A unique new eatery is open for business but as MARION SAUVEBOIS reveals it wasn’t all plain sailing

ONCE can be brushed off as rotten luck, twice as sod’s law, but three times surely is a cry of dire portent.

And by the fourth round of calamitous flooding within days of their grand opening any sane owner would take the hint, scrap plans for a subterranean haunt in Highworth’s damp underbelly and stick to drier land, preferably above ground.

Well, most of them.

With already one 'natural disaster' under his belt at The Globe, head chef and owner John Mitchell was not about to let a little slush stand in the way of launching his tapas eatery, The Tunnels.

Though he admits delaying the inauguration on three occasions only to be hit by yet another overflow at the eleventh hour on his fourth (but thankfully final) try this month was almost more than his heart could take.

“Three times we tried and three times it flooded, and then the electricity blew,” he sighs deeply for effect. “This time around we had a week before the opening when it happened again. Ironically, the problem wasn’t here, it was further down the line. But it didn’t stop us this time.”

“It was forth time lucky,” chips in his sous chef Gemma Mills, with obvious relief.

John is the man behind High Street café Puddleducks, which opened its doors moisture-free two years ago. Even then the father-of-two harboured ambitions to transform the cellar into a restaurant. Finally six months ago, he and his trusted sous chef, set to work in earnest, designing a cosy yet unassuming eatery with discreet touches of Andalusia peppered around the place. But The Tunnels proved more problematic to knock into shape than the quirky coffee shop above.

The choice of tapas was clear from the word go for John who, in a past life, spent extensive stretches of time jetting from Monte Carlo to Barcelona as executive head chef to famished Formula One drivers, their crew and guests.

“That’s when I fell in love with it. We would go to these rural areas and I got to discover and taste proper Spanish food, not what you get in chains. I think the space here really suited tapas. It’s relaxed, quiet rustic.”

The humble fare of Barcelona and its surroundings was not all he had the pleasure of experiencing on his travels. He enjoyed a taste of the jet set life, if by proxy. His claim to fame while catering to the rich and famous was receiving a kiss from Olivia Newton-John for his efforts, indulging in a bevvy after a long day’s work a table away from Tom Cruise, George Clooney and Anthony Hopkins and accidently shoving Sylvester Stallone.

“We were in Hungary in this really small paddock, we were very busy and I ran out and accidentally knocked him over,” he smiles meekly. “I also met Arnold Schwarzenegger and Phil Collins used to come to every race and muck in with us.”

Reminiscing about ploughing into Rocky himself and hobnobbing with Hollywood’s finest in sun-drenched Monaco is rather incongruous, bathed in the cool air of a cellar, on a market town’s quaint High Street. Then again, except for a fairly traditional training (as much as a 16-year-old would-be chef surrounded by a gaggle of girls in home economics in the 70s falls into the ‘traditional’ category), John’s career cannot exactly be classed as orthodox.

His apprenticeship done and dust he joined a small chain, Crest Hotels where he steadily rose through the ranks to become executive head chef. He stayed on when the group was taken over by Holiday Inn. Far from serving slapdash corporate-style fare, his food was aimed at a more discerning clientele. Under his leadership, the Telford Holiday Inn’s restaurant became the first to be awarded an AA Rosette. It is also there he made chain history by launching a traditional Japanese eatery to meet the large local Nippon population’s dining needs.

Never one to turn down a challenge, the ever resourceful chef enlisted the help of a Japanese friend to initiate him into the intricacies of her homeland’s gastronomy – a cuisine virtually unknown in the UK in the early 1990s.

“This was very authentic food, what you’d cook at home,” he says. “It was very intimidating to begin with. I was making food I had never even tasted or heard of. You work with so many ingredients. The majority of Japanese food is all in the preparation, cooking it is easy. People think Japanese is sushi but it’s so much more than that.”

But mastering the subtle art Japanese cooking was only the tip of the iceberg.

“We had people come in to teach us the language, Japanese customs and culture,” he recalls. “You couldn’t sit older Japanese people at Table 4 because in their culture it was bad luck. You also couldn’t sit people with their back to the door. It’s a superstition,” shrugs the 57-year-old.

After a few years at the restaurant, and a stint teaching at college, he joined MSL, a catering firm for major sports tournaments as executive chef. One of his ‘regulars’ was the King of Spain, who proved an appreciative guest.

“He was a nice bloke,” smiles John. “Very down to earth, he knew your name. I’ve got a huge amount of respect for him.”

Calling time on the hectic high-flying life of a Formula One caterer, he settled in Highworth with his family in the late 90s, travelling back and forth to Sheffield where he helped a friend launch a restaurant at the local Holiday Inn. Finally in 2010, he set his sight on the moderately sedate life of a pub owner and took over The Globe. When a disastrous leak destroyed its kitchen two years ago, he opted to simply run it as pub and set up a new food concern elsewhere. In December 2014 he launched Puddleducks café on the High Street. The name was inspired by a jerky drive, on a drizzly day, spent dodging an obstacle course of potholes.

Spurred on by the success of the old-world coffee shop, which serves a range of breakfasts, homemade sandwiches, cakes and Sunday Roasts at the weekend, he set the wheels in motion for The Tunnels. After far more tribulations than he bargained for the restaurant welcomed customers at last on June 17.

A traditional tapas bar, it offers a range of Catalan and Castilian staples from the beloved tortilla to and albondigas to the less common higados de pollo y chorizo (chicken livers with chorizo).

“I wanted to serve the real thing,” he insists. “It has to be authentic. If you’re going to do tapas it has to be traditional.”

Seepages and DIY niggles firmly behind him, he is now determined to make a success of Highworth’s only tapas restaurant.

“You can be as confident as you like about your choices, the ingredients, the décor, but the proof is in the eating and we’ve had great feedback,” he adds. “So we can breathe out now, to a degree. But when you start at the top where do you go? This keeps us on our toes.”

For more details about The Tunnels and Puddleducks go to the Puddleducks Facebook Page or call 01793 766002.