Andrew Sheridan plans three new openings this year

Andrew Sheridan is to open three new restaurants in Gloucestershire and his home city of Liverpool this spring.

The chef and his business partner Sam Morgan have closed their 8 restaurant in Birmingham. While Craft, which operates out of the same site, remains open and will soon undergo a refurbishment which will take between 12 and 16 weeks.

Sheridan is to relocate his three-AA-rosette tasting menu concept 8 to a site on Liverpool’s Cook Street close to the city’s famous Cavern Club, which helped the Beatles launch their career.

The restaurant is expected to open in April and will be spread across two storeys, with an upstairs area for pre-dinner drinks and snacks. Guests will sit at two separate 10-cover counters which will each be staffed by two chefs.

Sheridan said: “It’s a good move for us. My whole family are from Liverpool, my mum used to have a hairdressing salon a few streets down years ago, and my grandad used to be a policeman there.

“When we were looking at [relocating 8] Liverpool was the only place I wanted to [go]. We did consider London but I’m from the north…Liverpool is so vibrant. There seem to be more pockets of food places opening up here as well.”

Sheridan and Morgan are also opening a pub in the village of Newent, Gloucestershire, this spring.

An upstairs room at the pub, previously used for storage, will house a second site for the pair’s Black and Green tasting menu restaurant. They also plan to offer home delivery of stone baked pizzas cooked outdoors in a garden pizza oven.

The first Black and Green launched in the village of Barnt Green in Worcestershire last year and is recommended in the* Michelin Guide Great Britain and Ireland 2022*.

Sheridan said rents and rates in Birmingham city centre had become more expensive and he felt the new sites would have more of a defined identity.

“Craft was in the middle between a pub and a tasting menu and I struggled a bit with it," he said.

“There’s a lot more support in the village because cities are so large and there’s so much competition it’s harder to fill that middle of the road gap because people are so used to saying ‘let’s go to Nando’s’, and sometimes the independent [restaurants] really struggle.

“At Black and Green everybody knows you by name. We’ve got bedrooms for staff accommodation in the village and when they moved in I got a phone call at 9pm at night from a local saying ‘do you know that there’s four young men walking around in your pub, would you like us to go in and ask what they’re doing?’. You’d never get that in a city.”

Sheridan confirmed he is also involved with the upcoming District Marketplace food hall in Birmingham, which will take over the site of the former JD Wetherspoon Pear Tree pub.