Karen and James Rees are the married couple behind one of Cardiff’s most highly rated eateries on TripAdvisor, the Thackeray pub. Opening in 2018, the pub has managed to survive the pandemic and, not only that, but also expand in the form of a soon-to-open community café at Llanrumney Hall Community Trust.
The pair opened the Thackeray pub on Rumney Hill in February 2018 in just one month and have now transformed the community café at Llanrumney Hall in just a week, with hopes to officially open in April. They say that it’s been a “scary” but “humbling” experience.
“We feel fortunate that we’ve come out of it [the pandemic] and been able to get another business as well,” Karen said. “Our pub survived because of locals around us. We’ve got a good community around us and regulars that come into us a few times a week. So, we were grateful for all that, and then when this place [Llanrumney Hall] came up, we were like ‘OK, we’ll give it a try,’” James said.
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The pair decided to open the café in Llanrumney Hall after trustee of the hall and landlord of the Thackeray pub, Steve Borley, approached them after the previous owner of the café left. The café was previously the pirate-themed Morgan’s Table , which reached the top of TripAdvisor. The Thackeray pub is now in second place on TripAdvisor as the most highly-rated eating place in Cardiff, so seems like the perfect business to take over the site of the popular café.
The Llanrumney Hall Community Trust is a community-led trust that saw the hall transformed into a community hub with a range of services, opening in 2019. The trust's aim was to sympathetically restore and redevelop Llanrumney Hall on Ball Road, which was originally built in 1450.
Known for their homemade pies and Sunday lunches, the couple says they have worked hard to get the pub’s TripAdvisor rating up over the four years since they took over ownership. Prior to the pandemic, Karen said that they had been looking at the idea of opening a second Thackeray. “We thought, it’s a local café, it’s in the community. There’s a real buzz about this place now, especially with the hall and what it’s bringing to the community. We thought ‘Right, we’ll give it a try,’” Karen said.
“We’ve come in and we’ve literally just turned it into a mini Thackeray within a week,” she said. “I’m pretty good with a paintbrush now.” The couple has transformed the café into a ‘mini version’ of the pub and are now waiting for the last of the kitchen equipment to come in before they officially open, which they hope to do around April 12. WalesOnline was invited to a soft launch of the cafe on March 31.
The café is set to have a different menu than what’s on offer at the Thackeray pub, with light bites, paninis, and breakfasts all in the running. As the café is licensed, Karen added that the team are looking to do bottomless brunches, as well as a Sunday brunch with eggs benedict, eggs Royale, prosecco, and Bloody Mary’s. “So, it’s your proper Sunday hangover cure from the Saturday night,” James said.
“We listen to the customer, so if there’s something not on the menu, we’re open to everything. I think that’s kept us where we are, where it’s a two-way street. We’re fortunate to be where we are, so we’ve got to listen to the customer and thrive as much as we can,” Karen said. “We want the golden groups to come back in, to be able to have a dinner, have a chat, and get out of the house.”
“It’s a community café,” James added. “You could have workies, a solicitor sat there - it makes no odds. Whoever you are, you can come here, sit on a table on your own, if there’s nowhere to sit you can join a table with strangers and probably walk out with three new best friends. That’s the whole thing that we want.”
The café is also set up with Wi-Fi for people to come and work and has children's menus available to serve the creche in the hall next door. “It will become what people want it to be,” James said. “We have to evolve with what people want - if we can get it and we can do it, that’s what we’ll do.”
Karen, 50, and James, 45, have been in the hospitality industry for 25 years. Karen started in the trade by working at the Ha Ha Bar and Grill that was formerly on Cardiff’s Kingsway. She then moved on to become general manager at Tiger Tiger, before working for Cosy Club. Both James and Karen then worked for Brains as well as doing consultancy work.
The couple met through work at the Cosy Club and have been married for seven years and together for ten. “We’ve been together from work from day one and we’ve always worked together since then,” James said.
He continued: “We used to drink in the Thackeray when it was the Henry Morgan. That was always our stop-off on the way home from work in town. We always used to sit by the bar and say what we could do if we had this pub."
