Would you believe it? Peterborough’s number one restaurant is vegan!

Resist! Vegan Kitchen, the food offering at The Key Theatre on The Embankment, since March 1, has rocketed to the top of review website TripAdvisor’s top restaurant in Peterborough chart.

And Gareth Ellison (pictured), who runs the plant-based eaterie with Lynn Jobson, admits the rise to the summit has taken him completely by surprise.

“It is pretty wild,” says Gareth, who spends Thursdays to Sundays hidden away in the restaurant kitchen preparing everything from scratch.

“We only moved in at the beginning of March and we did not even have a TripAdvisor listing - and now eight weeks later Peterborough’s number one restaurant is vegan.”

Gareth says the feedback from customers has been great from day one, but it was only recently that they discovered they were making waves on TripAdvisor.

“We noticed we were number 18 last week and thought ‘where did that come from?’ Then a rep rang me this week to say we were number one. It is unreal.”

The success has gone beyond Gareth’s expectations, but he feels it is only the beginning for Resist!, which started a couple of years ago as a pop-up - once a new contract with Vivacity, which runs the theatre, has been negotiated to run beyond May.

“We did not expect it to be anything like it has been,” said Gareth, “we thought we would still be finding our feet, when the reality is we have been run off our feet. There is so much more to come.

“Everything is made fresh on site and every day we are constantly trying to keep up with demand.

“We had to introduce a walk-in only system on Sundays because it quickly got to the point where no one could make a booking by Tuesday because we were fully booked.

“But Resist! is very much a community, our customers buy into what we are doing, and people don’t mind waiting. On Sunday it was nice to have the doors open because the sun was shining and people were happy to sit and have a drink overlooking the river while they waited 45 minutes or an hour to get a table.

“And it is not just committed vegans visiting, our customers are a very mixed group.

“A lot of vegans do bring their carnivore friends just to give it a try and they love it.

“One woman brought her reluctant husband and after one of our ‘donner kebabs’ he rebooked.

“I am hidden away in the kitchen so I don’t get to see and hear what people have to say about their meals, so it is nice to read about it.”