About Dan
I run BANK and Lapin, two Bristol restaurants focused on flavour, warm service, and honest plates. Most days I’m somewhere between the pass, the dining room, and a notebook, trying to make sense of how it all works.
I’m a self-taught operator, and most of what I write is about the reality of running restaurants: money, people, service, and the quiet systems that make a night work.
How I ended up in restaurants
I talked my way into my first coffee job in my early twenties and it set the terms of my adult life. I started on the floor, pulled a lot of shots, singed a lot of fingertips, and realised I loved the graft and the rhythm of service more than anything I’d done up to that point.
From there I moved to a roastery, first training, then into wholesale. I spent a few years travelling around Europe with a battered suitcase, visiting cafés, talking about margins and machinery, and competing in coffee championships. It was obsessive and slightly ridiculous, but it sharpened how I thought about flavour, guests, and the business wrapped around both.
By 2019 I’d left London for the West Country, was working with Colonna in Bristol, and thought I’d found my lane. Then Covid hit, my role disappeared, and I had that very clean moment of realising I never wanted to be entirely at the mercy of someone else’s spreadsheet again. Consulting kept me afloat for a while, but the itch to build something of my own built up fast.
I started trawling listings and found a big corner site on Wells Road in Totterdown that wouldn’t leave me alone. That became BANK. It began as an all-day café with coffee, brunch and a few plates in the evening and, over time, grew into the restaurant it is now. Lapin followed later, a smaller French-leaning room in a shipping container by the waterfront. Five years in, I’m still learning, still getting things wrong, and still turning up to try and make the next service a little better than the last.
Between the two rooms we now serve a few hundred guests a week, most of them local, many of them regulars.
What I care about
Hospitality as a craft
I am interested in the small, repeatable things that make a room feel good: the greeting at the door, the way plates land on the table, how quickly someone notices an empty glass. Theatre is nice; I care more about rooms that feel well looked after.
Product and place
I like ingredients that taste of where they are from, whether that is something from a local grower or a bottle from a favourite producer further afield. Local when it tastes better; further away when it teaches us something. The only test is whether it earns its place on the table
People first
Good rooms do not run on heroics. They run on clear rotas, fair expectations, and training that makes the job feel calmer, not more chaotic. Retention beats constant recruitment. If the team feels steady and respected, guests can feel it.
Learning in public
I do not pretend to have a finished theory about restaurants. Notes on a Napkin and the longer essays are just me sharing what we are trying, what is working, and what is not. Small improvements, every service.
Away from service
When I’m not in my own restaurants, I’m usually in someone else’s, eating, drinking and quietly taking notes. I pay a lot of attention to how rooms feel, how plates land, and what still sticks with me the next day.
Most of the real work happens at a desk. That’s where I’m writing, looking at the numbers, working on financials, training plans, growth ideas and longer-term strategy, and trying to turn half-formed thoughts from service into something useful.
When I need to clear my head, I get on my motorbike or head over to the allotment. The riding shakes the noise out; the allotment is a slow reminder that good things take time. It all feeds back into the same aim: good rooms, calm teams, and guests who want to come back.