We visit the new venue by Northern Monk and Falafel Guys which recently launched on Great George Street.
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00:00 When we first met Nick from Northern Monk and Abdallah and Ahmed from Falafel Guys in mid-October,
00:07 construction work within the Northern Market on Great George Street was well underway.
00:12 Working with some of the food vendors that were in there initially,
00:16 we are bringing back an amount of food vendors within the venue.
00:20 The building itself is, I believe, 140 years old.
00:25 We're wanting to really showcase the building itself, bring a lot of the character of the building back into the venue.
00:33 With the venue now launched, the teams behind Falafel Guys, Big Buns, Six Slice and The Lucky Snake have settled in
00:41 and we can now catch up with Nick and colleague Heather to discover more about how the move-in unfolded
00:46 and their ambitions for the city centre venture.
00:50 A little bit of a labour of love really, I think. Everybody who was involved in the project is really proud of it
00:56 and proud of the way that it turned out. I actually think it looks fantastic in my opinion.
01:01 But, you know, that's up to other people to decide, I suppose.
01:05 I first saw it before we'd properly got the keys and initially walked in and started to look at things that we could improve on.
01:13 And so it's good to see that a lot of those things have been done.
01:16 I haven't seen it every day like Nick has, but I've sort of been in like once every two weeks.
01:21 And yeah, the difference last Wednesday morning before the soft launch to now is it did not look like a bar.
01:28 I was in full Halloween make-up, screwing table legs.
01:32 Like, it was, yeah, a whirlwind of a fortnight for sure.
01:38 As with all of these things, it is a process.
01:41 And usually a fit-out like this would be three, four, five, maybe even six months.
01:47 And, you know, a testament to the team that were on the job.
01:52 We've turned it around in five and a half, six weeks.
01:55 I think Nick would not try and build a bar pretty much single-handedly by himself if he had that choice again.
02:02 Maybe give himself an extra week or something.
02:06 I don't think, I mean you've smashed it, but I don't think you've had the most fun.
02:09 The focus now is to make sure that the service and the hospitality is right within December.
02:17 You know, we don't want to try and push everything in one go and then the service suffer from that.
02:23 I mean, the actual launch night honestly was a little bit busier than I had first anticipated.
02:33 I think that some people who were there would attest to that.
02:37 But, you know, we powered through.
02:40 We managed to sort of get the queues down, get a drink in everybody's hands and get everybody sat down and having a really good time.
02:47 I think it's, you know, Northern Monk as a whole is all about creating the best beer experiences.
02:57 And that's something that we want to try and focus on within December.