Andrew Brown, owner, Brown's Cafe & Grill

Jul 6 2010 by Jez Davison, Evening Gazette

Andrew Brown has cooked for top European politicians and made a small fortune from the sale of a restaurant venture. So why has he risked his life savings on a new eaterie in Darlington? Jez Davison finds out...

ANDREW Brown’s lightbulb moment arrived in a Newcastle pub which claimed to sell fresh, home-made food.

When he tucked into his plate of deep fried garlic mushrooms, he was horrified to discover his ‘fresh’ cuisine was, in fact, frozen.

“It wasn’t the first time either,” recalled the Scotsman, who earlier this year decided to plough his life savings into a new venture, Brown’s Cafe & Grill in Darlington.

“I thought that I could do a far better job.”

Problem was, he had no idea how to become a chef.

Having had “no great desire to go to university or work” upon leaving school, he’d fallen into the building trade before being made redundant in 1993 by a Newcastle-based furniture company.

But the disappointment allowed him to turn his passion for food into a lucrative career.

He landed a part-time job in a local restaurant while studying for a catering NVQ at Newcastle College - and months later his door to fame and fortune opened when esteemed chef Raymond Blanc created a scholarship to find his culinary apprentice.

Rarely shy of taking a gamble, Andrew beat 700 other hopefuls to win the scholarship, appearing on the BBC’s Good Food programme which covered the final ‘cook-off’.

After an intensive internship at the world-famous Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, Monsieur Blanc’s multi-award winning restaurant and hotel in Oxfordshire, Andrew returned to the North-east to transform Newton Aycliffe’s “spit and sawdust” County boozer into one of the region’s most decorated food-led pubs.

Out went the pool table and juke box as part of a £100,000 refurbishment programme to modernise the building. The investment paid off, as punters flocked from all over the North-east and weekly takings rose from £1,800 to £4,500.

But the rise in revenues brought a disproportionate increase in rent as landlord Scottish & Newcastle (S&N) aimed to recoup the £70,000 it had ploughed into the refurbishment programme.

“My rent increased from £11,000 to £36,000 in the space of 16 months and my income was going down and down.”

In a bid to escape his worsening financial predicament - not helped by the controversial beer tie for which he has obvious distaste - he bought the lease from S&N in 2000 for £285,000.

The following year, the perfect marketing opportunity fell to him on a plate when Sedgefield MP and former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, chose the County to host a top-level meeting with former French president Jacques Chirac.

“We had the world’s press parked outside our door. The County became the most famous pub in the North-east.”