Driving the dream

From pizza and prosecco trucks to a campervan cafe, it turns out there’s a lot you can pack into a van business. We talk to Yorkshire’s mobile marvels who are ready to hit the road again

- Bethan Andrews

COBBLE KITCHEN

The unrivaled freedom that comes with running a business from a moving vehicle was a huge draw for Suzie Hamilton, who set up Cobble Kitchen six years ago at the age of 25. ‘We can cater anywhere – as long as you can drive there (we have a generator and water supply), we can open up and become a cafe within an hour,’ she explains.

Having completed cookery school, Suzie realized that having permanent premises came with a lot of overheads and her boyfriend suggested looking into the option of vintage vans. What started as a van on wheels to take to events soon turned into a permanent residence Monday to Friday at Broughton Hall in Skipton. Before lockdown, Cobble Kitchen was serving lunch every day there, as well as doing events of all different types.

But since then Suzie’s little kitchen has played its own frontline role.

‘Our summer events all got canceled one by one, so that was our two main revenue streams all gone within days. I come from a medical family so we were getting clear messages from the frontline about how serious this was and out of respect for them I wanted to follow the rules to stay at home – it wasn’t worth carrying on just for the sake of selling some sandwiches,’ she says.

It was hard adjusting so I looked for volunteering work to do and we did our best delivering as much as we could afford to the local food bank. But lockdown became the new normal and I realized that maybe taking a break wasn’t such a bad thing; we got our government grants and it put it in the perspective of how serious this all was.’