Operator profile: Deeney's

Carol Deeney tells Henry Norman about Deeney’s and its famous hero, the Hamish Macbeth haggis toastie...

In today’s super-saturated market, it is increasingly hard to find out of home outlets that can claim to be doing something truly unique. However, Deeney’s, which is based in Leyton in the north-east of the capital, certainly seems to have carved out its own USP, describing itself as it does as a ‘Scottish street food and café’ business.

“When you’re in the street food industry in London, you have to have a product that will help you to stand out from the crowd and make it worthwhile for people to make the trip,” Carol Deeney explains, as I ask her about her business’s perhaps unlikely evolution. “You can’t just be doing another ham and cheese sandwich. We decided we wanted to do cheese toasties and the haggis was the unique part of the proposition.

“The logical move then was to get a premises and we decided to get a café but in a more residential area. We still do the street food toasties, but we are primarily a café. You can still get a coffee and a bacon roll. We’ve managed to combine both in order to appeal to a wider audience.”

This they have certainly done, with the business having been trading for 10 years now and garnered an impressive 4.5/5 rating on TripAdvisor, as well been a finalist at our recent Street Food Championships (to be discussed in a future issue). Carol tells me, however, that her industry experience goes back to way before her decade at Deeney’s. “Previously I worked in the advertising industry, but I grew up in the north-east of Scotland where my mum had a café serving traditional Scottish food,” she says. “I lived above and worked in it from a young age.”

Her decision to exit advertising came in 2012, with Carol being inspired to take the plunge by the then fledgling street food scene that was emerging around her in the capital. “It was becoming quite vibrant at the time,” she remembers. “People were upping their game with the branding, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to enter the industry and started a market stall.

“After doing some research, my husband and I decided to focus on Scottish food, because that was my background and something I am proud of and can talk about. We came up with the haggis toastie, which we sold in markets across east and central London.

“After three years of doing markets, events and festivals, we secured a location in east London for a café, and then a couple of years later we moved to bigger premises, a licensed restaurant that is more of a central kitchen now. We still do the street food from that kitchen, as well as large-scale catering.”

If you spend as much time as I do Googling ‘best sandwich in London’ (I have to for professional purposes, I don’t have a problem – honest), then you’ll certainly be familiar with Deeney’s trademark creation, the Hamish Macbeth. So, how did they come up with the toastie that would become their trademark?

“I did a focus group with friends, in terms of what could the brand be, how am I going to associate myself with food, and decided it was a really good way to bring myself into the product,” Carol recalls. “We started looking at dishes and obviously haggis came up. We tried a few combinations and the haggis toastie was born. It was about bringing something different to a food crowd in a familiar way.

“We started off having other things on the menu, like a chicken one and a salt beef one, but we found that you need to have this hero product, and that people who are visiting street food events want to try something that they can’t get anywhere else. They want to try it and tell their friends and, especially with social media, it’s about how you’re doing something different. This is a way for people to have more of an experience.”

Making such a specifically Scottish delicacy palatable to an English audience wasn’t always plain sailing, though, and Carol admits there was some educating involved. “There was definitely pushback,” she says, “people were like ‘Haggis? Isn’t that cheap innards and brain?’ They’d get it totally wrong and there are a lot of myths around haggis. It’s quite hard to reeducate people, but generally, once they’ve tried it, they love it.”

It no doubt helps that the heroic haggis is sourced from Scotland, with Macsween (“they call themselves ‘the guardians of haggis’ and they’ve been making it for many, many years”) shipping it down weekly. “They also do a fantastic vegetarian alternative, which over the year has become more and more popular, and now we’re seeing like-for-like sales between meat and vegetarian haggis.”

Unfortunately, as good as it undoubtedly is, Macsween’s reach doesn’t extend quite as far as the business’s first franchise – Tokyo in Japan. However, the franchisees have found a novel and impressive solution. “It was quite hard for us to get the right supply for them, obviously their local suppliers, they don’t have a lot of dairy and bread and definitely not haggis available,” says Carol. “So they actually make their own, which is unique.

“It’s very impressive because I certainly haven’t gotten into the butchery side of things! But they do a fantastic job and they’ve got a good recipe. When my husband and I visited, it was really authentic and we couldn’t believe how good a job they’d done.”

There are other items on the menu back at the English café, of course, though Carol confirms that the second best-seller also has a Celtic connection. “We do a full Scottish breakfast, which includes haggis and a square sandwich. We also make our own scones. Again, it’s about making an authentic product familiar to the English.”

The latter really could be this impressive business’s motto, so why does Carol think she has done so well over the last decade, succeeding across so many sub-sectors? “What we established when we started out in street food is that the brand is all about quality, friendliness and hospitality,” she concludes. “When we then moved into a formal café space, we managed to keep those values and that’s how we’ve done well. We get a lot of repeat customers from displaying those qualities and it really helped us when we started the café.

“Also, we’ve adapted within that space, which meant that when lockdown came in, we never closed, we just adapted. We now do delivery, we do meal kits, so it’s about sticking to your guns and maintaining consistency so people respect you and take you seriously. The reason why everything has worked out is because we’ve been consistent and we always focus on quality.”

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