“I feel like a bit of a loser sometimes,” says Gary Usher, standing in the car park of his new pub in Churton, a pretty hamlet near Chester. “I see some people, chefs, people in the restaurant world, and they just seem to look incredible, and everything’s so neat, and they always look really smart in suits and things. And I think ‘why am I always covered in s**t’?”
To be honest, he is not covered in that much s**t, but he looks like he could have been here for months. Probably because he has. He’s got a bit of a ratty black fleece on, a woolly hat, steel toe cap work boots and trackies, so I get where he's coming from. But the loser bit? Some might take issue with that, even if he doesn’t.
The chef proprietor behind a host of award-winning restaurants, from Kala on King Street, Hispi in Didsbury, Wreckfish in Liverpool, Sticky Walnut in Hoole, Pinion in Prescot and Burnt Truffle in Heswall - not to mention his own catering business and the cook-at-home spin off - has gone from strength to strength in recent years, in an industry beset on all sides by challenges.
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So loser? Not so much. He’s done all this by getting his hands dirty. He’s been involved in all the manual work of the fit-outs of all his restaurants, since day one. But the White Horse project has been something else entirely.
It’s been pretty overwhelming, and for lots of reasons. Firstly, the speed in which it all happened. Launching a crowdfunding drive to fund it, he raised the target of £220,000 in just 24 hours, £27,000 of which landed in the first five minutes.
He takes people’s money very seriously indeed, and so he’s been at the pub every day since last August. “I’m painter, cleaner, general skivvy,” he says. “I can’t tell you how many times I’m going to the tip. Every bit of fence out here, I’ve painted, all the tables in there, I’ve painted, all the walls in there, I’ve painted. The bar, I’ve painted. I f**king hate painting, and I’m s**t at it!
“But we can’t be paying someone to paint a fence in the car park, because I can do that. We’ve saved thousands and thousands of pounds by me and Matt doing everything. He’s a very peculiar man, in that he’s so multi-skilled.”
Matt is Matt Shaw, Gary’s managing director of his company Elite Bistros, and when I arrive at the pub, he’s got some pliers in his hand and he’s bending some metal beading behind the bar. Matt also plumbed in the new loos, and knows everything from electrics to kitchen fitting, the equipment for which is going to take the lion’s share of the budget.
So, with that in mind, the pub has been brought together with a host of reclaimed materials, begged, borrowed, though hopefully not stolen. Like a pair of chandeliers second hand from Widnes, while the wood for the bar was bought from a lady in Southport off Facebook Marketplace.
“I know people who would spend £15,000 on a bar alone, this cost me a couple of hundred quid,” he says. In time, he wants to have rooms upstairs too, but first things first.
The pub is just a few minutes drive from where his parents live, so Gary had driven past it countless times, and been in it a few times too, under previous landlords, though he always thought it could be so much better. It closed down as lockdown hit, and never reopened. Then there were plans submitted to redevelop it into flats, a move that spurred the local community into action.
“The community here is f**king amazing,” he says. “After the pub was put up for sale, the community put this bid in to buy it, to stop it being developed, and then between them, a group of about 20 of them started to plan to actually do it. They were really going for it, really impressive.
“I was a bit nervous, because I knew the community had tried to develop it themselves, and I was worried that there would be a group of people who didn’t want me to do it. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”
Within days of getting the keys and starting to clear up the neglected hostelry, locals started coming out of the woodwork. They were offering to help, and - and this still seems to baffle Gary - they wanted nothing in return.
Now he’s got a whole group of new friends and neighbours, salt of the earth folk who will not only be his regulars, but who will have put their own sweat into transforming the place.
Kevin, who lives opposite, who was involved in the community bid. Then there’s Steve, who made the bar and knocked him up a log store out of an old fence, among dozens of other jobs. Grant, who turned up on the first day and offered him as many tools as he needed. Gearóid who sourced some old parquet flooring and fitted it for him. Paul, who lives just round the corner, turned up one day to say hello and just kept turning up.
“These people have loads of other stuff on. But they just kept calling their mates to help out,” says Gary. “They don’t want payment, not a penny, I’ve offered. I’ve offered them free meals at the other restaurants. Paul, after going to Sticky Walnut, sent me a picture a few days later to say he’d had a great dinner. I asked him why he didn’t tell me he was going, and he said ‘because you’d have tried to pay for it’.
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“This is what it’s been like. It feels a bit cheesy talking about it, but that’s what’s happened. A lady makes lunch for us, she drops off soup. It’s endless. John, a farmer from just over the way, him and his son have picked up tons of earth for us. They all just want to be part of it, and want to see it open again.
“In places like this, pubs can become massively important community spaces. You get maybe an older gent, who lives on his own. He might come down for a pint, but that’s probably not what he’s coming for, he’s coming to see people. That’s what it’s about.”
What it’s also about will be the food, which he ‘hopes’ will be good. “Some people think we do fancy food,” he says. “We don’t do fancy food.” As if to accent this, he’s feverishly excited about the chips. And rightly so, being the absolute cornerstone of any decent pub menu.
Earlier this week, like a child on Christmas morning, he posted footage of his new ‘potato rumbler’ on Twitter, the machine that will be peeling and chipping thousands upon thousands of chips every week.
“It’s just something that we believe in so much,” he says. Of the chips. And you just know he means it. So whatever the menu ends up serving, whether it's his now-famous featherblade of beef, as seen at Hispi, or other pub classics, as long as he’s focussing on the chips, all will be right with the world.
But, for the time being, there’s still much to do. He hopes they’ll be open by the tail end of February. At the moment, there’s no kitchen, though the room is ready for it all to start going in, and like all these projects, once the end is in sight, things start to move very quickly.
“People ask ‘is it going to be a gastro pub?’,” he says. “That’s not what I want it to be. It’s a horrible word. We’re just a pub, and I hope we’ll do great food. That’s all I want to be.”
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