"You're not allowed fun at the moment, are you."
Asking Tom 'Westy' Westerland, Lucknam Park graduate, National Chef of Wales 2018 and Great British Menu 2019 contestant what he likes to do in his spare time does seem like a moot question - as many of our favourite activities are currently either hindered by rules and regulations or banned.
"I still enjoy going out and finding new restaurants though," he said.
"I'm quite new to the area, so it's quite nice to try new places," he added, describing Berkshire, where he recently helped launch Crockers Henley, of which he is the head chef.
Tom took on the position of head chef at the restaurant three days before the lockdown hit in March. Needless to say he was forced to revise his plans.
"We all missed out on the furlough by about 18 days," he explained.
"We had a month to get the restaurant ready to open, and we had to change tactics to running a takeaway to try and push on and get some wages in."
Lockdown Brigade
Busy getting things in order before launching the restaurant, Tom and his crew were left unable to rent privately when local estate agents closed, and were forced to move into the hotel above the restaurant.
Living together was a strong bonding experience, as most of the crew had never met before.
"It was quite interesting," he smiled. "But it's done some good, because we've got an absolutely solid team now, everybody knows each other very well."
"Any arguments or gripes that we would have had were over and done with in lockdown."
"It was nice not to be alone through lockdown. You'd have the company, you could enjoy yourself, we'd all cook dinner every night and have a sit down in the restaurant."
And incongruous as it may have been, the chef said the experience put an extra bit of fire under his team to deliver on the restaurant's product.
"It really launched us into having to find what the locals wanted to do a takeaway and to develop a cuisine for that, whereas now we've properly opened, we've had to change and try and get away from that."
"Going from having food put in boxes - burgers, hot dogs, things like that - trying to get across to the local community what we're trying to do and what we are doing is very difficult, but we're getting there now."
"It was a real culture shock. I got a real knack for closing the box and writing on the lid," he jested.
Doing between 150-200 covers on some nights, he said: "It was a completely different set up, we'd have all of our checks that'd be pre-order before service, so you'd have 200 covers on the board ready to go, and we'd be serving 15-20 covers every 15 minutes."
"It was quite amazing to see a different side of how services work."
"I'll tell you what - I don't envy takeaways. They've got a very difficult job."
"The first time I saw a plate again, I didn't know what to do with it," he joked.
When preparing takeaway food, he said: "You'd have to think about so many things - how well it would travel, how long it would stay hot, the texture of how things would change, how it would look in a box."
"We used to get some quite interesting pictures," he laughed. "People would
