This week we’ve been reflecting on exactly six years since the first Covid lockdown and five and a half since we opened the restaurant on Magdalen Road.
It’s been a while since we’ve thought about 2020: we’ve been running away from it very fast ever since. This was no time for a big opening, but it was our challenge, and we rose to it.
We had come by the Taste Tibet premises in January of 2020. The site had not operated as a restaurant before, and needed a complete refit.
Before our team of builders set to work, our daughter turned six, and in February we held a birthday celebration for her in the old shop. Her friends came by to eat cake and play games, but also to draw on the walls – a unique party proposition.
The fun and games didn’t last long. By March, the market in Oxford’s Gloucester Green, where we had run a stall for six years, shut according to Covid regulations. The shops closed too. So just as renovation works at the restaurant kicked off, the world around us ceased to operate. Instead of taking a couple of months, the refit quickly fell behind schedule and over budget.
All the while, we ran deliveries from our production kitchen instead. This was definitely a pivot: we’d never operated a service like this before. Unable to figure out how we could ensure that the food arrived hot, we proposed delivery of cold food instead. Yeshi and team spent the mornings cooking and blast-chilling individual and family-sized boxes of curry and momos. In the afternoons, I drove them around Oxford in our family car.
This was our life for many months. It was nowhere near lucrative enough to cover outgoings on the new restaurant premises, which we’d planned to finance through a summer of festival work. Nor was it seamless – our ordering system was home-made and subject to human error. Missed deliveries and other horrors still haunt us in our sleep from time to time.
There’s a much longer story we could tell about 2020 involving hospital food drops and deliveries to queues of hungry people in car parks.
On top of all of this, we were also pitching the Taste Tibet cookbook, and it was commissioned by Murdoch Books in June of the same year. Recipes were written and tested at the same time as running our deliveries business and opening the restaurant.
It’s little wonder that we don’t care to look back, but as we pass the sixth anniversary of the Covid lockdown, this year we choose to celebrate. Against many odds, our little local restaurant has survived to tell the tale. The format and decor is mostly unchanged since 2020 – we’re still in emotional recovery – but debt is less real for us now, and we’re looking towards the future.
Let us know what you’d like to see, eat or experience at Taste Tibet. What are you looking for that we haven’t yet created? We’d love to hear from you as we move into the next stage.
Taste Tibet is open all the usual hours this week, as follows:
Weds – Fri: 5-9.30pm (dinner only)
Saturday: 12-3/ 5-9.30pm
Sunday: 12-3 / 5-9pm
This week’s menu is up on the website – check it. Come for dine in, take away and a restock of your freezer.
Newsletter subscribers enjoy chocolate tsampa truffles on us this week. Have you signed up yet? Click here to receive weekly news and offers direct to your inbox.
Looking forward to seeing you soon,
Julie and Yeshi
Opening hours this week:
Weds – Fri: 5-9.30pm
Saturday: 12-3pm 🥢 5-9.30pm
Sunday: 12-3pm 🥢 5-9pm
☏ 01865 499318
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