FINT Leeds: Meet the head chef behind the Scandinavian-style restaurant that's replaced Fettle

The popular Scandinavian-style café was hit hard by the pandemic, once reliant on lunchtime trade and office workers.

Its owner and head chef, Simon Hawkins, closed down the café in June. But it was not the end of the Fettle story.

After gutting the premises and starting over, FINT opened a month later - still serving simple food in a welcoming atmosphere but now with a focus on an evening menu.

"I like to describe it as Fettle, but grown-up," Simon, 43, told the Yorkshire Evening Post.

“When we ripped out Fettle to do FINT, we knew that lunches weren’t going to be big for us anymore.

"Our focus now is encouraging people to leave the house. If you’re working in your home all day, it’s a treat to pop out for dinner.

"We’ve had a few hiccups, but generally, people love it. I hope people still feel comfortable and welcome when they come through the door.”

Simon's culinary journey started in an Italian restaurant in Halifax when he was 15, where his older sister landed him a job as a pot washer.

He has more than two decades of experience in the hospitality sector, including managing Browns in Covent Garden, but had always worked front-of-house until opening Fettle with his partner Kamil in 2016.

Simon said: "As much as I’ve always loved cooking for myself, Fettle was essentially my first proper chef job - excluding a few years at Pizza Hut!

“It was supposed to be a coffee shop with nice food, but the food very quickly took over which I was pleased about.

"The plan had always been to turn Fettle into what is now FINT, with the proper look and feel of a restaurant.

“There came a point when we just had to rip it out."

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That timeline was propelled forward by the pandemic, which Simon admits was an "awful" time for the business.

“It was one of the reasons we had to let Fettle go," Simon added.

"We didn’t know how we were going to survive."

Word is slowly filtering out that the restaurant is back and Simon has chosen not to rush that process, letting customers stumble upon FINT instead.

The bright and airy eatery offers simple plates of seasonal food at breakfast, lunch and dinner; on the winter menu is bay-roasted pork belly with speckled lentils, sea bass with Jerusalem artichoke and vegetable pithivier with rocket and fig.

Everything, except the bread, is made from scratch in the FINT kitchen - which Simon says is as important for his chefs as it is the customers.

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He added: “The industry has a huge problem with finding chefs, which has been growing for decades but exacerbated in the last two years.

"Rather than training people and giving them the skills they need, it’s often just being shipped out of the factory.

“We want to make sure that we do everything here. That means we have to train our chefs with proper knife handling or how to make gnocchi.

"If you’re always learning it makes the job worthwhile and a lot more interesting.”

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