Adam Handling announces new pub with rooms, The Loch and the Tyne, after delivery service Hame saves business

In the past year, Handling has lost two restaurants, a bar and a coffee shop. The chef tells David Ellis how his team saved the business – and him
Greener pastures: Despite losing two restaurants in the past year, Handling is now opening a pub with rooms in Windsor
Hazel Thompson
David Ellis @dvh_ellis29 March 2021

After an extraordinary year, one he dubs “the hardest challenge of my life”, Adam Handling is to launch a new project, his first outside of London.

Handling and his team will open The Loch and The Tyne in Old Windsor on May 17, a pub-restaurant with two rooms.

“We’re trying to make it the most sustainable pub in the UK,” says the Frog restaurateur, “So we’re building our own eco-garden, where we grow our own stuff, we’ll grow fruit trees, we’re going to get solar panels put in, a recycled water system. We’ll do composting, food recycling and that kind of thing. The motto is ’sustainable British luxury’, and that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

The news is a happy note that follows a tumultuous 12 months for Handling and his group. As he closed shop for lockdown one, the chef ran four restaurants, two bars and a coffee shop. Since then, he’s lost two of the restaurants, the coffee shop and a bar, battled against bankruptcy and uprooted his personal life to see both himself and the group through. It would have all collapsed, he says, but for his home delivery meal kits Hame – and his team. Hame has proved so successful that last week Handling signed a 10-year lease to house it independently of his restaurants.

“Hame was only created out of necessity, not because I wanted to do something with my time,” he says now. “You know, [at the start of lockdown] I locked myself away for like, two weeks. I couldn’t come out of my room. I was broken. It was… it was not nice. I had bills coming out my eyes and I had no money in the account.

“I didn’t have enough money to pay my rent. I got rid of my house to release the money to make sure that I could survive and pay the staff. And that was difficult, because I’ve got a family to pay for as well.”

Hame launched in May, and Handling credits his group executive chef Steven Kerr, his head chef at Adam Handling Chelsea, Jonny McNeil, and the group’s executive director Nicola Gartenberg for pulling it together, and pulling him through. Box number 90,000 was sent out last week and while the margins are tight on every delivery, Handling says “it’s not put any cash in the bank, but it’s let me pay off a s*** ton of debt” and has shaved years off the company’s recovery after a year in crisis.

I got rid of my house to release the money to make sure that I could survive and pay the staff

“I’ve probably not been quite involved in Hame as I have been on other projects purely because I was broken,” Handling says, “I split up with my partner, I lost my places in Hoxton, I had to sell another 10 per cent of my shares. There was a lot of negative stuff all on my shoulders and I just couldn’t find a way out. Without Steven, Johnny and Nicola, without the whole team, I could never have achieved anything.”

The closure of his east London ventures – the Frog Hoxton, its downstairs bar Iron Stag and nearby sustainable coffee shop Bean and Wheat – hit hardest. “We were in dire straits. The landlords of east London were evil – and I mean that in every way, shape and form. The things that they said to me – ‘hurry up and go bankrupt, so we can claim on your guarantors’ – that sort of stuff, it’s just not nice. And because of that, they almost pushed my company into liquidation.”

Still, it sounds as though Handling has put himself back together again. Some of it has been pure graft – “I literally sold my time to every single person that was willing to buy it, Zoom cookalongs and all that” – some of it has been “incredible” original investors helping out, and some of it has come through leaning more on those around him. To that end, the new pub in Windsor will be looked after by Kerr and McNeil, and is in fact named for where Handling first met the pair, in Newcastle and St Andrews respectively. “I’m giving it to Steven and Johnny,” says Handling, “They’ve worked for me for 13 years and 11 years, and are my two best friends. So I’m making them the chef-proprietors. It’s my name on the door and I’ll be involved, but they’re running it.”

Handling himself, meanwhile, is throwing himself into his flagship site, the Frog in Covent Garden. “Having to concentrate on creating a company, the finance, the legal side of things, that sort of stuff – it takes a lot of your time up, and it plays with your mind. It f***s your head up a bit. I’m a chef at the end of the day and I always think: ‘go to where your strength is’. Mine is Covent Garden.”

Heading back at the Frog means a few changes, too. The restaurant has been refurbished and the menu overhauled (“honestly, it’s the best I’ve ever done”) and Handling is reducing the opening hours from seven days a week to four-and-a-half, though the number of staff will stay the same. All about quality over quantity, then? “Not getting a Michelin star this year broke me. It was hard work to watch. I’m fighting my hardest to get a star in that place.”

Fighting seems the apposite word. After a rattling year, Handling is coming out swinging.

The Loch and The Tyne opens on May 17. For more information, visit lochandtyne.com

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