Since 2016
The first room had twenty-two seats and one menu, and it was written on the wall because printing it every week was more than the business could carry. Most of what the group still does was decided in that room by not being able to afford the alternative.
Four rooms later the menus are printed and the wall is still there. What has not changed is that each room writes its own, because a group that cooks one menu in four buildings is a chain, and that was never the idea.
We buy from the same six suppliers we started with, which is less a principle than a habit that turned out to be one. Two of them now grow things for us that they did not grow before.
Everybody who runs a kitchen in the group came up through one of the others. That is not a policy either, but we have stopped pretending it is a coincidence.