Ellis and Liam Barrie, the owners of The Marram Grass restaurant on Anglesey, have announced plans to open a restaurant in Liverpool.
The brothers, who transformed a former chicken shed on their parents’ caravan park in Newborough, Anglesey into an award-winning restaurant in 2011, will return to the city they grew up in to launch the restaurant at Albert Dock next year.
Marram Grass head chef Ellis, who spoke at H&C EXPO earlier this year and is currently on screen this week on BBC Two’s Great British Menu, has made no secret of the fact he has longed to open a restaurant in Liverpool.
In a statement on their website, Ellis and brother Liam, who runs front-of-house at The Marram Grass, said they had been ‘searching for the perfect location’ over the last 18 months and had ‘ultimately fallen in love again with the Royal Albert Dock’.
No other details have yet been revealed about the Liverpool restaurant, but the pair are expected to split their time between both sites.
“Despite the obvious differences in the spaces, Liverpool and North Wales have a lot in common, ultimately sharing a massive heritage together. It will be great to see how the restaurants and teams can develop alongside each other and to explore what that means for a new opening,” they said.
“We’re really excited to be coming back and see massive potential for the development of our team, ourselves and what it is that we can offer the city.”
Before opening The Marram Grass, Ellis worked with Chris Marshall at Radisson Blu Filini and later Panoramic 34 in Liverpool.
The chef has since transformed the 35-cover restaurant from a simple breakfast and tea into an ‘eccentric, yet sophisticated dining experience’ featuring dishes such as Treacle cured trout with compressed cucumber, pickled shallot, smoked Menai oyster emulsion and wild garlic; Mon crab risotto with roast garlic and Anglesey apple; Pan roasted lamb rump with minted lamb ragu, pied bleu mushroom, courgetti, Wirral watercress, yoghurt crunch and pickled mustard seeds and Black treacle tart with Gardd Rhosyr rhubarb and burnt orange.
Liam, who formerly trained as a surveyor, has developed an on-site butchery, where a local butcher comes to once a week to make sausages and where the lamb and beef served in the restaurant is butchered. Just 100 yards from the kitchen door, in an idyllic space across the road from the restaurant is a small farm owned by the brothers, from which the restaurant sources pork, eggs, potatoes and much more.
The restaurant has won a string of awards since launching, including two AA rosettes in yesterday’s AA Hospitality Awards.
Emma Eversham
Hospitality & Catering News, Interviews Editor