In Your Shoes - The Selkie

Kelly Fairweather is the co-owner and founder of The Selkie, a small family eatery and tapas bar based in Exchange Street, Dundee. While primarily The Selkie was to be open 9am-9pm each day, this plan has now changed with current restrictions.

Family is at the heart of The Selkie and Kelly works alongside her children, husband and son-in-law to provide locally sourced authentic meals.

www.theselkie.scot

Facebook: @theselkiedundee 

Instagram: @theselkiedundee

Monday

Monday is deep clean day; it is also the day we work out our to do list and goals for the week ahead. Its important that we are responsive to guidance, menu feedback and any new restrictions that may affect us. From the start The Selkie has been closed on a Monday to allow for deep cleaning, planning and all the other admin.

Tuesday

Robbie and I spend Tuesdays tweaking Menus and deciding on the menu for our community meals. In order for us to feed as many people as possible we try to make the community meals easy to prepare on a large scale, filling and still a bit of a treat. Our personal family commitment was to provide up to 1000 meals to the community over 6 weeks, but only three weeks in we have almost hit that number.Most of the requests for meals come in on a Tuesday so we go through e-mails and messages. Many are coming from Teachers and community workers.

Tuesday is also my Growth Mindset Day! I have been doing a course with Jamie McBeaty and I am loving how its consolidated a lot of personal development for me.

Wednesday

Wednesday is always a crazy day. We get lots of last-minute requests for meals and I have to make sure we have enough volunteer drivers. Our second Chef Jade will be in all day and along with myself and Robbie, we cook all meals from scratch. Paul goes to the cash and carry for supplies and my two older children help get organised.

Tonight, we delivered 276 meals thanks to my friends and family and Zippy D all helping with deliveries.

Our final delivery is to a 16-year-old who had just lost their mum to COVID. I make sure that he has a bit extra to see him and his sister through. It's heart breaking to hear some people's stories. I wish I could do more but at least I know that they have had a good feed.

We do not ask to know why someone feels that they need a meal, but many choose to share their stories with us. It makes me hug my own kids a bit tighter and reminds me that everyone has their own story.

Thursday

Exciting news today. We placed an offer on another site! A sister to The Selkie. Madness?? I’m not sure but I’ve spent a long time planning The Selkie.

I have “The Man in the Arena” speech in the office. I genuinely believe that my place is in the ring taking a bloody nose if needs be. I’ve made mistakes but I have learned and as a family we are excited by Dundee and all it has to offer. And Yes, we want to be a part of that!

Friday and Saturday

So, after a long week of home schooling and trying to work, anyone that has worked in Hospitality will understand that the weekend is the main event.

My first job of the day is making sure that we have everything we need. I then call customers that have received a delivery from us to check how things were for them and to get some honest feedback on how we are doing.

With the current lockdown we have four full days of Tapas Takeaway (Thursday to Sunday). Hundreds of freshly prepared dishes fly out the doors at the weekend. Robbie and Jade start at around 8am turning fresh produce into authentic sauces, slow cooking scotch beef and hand rolling around 1000 meatballs and that doesn’t include the hundreds of Vegan “meatballs”. At 4 pm the fun really begins and after the football scores are checked we swing into full service. We know service is over when two things are empty, 1- The fridge and 2- our energy reserves. Once all the orders are complete the kitchen gets a full deep clean, a 14-hour day ends with scrubbing sweeping and sanitising.

It's usually at the end of the night once everyone has gone home and I am having a wee cup of tea before heading home that I truly appreciate my family, the people that we are lucky enough to work with and everything that is unique about The Selkie. There is truly no place I’d rather be, I love the magical energy of our wee place on one of Dundee’s oldest street.