Liz Cottam: “It is time Home lives in a place in which she deserves to be"

Cottam says she is looking for a new venue for her Leeds-based fine dining restaurant Home as part of her ambition to continue to improve her restaurant business.

Speaking in the latest video in the Estrella Damm National Restaurant Awards' Sessions series, the chef and restaurateur says she has found a new “more polished” venue for her restaurant that she hopes she can relocate to.

“I’m looking into a fantastic new venue for Home. It will have more covers and let us do things differently and better and build on what we do really well.”

Cottam says the new location will be a more flexible space, allowing her to flex and contract covers at weekend and make use of the space beyond the restaurant’s traditional openings times of Wednesday to Saturday. It will also have a proper bar area, something which she says is lacking in the restaurant's current location.

The restaurateur also says that she had been speaking with landlords during the first lockdown and is using the pandemic as an opportunity to look for new sites.

“We are in a very strong position in terms of finances and are one of the only businesses right now long to continue a future in a new venue. There are some great deals to be done and we are taking advantage of that.”

She says the new Home will be “more mature and grown up”, but with heart and soul of the original restaurant that she describes as welcoming and approachable. “I think it is time Home lives in a place in which she deserves to be, in more polished surroundings.”

Cottam has already changed the approach at Home using the enforced lockdown in the spring as the catalyst, with the biggest change being how the food looks.

“During lockdown I had the time to connect with a more artistic process rather than a design-led one. Rather than being constrained by time and running a restaurant and doing dish development, lockdown allowed me to get into the kitchen and create in a way that I hadn’t been able to before.

“Our ambition is to get better a little bit every single day. I want to see us become a lasting name on the scene.”