Why You Need to Visit Durham's New Fine-Dining Restaurant FIIK
The newest addition to Durham's rapidly expanding fine-dining scene has just landed on Elvet Bridge. Living North caught up with the team behind FIIK to find out more
Tell us about the inspiration behind FIIK.
As a concept it’s been in formulation for quite a while. The team has been working together for a number of years. We got the premises in 2022, and it’s taken the past couple of years for us to actually be in a position to fully commit to what we were doing, and get it open. It’s been a long time coming which is why it’s such a relief now that we’re open and have got the ball rolling.
Durham’s food scene has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. What makes the city special for you?
Our long-term plan is essentially to open between five and 10 restaurants across the UK, but the reason we started in Durham was because we all live in Durham and it was a natural thing to open one here before moving onto the next one. With what we’re doing it wouldn’t really be doing it any justice if we weren’t opening in our hometown.
Talk us through the space.
It’s a very interactive dining atmosphere but it’s not a massive space. The whole idea behind this is precision, and ensuring that we can give each individual customer the attention they require, which is why we’ve kept it small. It’s a very intimate dining experience and we’ve paid attention to every little aspect of it.
How have you approached the menu?
For us, each and every single menu sticks to our primary principle which is that this is something that we genuinely enjoy doing and we’re just having a bit of fun with it. We’re not taking ourselves too seriously and the menus are designed to follow through with that. They’re designed to add a bit of enjoyment and take away the staleness which you usually get in the fine-dining sector. Every single menu is going to be entirely different every five weeks, but essentially the format is going to be the same – it’s going to be a tasting menu, but the food itself will likely be different every single time you come.
Can we get a sneak peek of what’s to come?
The next one in January is ‘Sack the Gym Off, Get The Takeaways In’. It’s a play on New Year’s resolutions so you can forget about that and come and dine with us instead – we’ll keep the party going.
Tell us about your highlights from the menu.
It’s hard to pick because they’re all very much something we’ve worked on for a long time – it’s like picking a favourite child! For myself, we created a dish with spiced apple mincemeat, a cinnamon brioche and chai cream which is one of my favourites. Our chefs involved in creating recipes have been doing it for about 14 years now I think, so between us we have a large repertoire of recipes to pull from. In terms of the dishes themselves, they generally have a personal link to each and every one of us, so we try and keep it as enjoyable as we can.
And the dish names?
Everyone’s pun game is on a different level at different points in time, so we do try to help each other out to come up with the best names!
What has the reception been like?
Unbelievable – it’s like floating on cloud nine. We were expecting the first month to be relatively quiet for us to ease ourselves into it, but we found that the first week was far busier than expected, and the feedback has been phenomenal. We’re close to being fully booked, and the bookings are flying in for next month too. We can’t thank the people who have turned up to support us enough. It’s given us the peace of mind that we made the right decision, and it’s nice to be able to invest in something which is a labour of love and know that you can make that work.
Besides FIIK, where’s your favourite local restaurant?
If I was going local, I’d go for Pine!
One piece of advice for an amateur cook?
Perseverance! It will all go wrong no matter how often you do it, even if you’ve done something a million times, one day it will go wrong – don’t worry about it, just keep going.
Do you have a favourite ingredient?
At the moment we’ve been getting some saffron from Afghanistan which is unbelievable. The collective which supply it have been encouraging local farmers to farm saffron instead of poppies.
Visit fiikdurham.co.uk for more.
