Last year, a celebrity chef and two local businessmen teamed up to open No1 Cromer, a fish and chip restaurant and take away that is located in New Street. In its first year, the business has been going from one positive to the next, all the while using local producers and due to this, they were able to open a new part of the restaurant upstairs. The upstairs section of the business offers a wider array of dishes including crab and lobster.
According to Spencer Gray, one of the businessmen involved in the restaurant together with Chris Griffin, it’s the popularity of the downstairs section of their business that led them to expand it. He says that as they watched the business go from one positive to another, they started thinking what else they could do to make the most of this and that is when they decided to take advantage of the celebrity chef, Galton Blackiston’s knowledge in catering matters and start offering more than just regular fish and chips. He added that they are quite proud of what they were able to achieve by working together and that the restaurant had actually performed much better than they’d hoped.
The restaurant currently hires around 30 people according to Gray and he believes that their business has done a lot for the city as it has brought people who would normally not come to these parts. The restaurant was praised by Norman Lamb, north Norfolk’s MP who visited the restaurant recently and had a chance to meet with Gray and his wife Rachel. The MP praised the work that had been put in to make the business as successful as it had become. For Cromer, the MP said, this was a great thing because crowds of people were now coming to the town even during the off-peak season and there are no signs of the numbers going down.
The MP described the combination of Galton’s brains and interest plus Spencer and Rachel’s skills and knowledge as a partnership that had been made in heaven.
The Times News Paper named the restaurant the 6th best place to eat by the sea. The upstairs portion of the shop is bound to be a big hit thanks to the wonderful view it offers of the sea and the pier. The focus of the upstairs menu is modern British cooking.