Meet the member:
R & S Cafe Bistro, Kirkcaldy

We’re a family business & all our staff (6 in total) are either family or friends, so it’s a great place to work & our customers love the familiarity. Our menu is unique and the atmosphere is always warm & inviting. We’re serious about creating honest, tasty food using local ingredients and we make everything from scratch daily even down to our burger buns. We have a wonderful loyal customer base and pride ourselves on offering all our customers a relaxed, friendly & unpretentious place to enjoy homemade comfort food with a twist.

Not as easy as I thought but we’re really proud to be working with some fantastic local producers now. It’s important to me to know where my ingredients come from and to support both the local economy and community. If I can’t buy direct, I rely on local wholesalers to keep me updated on what’s local & in season.
We’ve built up some great relationships with several local businesses we buy direct from but were surprised at how difficult it was to source the simple things that you’d think would be easy.

We have a close relationship with C Sinclair from Burntisland for our fish. They help us plan our menu’s according to what they can get from local catches which is a huge help. Hendersons Butchers in Kirkcaldy make a stunning Linguica (Portuguese Chorizo) which features on our menu & is one of my favourite ingredients. Raith Fruits supply our fresh produce and we get our ice cream & mozzarella from The Buffalo Farm.
Our hot drinks come from The Wee Tea Company in Dunfermline & Eco Bean coffee roasters here in Kirkcaldy.

The thing I’ve found most frustrating is getting a daily delivery of milk from within Fife, believe it or not. Minimum orders are really challenging for small businesses with fluctuating sales. We don’t have space to store a lot of chilled produce so we need a daily milk delivery as it takes up a lot of space but we find it really difficult to hit a £50 MOQ.

We change the menu every three months and the one dish that never changes is Avocado Hummus on Toast – it’s one of the many the South American influences & there’d be an uproar if we changed it!
I bake all the cakes & bread from sourdough to baguettes – nothing is bought in but I can’t make enough of my scones & Pastel de Nata (Portuguese egg custard tarts)! They’re so moreish and the perfect size for a treat.

My personal favourite on the current menu is the Cullen Skink- it’s hearty, warming comfort food.

We’re always keen to support more local producers on the menu & for retail where we can. Apart from that, the model is working really well in its current format so any changes would be very carefully considered. We’d look at doing more evening events but just don’t have the time or staff at the moment. We can seat 30 people comfortably and cater for up to 50 with a mix of seated and standing. The café is a lovely environment for birthdays, meetings, etc, so private events is definitely an option. We held a live music event with a local artist last year, which went down really well, so we’re open to enquiries for a variety of occasions.

Personally, if I had more space, I’d bake bread for retail as we’re always getting asked if customers can buy a loaf.

My first cup of coffee and baking scones first thing – it’s almost therapeutic. I absolutely love to bake.