Mon 8th Feb 2016 - Enterprise signs ground-breaking deal with British Street Food Enterprise signs ground-breaking deal with British Street Food: British Street Food has signed a ground-breaking deal with Enterprise Inns to bring street food to its pubs. The agreement, which is called the British Street Food Pub Takeover, will allow street food traders to link up with licensees and present a new food offering to customers. The initiative will be launched at enterpriselive – Enterprise Inns’ annual trade show – on Tuesday, 23 February. The pilot scheme will involve three pubs in London including The Kings in Essex Road, Islington, which has agreed a deal that will see gourmet macaroni and cheese trader Mac Factory operate its kitchen. British Street Food founder Richard Johnson told Propel discussions had been going on for about two years since Nathan Wall left SSP to join Enterprise Inns in May 2013. Johnson said: “Since Nathan moved to Enterprise, who I worked closely with at SSP, we’ve been looking at putting street food into pubs. We’ve had pop-ups but the only way we could advance it was to put it indoors in some way. At Trinity Kitchen in Leeds (based at Trinity shopping centre) we are now into our third year. We’ve lifted five food trucks every month onto the first floor and the customers and traders love it. But there was always more that we could do. So we looked to hook up with a company that had these wonderful Victorian buildings with kitchens that were not being used and offer street food traders a whole new demographic. Enterprise has well over 5,000 pubs and they want something more exciting than just crisps and nuts. We’ve organised residencies before – we put Cheeky Burger into the Duke of Hamilton at the weekend for instance. It’s a pub with a landlord who is doing everything to reach out to a new crowd including top notch theatre in his basement and jazz nights with Ronnie Scott’s regulars. And street food is a similar idea. But the British Street Food Pub Takeover will be on a different scale. It will help traders and landlords enormously.” It will work by both Enterprise licensees and street food traders uploading their details to the British Street Food website. Licensees can decide what type of street food they are looking for and for how long and then are matched to an appropriate trader. Johnson added: “The system is very simple, very straightforward. The pilot will allow us to see how it works in different parts of London and then we can look at taking it outside of London. The idea is to build a social following – get the new crowd in. It might mean the pubs also having to make some changes – putting on a different type of beer behind the bar for example. It will be interesting to see how the Kings Head works because it is opposite Lucky Chip. That little corner of Islington is going to be a hotbed of street food. The landlord had a kitchen that just was not being used – now it’s going to be producing quality street food.”