If you’ve visited our website or followed our journey on Facebook you will have heard us mention the place where the magic happens: Casa Tigellae! The process of creating our development kitchen was a long one – it took us almost 14 months to design, install, construct, paint, furnish, clean, repair, decorate…you name it, we did it!
After finding our amazing Vanstaurant, the next major stage of our Tigellae journey was to find our new business a home. One day, whilst searching for premises, Giordano came across an industrial unit close to our home in Greater Manchester.
The first time we saw what would soon become Casa Tigellae, we knew it was the right space for us. The only trouble at that stage was the leaky roof, uneven floor and complete lack of a commercial kitchen!
When we moved in it looked like this:
We weren’t daunted by the huge task ahead of us – by this stage we’d seen a few different places and knew what our best course of action was. In July 2013, we moved in and set about creating our kitchen from scratch.
The first step was to divide up the space into an entrance hall, commercial kitchen, office, bathroom and workshop. This is why we chose this particular unit – there was a lot of space to work with!
We sourced our kitchen equipment from far and wide. I’m especially pleased with our Angelo Po pizza oven!
Once the walls were up and we’d bought most of our bulkier kitchen items, it was time to get painting. Here at Tigellae we don’t believe in jobs for boys and jobs for girls, but we do believe that ome jobs are best left to tall people like Giordano, who is not scared of standing on stepladders like I am, and that other jobs – such as painting skirting boards – are more suited to people like me (I’m 5’1″).
As well as this, we’ve cleaned the whole unit, watched various herbs grow and grow (and, in some cases, start to take over a little bit!), we’ve sanded, scoured and made countless trips to the DIY and homeware stores of Ashton-under-Lyne. We’ve learned a lot and now have our very own space where we can create our regional Italian food, which we’re really proud of!
We are also eternally grateful to our friend Big G for all of his hard work in getting our unit ready. We really can’t thank you enough.
So that’s Casa Tigellae! If you fancy a sneaky peek inside, head over to our Facebook page where you can see the journey of Casa Tigellae from start to finish, including me in a fridge and Giordano doing his best Bruce Willis impression with a jet washer!
Ciao for now!
Laura