Famous

Recently all sorts of new activities have been cropping up for us and the Beast. Street food is gradually gaining traction in Birmingham and nationally the whole idea is becoming more acceptable. This means there are lots of opportunities for free publicity going and, while I’m really not a fan of advertising in the traditional sense, a bit of free PR never did anyone any harm.

One of the goals I set myself, way back in the early days, was to try and make a mark on the street food scene. I’m not sure I ever mentioned it here, as in my head it sounded way too close to me saying “Our street food will make us famous”, but the desire was there. Now we are two years older, especially the van and Barny, and we are actually getting somewhere.

Shortly after Brum Yum Yum we were woken up one morning by a feature writer for the Birmingham Mail. Barny was feeling grotty, so I gave her an interview and she then arranged to get a photographer out to see us. We have never done a photo shoot before and are officially one experience better off for it. It mostly involves smiling and holding things in positions that do not feel natural or sensible. There are possibly exceptional photo shoots when this is not the case, but most of the afternoon was spent either watching Barny waving toasties at Mark the photographer from under his arm or waving toasties at the photographer myself.

Our efforts were later published, but circulation doesn’t quite get out to Leamington so we had to try and arrange spare copies. You can read the full story here, but we are still working on a print version.

It seems like we are gradually finding ways to spread the word of the Wocky and help him make a name for himself without too much advertising. We have many others to thank for this, not least your good selves, who tweet and spread the word and, in the case of two lovely locals who we met on twitter a while back, come and try the food as a result. I’m going to count you two as the first toastie sales made though the blog, by the way. That’s conversion, baby!

We also had the BBC Good Food Show come back to us and announce we had won, meaning we have an exceptional pitch for free at their food show selling to as many of the 90,000 people as we can manage over 5 whole days. To put that in perspective, you pay somewhere in the region of £850 for a festival of 7000 people over 3 days. There is some serious maths to be made at that one.

It’s exciting to have so many bits and pieces finally start to work out, especially as Barny is still recovering (thanks very much for all your support on that one) and the jobs are now nearly a comforting memory of the past. If things could just stay fixed for a few weeks, Beast I’m looking at you here, then we can actually make this happen.