Casey and Mike’s Trip to Cornwall (And Part of Scuttlebutt’s Origin Story)
If you’ve been into Scuttlebutt in the past ten days or so, you know that the team has been holding down the fort (thanks Shayla, Vernon, and team!!) while Mike, Cody and I have been away together on a family vacation! This is a real first for Scuttlebutt. We’ve gone away for quick long weekends while the business has been open before, but never on a full long trip out of the country while keeping Scuttlebutt open the entire time. That milestone alone had us reflecting on how far the business has come.
We were over in Cornwall, England, for much of our trip - yes, definitely taking some real R&R with friends while we walked and swam on the dramatic South West Coastal Path beaches and dined in cozy pubs. But we were ‘back’ in Cornwall after spending a turning point in our careers there seven years ago.
In 2015, Mike and I moved to London for his corporate banking job. I was fortunate enough to keep my job as a geologist at an engineering firm and transition to a remote report writing position; but I was lonely in a new city while Mike was at work most of the time. With no hospitality experience, I applied for a part-time barista position at the coffee shop in our London neighborhood and instantly found the community of staff and locals I’d been craving.
Between Mike’s and my immersion into the London hospitality scene through my job (I pretty quickly quit my geology job and managed the London cafe), and visiting so many cafes and BnBs on our travels abroad, we started dreaming of different hospitality ventures we could open up back home in Dartmouth.
In 2017, we saw an article in Finisterre’s magazine about a chef named Ben Quinn about cooking a meal of smoked mackerel over a live fire on the beach. Ben owned a cafe and catering business in Cornwall, and specialized in cooking delicious and flavorful food over live fire. We were so inspired by the article and the ideal of sharing memorable meals in beautiful, natural settings with people we love. We decided to send a cold email to Ben to ask if we could (drive 6 hours from London to Cornwall to) buy Ben a coffee and hear about how he launched and operated his business. He wrote right back and said rather than talking about how the business works, we should jump in and experience it firsthand by working some weddings and events with him in St. Ives.
That first weekend we spent with Ben and his team had our heads spinning. We could barely sleep because we were so excited about working the events and experiencing the memorable culinary and hospitality magic he and his team put on. At the end of the weekend, we did in fact go out for coffee and debrief about what our dreams were and he told us if we ever did quit our jobs, we should come out and work with him for awhile to learn more; so we started planning how to make that work.
In May 2018, we gave away most of the stuff we had accumulated through nearly 4 years living in London, packed our duffel bags, and headed for St. Agnes, Cornwall where we parked ourselves for the late spring / early summer. During the week we worked at Canteen (Ben’s coffee / breakfast / lunch cafe) and on the weekends we joined the Woodfired Weddings catering team. He threw us right in the deep end of food prep, working “the line”, smoking chickens for 200 person weddings, and learning how to operate in a commercial kitchen.
We felt so at home in their community getting to know all of the familiar faces that came in for a coffee and a chat every single day - just like Scuttlebutt today. We helped Ben and the team host spontaneous “pay what you think it’s worth” pop-up dinners announced on Instagram. We’d carry heavy wooden tables and smokers and food down a quarter-mile dirt path from the restaurant to a cliff overlooking the South West Coastal Path, and people would show up to eat food we’d smoke over fire while the sun set and then pay whatever amount they felt like at the end.
We were buzzing with excitement about all of the possibilities this could mean for us. At the end of our time with Canteen, Ben challenged us to come up with a menu that meant something to us, and we cooked a “pay what you think it’s worth” dinner (we channelled a Memorial Day BBQ menu with smoked chicken, potato salad, cornbread, and strawberry shortcakes) and gave a speech to the forty strangers that showed up about what we hoped to do when we moved back to Dartmouth, Massachusetts - essentially pitching what we didn’t know at the time was “Scuttlebutt” to them.
After leaving the UK to travel around Croatia, France and Italy by ourselves and with friends and family, we arrived home and moved in with my parents to save money while we figured out what sort of business we could start. We thought we’d get going with a mobile coffee set-up, but family friends who had been following my instagram and seeing all of the catering we were doing with Canteen started reaching out and asking us to cater private dinners and events - and first, Cuttings’ Table was born.
Eventually we were introduced to our now business-partner / friend Jake and that’s when the wheels for coffee and Scuttlebutt finally kicked into gear. And as many of you know, there have been so many iterations of Scuttlebutt over the past six years (our farmers market stand, pop-ups, and locations that didn’t work out), and now, after a lot of moments where it felt like we should give up but we continued on - a place we can really call home in Padanaram.
Through all of those transitions, we’ve stayed in close touch with Ben; his business has seen very similar periods of upheaval and they’ve moved locations several times, now finding themselves in a really magical spot - a refurbished garage complete with a wood-stove - in Mount Hawke, Cornwall. Ben and his wife, Mel, came to visit us last year and finally got to see all that Scuttlebutt has become, and we started hatching plans for us to return to them in Cornwall this year.
I still haven’t really begun to process all that the trip last week meant to us. When we drove down the hedge-lined, one-lane-two-way winding roads into the north west coast of Cornwall, it felt like returning home and reignited this passion in me, reminding me why it is we do what we do despite the sometimes long hours and low pay and usual set backs of a small business. Seeing so many familiar faces of Canteen in person, and all of the local business owners that we got familiar with while we lived there, made me feel warm and adventurous and connected to other people - the same way that we are so lucky to feel from Scuttlebutt on a daily basis.
We took Cody to all of the same beaches we spent dozens of hours walking up and down that summer of 2018, talking about what it would be like to leave our stable incomes and move back to Dartmouth to start a small business and a family. How we wanted that small business to really be a place where people felt like they could find (ahem, sorry for such overuse of the word) a sense of community. I sat on a surfers ledge with our friend Sam in St. Agnes, while we watched Cody and Mike climb on the cliff rocks around my favorite cove, and I teared up as we sat with the fact that so much has changed in the seven years since we’d seen each other, but friendships and our favorite places have remained steady.
It felt incredible to dig in the dirt on Canteen’s new farm and have Ben look over at us and say “You know, you guys really did exactly what you said you were going to do. So what’s next?” and spend our vacation bouncing ideas back and forth with him with such imaginative purpose; and to sit around the dinner table with his family and our friends who traveled with us and reflect on how we can all work to feel more connected in a time that we need it most.
We are so grateful that Scuttlebutt has come to mean something to so many of you, and we are so lucky to have friends globally who support our idea of purpose over profits.
