Once upon a time there was a millennial who started a food blog called the 'Little Pink Kitchen'.
It would be be the easiest thing in the WORLD to romanticise but basically 11 odd years ago I was talking to new friends I wanted to impress about Indian breakfast food and how fabulous it was and then we ordered more wine and even more wine and all of a sudden I had unintentionally volunteered to cook them all Indian breakfast.
This was a hefty enough call but we were finishing off getting our first wee house ready to put on the market so it was going to be like 7 people in a Sydenham semi but sure wouldn't it be grand?
I hotfooted it to the old Asia Supermarket on Eglington Avenue and got myself the wherewithal for some dosa and then hotfooted it elsewhere for the wherewithal for even more mimosas and nipped into the BP on the way home so there was the wherewithal for emergency toast.
Except the night before this gathering of 7 people I didn't know absolutely brilliantly well yet I went up to Ballymena to go out for dinner with my sister because she was over from England and we ate and drank and made merry and then we ordered more wine and even more wine and all of a sudden I had unintentionally invited my family round to join us for Indian breakfast as well.
So now there were 10 people in our Sydenham semi for dosa. Only some of whom had a raging hangover. So the next morning I fermented batter and made chai and put on a sari and got everyone a bindi and we had a properly lovely morning eating and drinking and making merry. Mr P decided to use the kids as child labour and got them to work on touching up an outside wall. The rest of us did some more making merry.
And halfway through approximately the 17th round of mimosas my friend Caroline said 'this is what you should do. You should organise something like this and get people to buy tickets.' And fuelled by mimosas, and told about Canva by my friend Patricia, I set the date for my first ever breakfast club.
A year later, The Little Pink Kitchen was busy enough to be my full time job.
I've catered for weddings and christenings and funerals and birthdays and hen parties and training days and everything in between. Since those first days of nobody ever having heard of a 'supperclub' or 'pop-up restaurant', when guests mostly were friends or family, through the years of nearly losing myself in a sea of pop-ups to now, where guests have become friends. In the 10 years of the Little pink Kitchen, I've survived a pandemic that nearly broke us all, a heck of a lot of IVF, and the whirlwind that is trying to keep a business afloat while raising my very own tiny human.
What a decade.
