SERVING UP SOLUTIONS

How is Dorset’s hospitality sector faring during lockdown? STEVE HARRIS talks to some of the people who are having to rethink how their business works

- STEVE HARRIS

It would be great to be in on the ground floor of a successful business, wouldn’t it? Take graffiti artist David Choe. He chose to receive shares rather than his quoted $60,000 for painting Facebook’s HQ in 2005. Seven years later that stock was worth $200m. That’s an impressive profit. Well, maybe your opportunity to replicate that kind of success is to buy yourself shares in Perspex.

From the merest whisper of a pandemic we’ve seen a number of lockdown product “rushes”. First it was toilet paper and hand gel, then yeast and flour, and as our hospitality industry gears back up, clear plastic finds itself in the crosshairs. Supermarkets have it at checkouts, dentists’ surgeries at their reception desks, and bars and restaurants are using it as a way of enforcing safe social distancing as they look at reopening safely in July. Demand is sky-high.

Andy Lennox has been splashing the cash on the clear stuff, but with a keen eye on creating some semblance of tasteful design. Andy co-founded the award-winning Koh Thai restaurant chain in Boscombe in 2009. 18 months ago he opened Zim Braai in Poole, selling Southern African cuisine. He was just getting ready to open Zim 2 in Bournemouth when coronavirus turned up on our shores and everything stopped. “The amount that I’ve spent on PPE is mental,” he tells me. “We’ve got these beautiful fret-cut Perspex screens with metal, to make the restaurants feel like they’ve been designed rather than just chucking a load of screens everywhere.”