The Cookhouse Street Food

The Cookhouse Street Food in Portsmouth, run by Ashley Cornish and his sister Danielle Cornish.

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Ashley Cornish, this is Danielle Cornish, my sister, and we own the Cookhouse Street Food.

00:06We've been running this for about three years now, and Danielle can tell you why.

00:11I saw a film, it was based in America with lovely sunshine, and they've got a food truck and it

00:17looked so much fun, I thought let's give it a go, but didn't take the weather in mind, that's the

00:22only problem. Brilliant, so tell me what your sort of favourite food places are in the city?

00:31I am really enjoying the briny at the moment, I love fresh fish and I love what they're doing

00:36there, love the quality and stuff. Always have to shout out Dwayne at Broadway Coffee,

00:42he sort of gave us our first gig in Pompey and got us around, and then Staggeringly Good,

00:48they helped us loads as well, we love them guys. Fab, so tell me a little bit about what

00:56the Cookhouse brings to the city? So for us, the reason we need to do this is because we're

01:03passionate about food and we love eating, it's not, I would say, a generic burger van, there's

01:08nothing wrong with that, but for us to be interested it was all about quality, and I believe we're

01:13building that brand now. And the fact that everything's made by us too, even down to the

01:18chips. Yeah, well I think we're the only mad people that actually make our own chips in this type of

01:22setup, and it can be testing at times. So tell me a little bit about your setup then, in terms of,

01:29I understand you're obviously a food van and then you travel around the city or further afield?

01:34Yeah, so essentially at the moment we do, Victoria's Festival is our biggest one we do,

01:41then we do lots of private corporate events and that's what we're pushing for now, we really want

01:46to do sort of the festivals at weekends and corporates through the day. You do a lot at

01:51Southsie Common as well, don't we, when they have the fireworks? Yeah, that's for the Portsmouth

01:55Council. Yeah, cool, tell me what's the big seller on your menu? Well that's got to be the lamb

02:01filthy fries. It's a bit of a cult following now. Yeah, we've made our uniform, or James

02:09Madgwick, he made this for us, it's a really cool design, that's the lamb chopping up potato

02:17for the chips. That's, yeah, it's a lot of work goes into it, but the lamb filthy fries is

02:21definitely our best seller. So tell me what the future is for the cookhouse? So like previously

02:29said, we're pushing the corporate now, we want to make that sort of at least 50% of our business,

02:35and then going forward hopefully you'll see the same brand, the cookhouse, but we'll be offering

02:41maybe the cookhouse coffee, things like that. We are in the process of building a commercial kitchen

02:46and then in the future having a coffee shop, but that takes a lot of money so

02:52that'll be a little while away yet. So what is lovely is the amount of support we've had from

02:57start up until now, starting on Hayling with all the regulars that we've had, coming over to

03:01Portsmouth, building more, and then Hampshire, and yeah it's been an amazing amount of people

03:06we've met and that's supported us from the start all the way to now.