Our Story
Lamar is the Arabic word for molten gold. It felt like the right name for what we were trying to build: somewhere warm, somewhere that glows, somewhere you’re glad to be sitting.
We opened in 2009 with our family’s recipes and not a great deal else. We’d been given these dishes the way most families pass things down, by watching, by being fed them, by being told we’d got it wrong until we got it right. Opening a place of our own to cook them in was a risk, and we knew it. We did it anyway.
The lounge
In the beginning there wasn’t much in our hands. We couldn’t control who walked past the door or what anyone had heard about us. What we could control was how a person was treated once they sat down, and whether the food that reached them was worth their time.
So that’s where all our attention went, and it went there for years. We changed things, got things wrong, changed them again. Slowly it got to where we wanted it, and somewhere in the middle of all that it stopped feeling like a business we were trying to make work and started feeling like ours.
That’s still how we run it. Which is a long way of saying, if you’ve had one of those days where you’ve nothing left to give it, come and sit down. Order more than you need. Stay longer than you planned. We’ll look after the rest.
“Inspiring excellence”Lamar Cafe, since 2009