Owner of Perch on the Pier in Worthing looks back at the last year

Alex Coombes, owner of restaurant and café brand Perch, opened the company’s site on Worthing’s Art Deco pier on Good Friday last year after completely renovating the structure’s south pavilion.

The businessman looked back on the last 12 months with pride, but added there had been plenty of learning curves for the team.

“It’s been great,” he said.

“We’re delighted we’ve been able to do this, and I hope it’s been broadly welcomed.

“We have 65 jobs here on this site and we have a great team.

“And we’re seeing really nice customers, a lot of repeat bookings.

“In hindsight we wouldn’t have opened on the Friday.

“We would have done it a bit softer.

“But we wanted to get it open.

“The reaction was really great from customers.

“It was exactly what we wanted to see, we’d spent a lot of time on refreshing the building and making it fit for purpose and people were excited as soon as they came back.

“One of the motivations we had about building it was we wanted people to be really proud of it.”

Perch began business with the opening of its site in Lancing in 2015 before opening another location in Eastbourne.

Alex had had an eye on the pier pavilion for years and said he wanted to be a part of Worthing’s growing food scene.

Inside Perch on the Pier (Image: Perch on the Pier)

“Worthing is full of independent food places here and it’s growing,” he said.

“It’s one of things we find really attractive about the town.

“It’s such a cool building.

“Everything came together at the right time.

“It was a huge undertaking, probably too big looking back.

“We didn’t anticipate the building to be as big as it was and it was probably bigger than our capacity at the time.

“We learned a lot of things.

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“We certainly didn’t plan for it to be as extensive a refurbishment.

“But we realised it hadn’t had a lot of money spent on it for a long time.

“The idea is to be here for a long time.”

There are plenty of things in the pipeline for the next year, with plans for another three more sites in the county, an outdoor seating offering being developed at Worthing, as well as the inception of the Nest.

The Nest is a stand-alone dining space on the first floor of the restaurant, which will be handed over to a budding restaurateur for 18 months.

The view from The Nest (Image: Simon Callaghan Photography)

The new operator, who Alex has now found, will have support and coaching, as well as marketing, HR, accounting and operational support if required.

“It’s a pretty amazing space and we want to do it justice,” said Alex.

“Because it’s a big variance from what we do we want to see someone come in there and thrive.

“We think we’ve got someone now who is extraordinarily talented and we hope in June to have a soft opening for him.

“It’s a really exciting project.

“It’s about bringing the whole building back appropriately.”