From the Earth (once known as Seconds) has now been open for a year.
I passed From the Earth one day last week and spied that it was full. Admittedly when run either as a business or now as a community interest company it never had many covers but it was nevertheless a surprise to see it so well patronised.
With less money around, the ethos behind the café means that it can charge low prices. It uses food that is about to go beyond its use by date. A main meal costs £5 or £5.50 and there’s invariably a reasonable plateful. An eat-in sandwich is about £3.50.
Perhaps the reasons why it isn’t always full are:
- Because it uses ‘waste’ food, you sometimes have to take pot luck. The menu is limited.
- It sells only vegetarian and vegan food. Meat-eaters may not always want a jacket potato with a meat-free filling or a variation on a cheese sandwich.
- Some other town centre cafés are also struggling. Is there an over-supply or is it that there isn’t the off-season footfall to sustain them all.
The history behind the venture is as follows. This was once Crown House Café. It opened at the time when the county council refurbished Crown House in the late 1990s. Crown House Café closed by 2016, later re-opened as Miss B's, which itself closed in 2018. The site was then empty till this time last year, when it opened as Seconds (now From the Earth).
When last rated (June 2023) the community café rated a middle ranking 3/5 in terms of hygiene.
(You may recall that the Joneses and Rachel Coombes of Crown House Café went on to be the first tenants of the Craft Centre café. For a period, they operated both that and Crown House, then just the Craft Centre’s and then none at all. They cited a drop in Craft Centre footfall as the reason why they withdrew from the Craft Centre closed. Yet in spite of its 2023 truncated opening hours, the Craft Centre café now operated in-house by Denbighshire Leisure Ltd seems more busy than ever.)