on the opening of the shop, Stuart added: "I can’t work out if I’m excited or nervous...I’m really proud of where we've come from and mainly proud of how my wife's taken to it.

"When we first started as a catering business, her first response was ‘you can do it if you want but I'm having nothing to do with it’. She didn't share the original passion for cooking that I did and she was also running the Pure Party shop in Chesterfield so she was taken up with that.

“As the catering side of the business got busier, we decided to put all our energies into that and get someone to take on the party shop lease. Now I look after the cooking and the smoking of food and come up with ideas. Karen is the person who organises the business, doing everything from interviewing new staff to dealing with the customers.”