New Leeds venue: Inside The Northern Market

We visit the new venue by Northern Monk and Falafel Guys which recently launched on Great George Street.

Transcript

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.