“If you’re going to have a sh*t day, what better place than here?” Stephen Terry says looking over Abergavenny’s green hills from his restaurant on a roasting hot afternoon. The renowned chef who transformed this old rundown pub into one of Wales’ best places to eat has had too many sh*t days recently.
He’s been at the centre of a high profile court case which has left him feeling angry after his former secretary, Nicola Nightingale, fleeced the restaurant for £150,000 with the help of her husband, Simon (you can read the court coverage here). He is angry over what the case has done to his family, how a team of staff he cares for deeply have been “shafted” by a “meticulous” crook, and at how the case has been dealt with in court which has left him with little confidence in the justice system.
Inviting WalesOnline to The Hardwick for an extensive interview on what the case has done to him, his family and his staff at a time where he admits the restaurant was already struggling, the straight-talking chef also addressed his concerns over the future of top dining in Britain, why he’ll always be irritated by “pretentious” cooking, and how it took him six years to get himself out of the Michelin Guide which he never wanted to be in.
It was in March 2020 when Stephen began to realise something was wrong with his business’s finances, but nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to uncover. “We were told we were going into lockdown and we had Mother’s Day on the Sunday and were fully booked,” he recalled. “We filled the plates and sold them off cheaply, like a tenner or something. After that we had a meeting and I quickly realised there were no funds available. We were due a pretty large rebate from the council but when I questioned Nicola about it she said ‘No, there won’t be any rebate.' She just shrugged it off.”
Nightingale had only been paying a small portion of the council tax the business owed so the council informed Stephen that while he thought he was owed a fortune he actually owed the council £9,000.
“I came in the next day and asked her ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me? What you’ve told me is quite a big deal. Is there anything else?’ She looked at me and just cocked her head and said ‘no’. That set the ball rolling. I had an email from a loans company telling me I owed £40,000. I thought to myself ‘Have I signed something I shouldn’t have? Have I agreed to something and forgotten?’ It was late at night and the next morning I phoned the company and the guy said ‘You actually owed two lots of 40 grand but you’ve paid one lot already’. Every time someone made a payment at The Hardwick on the card machine 11% of that money was going to the loans company to pay the loans back. I was like ‘Oh my God.'”
In total, Nightingale, with her husband’s assistance, stole more than £150,000 from Stephen’s business which he will never get back. She used four ways to extract money from The Hardwick, including direct payments to her account of £50,190, inflated wage payments of £6,284, additional payments disguised as wages and invoices of £47,018, and 55 payments made into her husband’s account amounting to £46,741.
“She was paying herself £25 an hour one week. She paid herself in full while she was having holidays and holiday pay on top,” Stephen continued. “She went off to Ascot, concerts, restaurants, trips away, Morocco twice, EuroDisney twice, Florida. Spent a fortune."
His view on their sentences - both two years suspended for two years - pulls no punches. They “got away with it”, he says. What still rankles is the impact the episode has had on his family, which “no-one asked about” while the Nightingales’ children were used in their mitigation.
“What it suggests is that crime pays. Crime pays if you’ve got kids," he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was D-Day for her. It’s an absolute joke. I’d have put my life on her going down. All we had left for us was some justice, some justice in the real sense of the word, for what that woman did to us, our family, our business, our employees, for messing everyone’s pensions up, for messing suppliers up, with no regard for anyone other than herself. It was all done with meticulous planning.
“It took bloody ages (the case to get to sentence). It was postponed twice because of Covid, then the barristers’ disputes. When he said ‘suspended’ I looked at my wife Jo and she looked at me and I said ‘They’ve got away with it.' Then I saw it later on the news and she's coming out of court waving and Simon is smug. I'm just thinking 'Oh my days.'"
His steely exterior rarely wanes but he admits he “was close to tears” when a supplier, not paid properly while Nightingale worked for The Hardwick, offered Stephen his own money. “I phoned him up and said ‘I’ve found this has happened to us and I know I owe you a lot of money. I think I might owe you six grand.’ He said ‘Stephen, you owe me 20 grand.’ The next thing he said to me was ‘Do you need any money? I’ll help you.’ That is the type of people I deal with. I was close to tears when he said that.
“My wife, the kids, it has had a really bad effect on us. The kids could see we were in bits. We tried to shield them from it. It has put a lot of pressure on us because there have been a lot of unknowns about what could happen. We’re tough and we bounce back and we are bouncing back. We’re resilient people but the effect it’s had on us has been profound. It made me feel ill.”
He wasn’t rich before this and certainly isn’t now, he insists. The business, he says, is “treading water”. “People think I’m loaded because I’m on the telly occasionally, but I’m definitely not. It’s always been difficult. We’ve never made loads of money here, it’s a business run on passion and passion doesn’t make money. Success for me has never been about money. It’s been about whether people walk in here and enjoy what we do and are content.
“I like a challenge, but trying to fight this during a cost of living crisis has been huge. This place costs a f***ing fortune to run but we’re sticking it out. It’s not easy. We’re trying to do good tasty food while keeping costs down for the customer and our prices are going up. It’s horrible."
On a typical day he is in the restaurant from 8am until late at night. It means he rarely sees his three children for the majority of the week. He’d like customers to have more compassion for those working in hospitality now.
"It's horrendously difficult to recruit staff," he said. "Over the last couple of years with Brexit and Covid a lot of good workers have shifted out of this industry and do other stuff for probably better money and better hours. I've never had a more inexperienced team than I do now. Not knocking them - they're great people and they work really hard.
“We work 15 and 16 hours a day and I think everyone who comes here needs to be appreciative of each other’s time. If someone comes in kicking off, I just think: ‘F***ing do one and have some respect’. Believe me, no-one is standing around in the kitchen, we’re running around like blue-arsed flies getting our arses handed to us.”
The arial font on his menu matches the no-nonsense but welcoming decor of The Hardwick. It represents everything he’s about: delivery without being ostentatious.
“We’re not fine dining because I don’t think fine dining is value for money. I want good tasty food in a way that isn’t pretentious in a relaxed atmosphere and that’s what we’re about. Fine dining is anally retentive. You couldn’t pay me to sit there and have someone fanny around me with a pair of tweezers putting flowers all over my food - f*** off. Seriously.
“I think fine dining is becoming an ever-decreasing circle. A plate is a functional object, it’s flat, it’s white, it’s round and I put food on it and I eat food off it. Make it look nice by all means, but it’s not architecture. Do most people want to feel like they’re having to deconstruct their food? If you’re DJing and you’re really into it and no-one is f***ing dancing then you need to look at what you’re playing don’t you? It’s finding a balance between your own creative integrity and what works. I put food on a plate so halfway through eating it it looks like half of what arrived when it was first put down in front of you.”
He isn’t sure whether being on the Michelin Guide has helped the restaurant greatly, and feels some may avoid The Hardwick because they think it’s a lot more expensive than it is. “I never wanted to be on it and I still don’t. It took me six years to get the AA to get me out of the guide. I never filled out the forms and they sent me a letter last year saying I’ll be kicked out of the guide. I’m not interested. The only opinions I’m interested in are mine, my staff and my customers."
Can he take any positives from a hellish couple of years? "We're still here. We've dug really, really deep and got through it. It's made me wiser, definitely. I want to get that across. If you own a business, however much you trust someone, get involved. Do look at your accounts and make sure you know your business inside out. I look at my accounts every day now and I have the login details for everything. I'm very much aware about what is going on in my business now. It's been hanging over us for so long and we've got no justice at all which is a kick in the doodahs. But we've got to look to the future."
What does the future hold for him? "I'm off to make some Merthyr pies." Hopefully with fewer s*** days ahead.
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