Festival Street Kitchen to close venue due to dispute

Festival Street Kitchen, a family-run business owned by husband and wife duo Alex and Danielle Menicou, has been a beloved food place in the town since it first opened its doors in 2016.

The restaurant, known for its vibrant street food and locally sourced ingredients, had recently expanded into a larger indoor space within Festival Place in March this year after a four-month refit.

Husband and wife Alex and Danielle Menicou (Image: Emily Roberts)

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The new venue, which took over two empty retail units, offered customers an enhanced dining experience with more seating, and an upstairs area for private events.

Despite the business’s success and loyal customer base, the Menicous said in a social media post that they have been forced to make the difficult decision to close the new site due to "circumstances beyond their control".

In a heartfelt post on social media, Festival Street Kitchen said: “To clarify our current situation, for the past seven years our family business has gone from strength to strength, all our events have been a success, we survived Covid and opened a new much bigger site this year.

"Unfortunately, for matters out of our control due to a dispute with our landlord, we are having to make the heart-breaking decision of closing the new site.

"As it stands, this will be our last weekend within the unit."

However, the business reassured its customers that all existing event bookings will still be honoured, and they have plans to release a recipe book in the coming weeks.

Festival Street Kitchen further said in an Instagram story that the main dispute with the landlord is over decommissioning of a service lift.

"The main issue being, before we could finish our fit-out, our service lift was de-commissioned for 'planned maintenance' by the centre," the business wrote.

"Our site was two years in the planning, so for this to coincide with our fit-out has been extremely detrimental and we have been in a state of limbo since.

"We have been open for almost six months and the lift is still not operational. There's also a lot of other factors to the situation that we can't go into but the toll this has taken on us as a business, staff and family is unprecedented.

"Our restaurant is 4,000sqft on two floors and we simply can't generate enough revenue from the downstairs alone. The upstairs commercial kitchen and office was due to be completed shortly after we opened but with six flights of stairs into the back of our unit and no lift, it was impossible for us to do this and still is.

Festival Street Kitchen (Image: Emily Roberts)

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"Without this kitchen, we can't run events properly, produce food for external catering, have a dishwasher, glasswasher, plates, cutlery and the list goes on. We cook fresh food, we don't use microwaves or freezers other than for ice etc. so for the deliveries, which come in daily, it's a nightmare to get it in and store it in the unit.

"To date, there has been no support offered by the centre and we simply can't continue in limbo."

Festival Place has been contacted for a comment.