Relish Food & Drink, Wadebridge
Relish Food & Drink is a gourmet café and fine food grocer in the Cornish town of Wadebridge. As well as being genuinely passionate about great food and drnk, Relish also serves some of the best-made coffee in the country.
News Releases
25th February 2008
Cornish café wins 2008 UK Barista Championship and will represent the UK in world competition.
29th November 2007
Wadebridge café celebrates first year of opening with double competition success.
23rd March 2007
Cornish Café home to the best made coffee in Britain.
6th February 2007
Wadebridge Café is officially home to the best coffee in the South West.
25th January 2007
Purple Love Week - Britain's largest free food tasting event - comes to Relish Food & Drink, Wadebridge.
1st December 2006
Relish Food & Drink, Wadebridge's new gourmet grocer and café, opens on 6th December.
Who Are Relish?
Hugo Hercod
Hugo Hercod, 37, was born in Brunei, Borneo and as a child lived in the Far and Middle East, Holland and England. His formative years were spent eating a somewhat unconventional diet of Indonesian nasi goreng and bami goreng; char-grilled buffalo satay with fiery peanut sauce; and coleslaw. These early experiences have given him a particular fondness for Indonesian, Malay and Turkish food. The same cannot be said for Dutch cuisine.
After completing a degree in Hotel & Catering Management at Portsmouth University, he put his skills to use working winter seasons in the French Alps, and summers teaching sailing and windsurfing in Greece and Turkey. Then followed a summer on the Isles of Scilly at Tresco’s Island Hotel, before he and Sarah settled in Cornwall in 2000 to jointly manage The Beach Hut Bistro at Watergate Bay. Rapid expansion followed with Hugo working as Food & Beverage Controller for the Watergate Bay Hotel and Extreme Academy’s two restaurants, two bars and takeaway.
A six month walking trip through New Zealand opened his eyes to the country’s wonderful café culture, inspiring him on his return to the UK to master the skills of the barista - an expert espresso machine artisan - with some success: Hugo came fourth in the UK finals of the 2007 National Barista Championships. A self-confessed “coffee geek”, Hugo’s obsession with creating the perfect cup of coffee is unparalleled.
Sarah Townsend
Sarah Townsend, 36, grew up in a generation which were told computers were going to make everyone’s lives easier and robots would be taking over people’s jobs. As leisure time would inevitably be increasing due to the robots and computers (hey, this was the ‘80s), she decided a career in a food-related job was quite a good plan, as everybody would still have to eat. In theory this would be the same all over the world so she might also get the opportunity to travel and feed people in interesting places.
After training in all aspects of hotel and restaurant work, she studied for an HND in Hotel Management, and then the travelling began. She worked for three seasons as a chalet host in the French Alps, where she met Hugo, and spent the summers working in Kusadasi, Turkey running a villa for 35 guests.
There she discovered the delights of paper-thin pastries: savoury cheese and parsley borek, and sticky sweet baklava; there were Turkish breakfasts of white salty cheese, chunks of large ripe flavourful tomatoes and olives, followed by thick creamy yoghurt with rich fragrant mountain honey and huge wedges of chilled watermelon. The simplicity and freshness of the meals in Turkey inspired in Sarah a love of great ingredients, where taste is everything.
She went on to work at The Island Hotel on Tresco, then spent a hectic year managing The Beach Hut Bistro at Watergate Bay, before moving on to work for Rick Stein in Padstow. There she developed and expanded Stein’s mail order business and organised events with the cookery school. At this time Stein was writing and recording the BBC series Food Heroes, which earned huge praise for its philosophy of sourcing locally, reducing food miles and being prepared to pay for quality - in stark contrast to the approach of the supermarkets.
After a break travelling in New Zealand, she returned to Stein’s as Deli Manager, soon becoming Retail Operations Manager in charge of Stein’s expansive retail empire. In this role she gained more experience of sourcing great ingredients, tasting samples of hundreds of products a year.
Images
To download high-resolution (300dpi) print-ready images click on the thumbnails below. The image will open in a new window/tab, then right click (control + click for Mac) to save the image.
Images may be used free of charge subject to the following conditions:
1) The image is used in editorial promoting Relish Food & Drink.
2) The photographer is credited as indicated in the captions.
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| Relish logo |
Hugo Hercod & Sarah Townsend.
Photo: Bob Berry. |
Hugo Hercod
Photo: Barefoot Media. |
Sarah Townsend.
Photo: Bob Berry. |
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