The pub then went on to open as an a-la-carte restaurant, the Thackeray. Then, in January 2018, James received a text from a former employee to say that the Thackeray had tweeted to say it was closing . James got in touch with one of the owners about the closure, offering any help if needed.
“Within minutes, [they messaged to say] ‘Can you meet at the pub?’ So, we met him at the pub and within ten minutes, ‘There’s the keys - go for it,’” James said. “That was on January 16 [2018], and on February 16, we opened the pub up.”
He continued: “It’s still scary, but it’s an absolutely amazing feeling. We’ve got to know some amazing friends, and they look after us as much as we look after them.”
Like many hospitality businesses, the Thackeray had to close its doors for a period of time during the pandemic, shutting for four months during the first lockdown, and then for a further two months around Christmastime in 2020.
“The first one we were kind of like ‘It’s going to be a couple of weeks, we’ll have a couple of weeks off’ - which we’ve never, ever, ever had, that amount of time off. Then it went on, and went on, and carried on and we started to worry a little bit,” James said of the pub’s survival over the course of the pandemic. “We had help with certain government grants, but they didn’t even cover gas and electric bills, because we still had to pay those even though the business was closed."
“Steve [Borley] had stopped our rent and everything and didn’t defer it, so we didn’t have that worry,” Karen added. “But we put all the staff on furlough. That was my biggest worry - thinking ‘We’ve got 16 staff, what’s going to happen to them?’ We were fortunate in that we were able to look after them.”
“Hospitality got absolutely decimated [during the pandemic]. We’re still seeing the knock on effects now when you’re trying to get kitchen staff and they don’t want to do it. People think this trade is easy, and it really, really isn’t,” James added.
Karen says that the pub still carries out risk assessments to ensure that customers feel safe when they come in and to re-assure people. She says that they feel “humbled” to have come through the pandemic.
“When you’ve got friends in the trade that have lost businesses and haven’t re-opened again… You can walk around town and it’s not the same,” Karen said. “So, we feel really humbled that we’ve been given an opportunity to do this and, hopefully, more to come.”
James says that they hope to set up a training school at the hall further down the line, bringing in new chef and new front of house staff. “We want to show people it is a rewarding job,” he said. “If you put the time and the effort in, you can climb the ladder and get to the top.”
The Thackeray pub has also started using the Kickstart scheme, which provides funding to create new jobs for 16 to 24-year-olds on Universal Credit who are at risk of long term unemployment.
“I think this is the nice thing about having the pub in here [the hall], just getting people back together, sitting around the table and talking, because mental health is a big thing for us,” Karen added. “For us to be able to do either things like workshops, or just have people come in and know they can talk about anything with us.”
The local community has also been involved in the opening of the café at the hall, with a group of 17-22-year-olds from Cardiff and Vale College having re-painted all the chairs, despite not having any DIY experience beforehand. “That just shows to us that, if you give someone a project [...] that’s the result,” James added.
The couple gave thanks to the pub’s landlord, Steve Borley, and his wife Christine for “being a constant” through the course of the pandemic, as well as Paula Oaten, who has been running the Thackeray pub while Karen and Steve set up the café, and their chef Mark Rowe.
“We want to say thank you to our staff and the pub and our regulars and family, because if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be where we are. We’ve been able to take our time out of the pub to come here and do this,” Karen said.
“It’s nice to know that we’re doing a second one [Thackeray] now after all the effort we put into the Thackeray at the beginning,” she said of the cafe’s opening. She added: “I think there are exciting times going around Llanrumney Hall.”
“Llanrumney in general,” James added. “With the multi-sports pitch that’s going there [next to the hall] and potentially a few more further on down the other end of Ball Road, there’s a lot.” The hall is a busy place with lots happening in different areas, from The Pantry, which aims to reduce food poverty in the Cardiff East area, to a music and recording studio that opened on the grounds in February.
“I think it’s just trying to break down the barriers of what people think of Llanrumney,”James said. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, there’s good parts and there’s rough parts and most of the time they mix together. In a community place like this, you could have a workman sat next to a solicitor. It makes no difference. That’s what we want.”
