Tim Allen goes Sō-lō with his first business by himself

But in years to come, Allen will surely look back on the opening of Sō-lō in Aughton, near Ormskirk, as his finest hour. Situated just a stone's throw from multi-Michelin-starred Moor Hall, Allen is finally operating a business he can truly call his own.

"I'm bouncing off the walls about the place, I'm absolutely buzzing," enthuses Allen, who opened his 38-seat restaurant on the site of the former Seafood Pub Company Wine Bar last November. "It's taken me a while to do this for myself, but I love what I do and it's that passion that is driving me. And now I get to express that passion in a place of my own."

Freedom in the Sō-lō kitchen

While Allen has won plenty of accolades over the years, and even had his name above the door at the Flitch, he has, nevertheless spent his entire career as an employee.

"What have I got at Sō-lō that's different from other places? No glass-ceilinged autonomy, and that's said with no negativity whatsoever," says the straight-talking Yorkshireman. "Everything now, here, is for me, it's for my children, I'm not lining someone else's pockets. I see the benefits of this business. But why it's taken me so long to get here, I just don't know," he laughs.

Not that Allen is blaming anyone for his live by the sword, die by the sword approach to previous roles. "I've always gone into places and treated them like my own. Why? Because I think that's the proper and professional thing to do. But when that's unwound and you think, actually, I'm just an employee, all that extra length that I'm going to… well it creates frustration."

It's a frustration that he entirely owns, however. On departing the Flitch of Bacon in the summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Allen left the coalface of the industry but continued to cook for high-net-worth individuals to ensure he could provide for his family. Slowly, he started to plan his return to the restaurant scene (hand in hand with his backers, IT entrepreneur Peter Miles and Miles's group chief financial officer Ian Gaskell).

But all wasn't well. For years, it would seem, Allen had been desperately unhappy and had gone to great lengths to hide the real state of his mental health.

Having finally hit rock bottom, last May Allen reached out to a friend and fellow chef and came clean about the extent of his dependency on alcohol. As a result, he embarked on the 12-step programme, and today, Allen is celebrating 11 months of sobriety.

"I've spent my life being a people-pleaser, thinking that I could fix everything. And I was also a slave to my ego, not wanting to fail, trying to prove ‘I can do this', when I just needed to ask for help. I put myself in unmanageable situations. I chose to make those decisions and, ultimately, I relied on alcohol as a coping mechanism. From that coping mechanism came a dependency, and a dependency on a coping mechanism is alarming. I drank myself into oblivion to the point where I had no place to go."

The 12-step programme has made Allen realise that, over the years, the more pressure he put himself under to perform, the more lost he became in the process. "The ability to look at yourself introspectively – you just don't naturally have those skills. Getting into sobriety has really enabled me to internalise, to look at myself, at my behaviours, to look at what I've done, and look at what I'm doing now with a much more glass-half-full mentality."

Tim Allen's painful past

From a psychological point of view, it's easy to see where things started to unravel for Allen. Timid by nature, he was bullied at school and forced to move schools to the other side of his hometown of Huddersfield, an hour-and-a-half's commute either way. Moving to a new school brought with it a new set of problems. Despite everything, he emerged from sixth form with two A-levels – in environmental science and physical geography. With a little more application, he could easily have gone to university.

"I would have loved to have been an environmentalist or gone into forestry management. I was also really into farming. I worked on a farm from the age of 13 and that work ethic has always been there. I had few socially interactive skills, to be fair, and I would do stupid things to be liked, and that got me into bad places. I was meek, I had low confidence, it led to me being bullied, which is often the way of the world."

At school he got into the wrong circles and, despite being driven enough to maintain a part-time job in a local pub kitchen while completing his studies, he got into recreational drugs. "I worked hard and played hard – initially with marijuana, and then one thing led to another. I know loads of chefs who do that, it's not a new story, and it's not just chefs – lots of people in lots of professions do it – but I grew up in the naughty 1990s; that was my era, it was an easy distraction."

What's on the menu at Sō-lō?

An outright perfectionist, Allen has been pumping out the exquisitely designed plates of food that he is known for since the launch of the restaurant, but insists, like himself, Sō-lō is very much a work in progress. There's still building work to be done, such as the lowering of ceilings that had been adversely affected by water damage previously, and the refurbishment of the toilets, which will be carried out in May.

But Allen and Karen Miles, Peter's wife, who oversees the interior design, have been resourceful in their approach to upgrading the property. Indeed, much of Allen's kitchen hails from chef Michael Wignall's old kitchen at the Angel at Hetton.

"We need to make hospitality more sustainable and that's not just about separating your rubbish, it's asking whether this a sustainable environment for people to work in. Sō-lō has been opened with that mentality. There's lots of work to do, but by the middle of this year, upstairs [the private accommodation where Allen's family will live, which was a building site at the time of The Caterer's interview] will be done, and the focus will be on the dining room. I've never given time to anything – I would just go at 200 miles an hour – but that's not sustainable and that's not manageable.

"At the moment, I've got too many focuses. By the middle of the year, we'll be cooking. I don't have a full team – I'm still trying to grow that – and I opened up in a pandemic, which is either ballsy or daft.

"It was a great time to get into business – money was cheap, lots of people going bust, sadly – but we're getting moving again as an industry, which is encouraging. I don't have a PR company because I can't afford one – I may engage one down the line – but, for now, we're just cooking and some people have been here 10, 11, 12 times. That is testament to the fact that we've got something right. My only barometer is ‘have I got customers coming back to the restaurant' – it's not about am I going to win this, have I got that?"

Recipe for success

Allen is, arguably, more focused on ingredients than ever before. Grateful for the suppliers that Mark Birchall at Moor Hall has introduced him to, Allen is soaking up the opportunity to work with those who, for example, just grow one ingredient.

"We're working with someone literally down the road who just produces cauliflowers. I'm in an area now where I can have that thinking. The menu is £65, take VAT off it and all the rest of it, we're cheap. It's a cheap menu for the quality of the food we're cooking. And it's also intensive.

"There's a lot more veg on the menu now. The celeriac dish is a starter course on the menu, cauliflower is on there as a course and I think it's good enough as a course – you eat the dish and it does what it says on the tin, it's delicious, so why would you not serve it? I know I've got enough knowledge and depth to make a piece of cauliflower something wonderful to eat."

For hospitality trainer Giovanna Grossi, who grew up in Royal Birkdale, 20 minutes from Sō-lō's front door, Allen's approach to food has always been to source great ingredients and then extract and deliver the best flavours from them. "His cooking has continually been food I really wanted to eat," she says.

As an operator, Allen takes every element of the business seriously, adds Grossi. "He's not just a great chef who limits his focus to the kitchen, he is meticulous about everything from the restaurant design and layout, the service and hospitality and, critically, a real strength of Tim's is his firm attention on the P&L. A lack of knowledge and awareness of the financials can be the downfall of many chefs who run their business for the first time."

Allen is the first to admit that Sō-lō isn't the finished article, but he does concede that he has plans. "Do I have aspirations for Sō-lō? Of course I do, but I'm not in control of those things – that takes years of work. What's important is that I've got a viable business, I'm responsible for people, we're in profit, I'm the happiest and the most excited I've ever been, but I need to accept that things need to go a little bit slower. I need to give time. The accelerator pedal is great, but you need to know when to put your foot on it – and not just to keep your foot on it, which is what the old me would have done."