21/01/2023
A message to all of our lovely customers,
It is with a very heavy heart that we are announcing the permanent closure of The Nook. Whilst this is really the last thing in the world we wish to be doing, the past half a year or so has proved such a strain on our life, that we have come to the conclusion we simply cannot soldier on any longer. Opening the cafe has been one of the proudest achievements of our so far short lives, but also one of the most challenging. Whilst opening a new business is a difficult venture at the best of times, ours seemed to face several extra hurdles. We opened the business with fairly limited initial investment and not a huge amount to fall back on. We hoped that both of our individual experiences within the industry, combined with our family's combined experience of running successful hospitality businesses in the town would be enough to get us to where we needed to be. However, by the end of the first month of our lease, we were already faced with a big problem in the shape of The Pandemic. We were not even able to open our cafe before we got plunged into a lockdown. Following months of pottering around, come July 2020 we were finally able to open the cafe.
Our first few months proved extremely promising with that post lockdown buzz and the introduction of The Eat Out to Help Out scheme. However, come Autumn cases has started to rise, the scheme had finished and we were plunged into another lockdown. Just as we had started to get a rhythm going, we were faced with another roadblock. When this lockdown finished, hospitality businesses were told they would only be allowed to open to customers sitting outside. We tried to adapt to this by extending our garden space into the car park and opening the inside of the cafe as a shop, selling an array of homemade goods, books and local art, all of which at personal expense to the cafe. We tried to adapt from then on to changing trends, most notably the rising cost of supplies. Coupled with the recent cost of living crisis, the cafe's finances had become even more stretched. *Continued in comments*
