Five Months Underground: Building The Cave

Five months. That is how long it took to turn the basement under 33 Westow Hill into The Cave.

We have not written much here since March, and this is most of the reason why. Every spare hour, and a lot of hours that were not spare, went underground.

What was down there

If you came to us for khachapuri any time this year, you ate directly above a building site. You would not have known it. That was rather the point.

Downstairs was storage and an extended kitchen. That is the whole of it. Shelves, stock, the overflow of a working restaurant, and no reason for anyone but us to go down there.

The room you sit in now looks like it was always meant to be a room. It was not.

The tiling

Everyone who has renovated anything has one job that broke them. Ours was the tiling.

It is the kind of work that does not photograph well and does not announce itself when it is done. Nobody walks into The Cave and says "beautiful grout lines". But get it wrong and you feel it every day afterwards.

Masha prepared some of it herself. Then we looked properly at the numbers and brought someone in, because the whole downstairs is about fifty square metres and that is a great deal of floor to get wrong by hand while also running a restaurant upstairs. Knowing which jobs to hand over is its own skill, and it is one we have had to learn quickly this year.

Doing it while running a restaurant

The hard part was never any single job. It was that none of it could stop the restaurant.

Lunch still had to go out. The dough still had to be made every morning upstairs. Christmas happened, Valentine's happened, the fiver lunch happened, we got engaged in May, and underneath all of it the basement was slowly becoming something.

We are a small team and there is no version of this where someone else did the hard bit. That is not a complaint. We bought this place on a Monday and opened it on the Friday, and we have never really known any other speed.

What it is for

The Cave holds a small crowd on purpose. Somewhere between ten and twenty people depending on how we set it out, which is small enough that nobody is at the back.

That constraint is the whole idea. It is a room for the things that do not work in a big space: live music where you can see the player's hands, a masterclass where ten people get their hands in the dough, a long Georgian table with wine that deserves an evening rather than a glass.

We have wanted a room like this since before we had a restaurant to put it under.

It is open

The first night was Melania Maggiore's debut EP launch, and it sold out fast enough that we added a second date. We have written about that night separately.

What is coming next:

• Bluegrass Night with Ben Scrivener and Hugo, Monday 10 August
• Khachapuri Masterclass with Masha, Wednesday 2 September in English and Thursday 3 September in Russian

Everything lives at khachapuri.co.uk/events. The room is small, so they do tend to go.

Thank you for eating above a building site for five months without ever once being told that is what you were doing.