Community coffee shop sets out to support unemployed people as it opens its doors with an award-winning chef

A charity has opened the doors of its city centre community coffee shop after its long-awaited completion of the £650,000 transformation of a former bank.

Jubilee Central Ltd, part of Jubilee Church in Hull, plans to use revenue generated from The Living Room to support its work helping long-term unemployed people back into employment.

It hopes the wider community – including the corporate sector – will be inspired in the same way as chef Nick Hill, who has been tempted back into the kitchen after closing his award-winning Hispanist restaurant early in 2025.

Nick opened the restaurant in Paragon Arcade in 2019 and within months the business was hit by Covid lockdowns. He battled on to earn successive listings in the Good Food Guide Top 100 Local UK restaurants and to win the food and drink category of the 2023 HullBID Awards. 

But he called it a day after what he described as the rising physical and mental toll of fighting the rocketing costs of running the business alongside dwindling customer spending power. When The Hispanist closed, Nick had had no plans other than to spend time with his family, rest and reset.

Now he is energised and excited. He said: “I spotted the advert for The Living Room and I applied. I see this as a blank canvas with plenty of room for creativity and we want it to be something different for the city centre.”

The Living Room project dates back to conversations nearly 10 years ago when management at Jubilee Central discussed options for opening up their building and its many facilities onto King Edward Street via the space which once housed a NatWest Bank.

Casey Fawcett, events manager at Jubilee Central, said: “The front onto King Edward Street was just green slate and nobody knew we were here. We started fundraising for the project because we wanted people to see the work we are doing in the community and the benefits of supporting what we do as an organisation. It’s taken all that time to get to this point.”

Named the Full View Project because of the installation of a huge glass frontage and the opening up of the previously hidden baroque revival façade of the building, the transformation is designed to attract more people into the building to find out about the facilities and services.

A “life college” helps people with skills including cooking on a budget, English, exercise classes, craft groups and more. Businesses and other organisations can use spaces ranging from small meeting rooms to the 598-capacity main auditorium. The new café has 60 seats with a modern design and modern cuisine.

Casey said: “It’s been a long time coming and we are eager to get it open. What we want to do is train people up who are currently unemployed. We will use the partnerships which we are developing to get them into employment. We will train people in front of house skills, how to work in events, catering, hospitality, corporate, big events in our auditorium.”

Nick has created a menu “in the breakfast and brunch style of the coffee houses of Los Angeles or Australia.”

He added: “Everything in the kitchen here is top drawer, top quality equipment and we’re aiming to source as much of the produce as we can locally from like-minded suppliers.

“The kitchen is about the same size as we had at The Hispanist but with more seating for customers. During the last year I’ve been doing private dining, pop-ups and weddings. We’ve got all sort of ideas but we’ll start with 9am to 3pm Tuesday to Saturday, maybe some private bookings, and find out what we’re capable of.”