Hastings Pier and catering firm part company

After having established a pro-active and collaborative working partnership, the Hastings Pier Charity and its food and beverage providers, Centerplate, say they have come to a mutual agreement for the catering services to be handed back to the pier on July 1.

Centerplate currently provides food and drink for the pier’s Pavilion Cafe, bar area, fish and chip shop and ice cream kiosk, as well as catering for private functions on the pier.

The Hastings Pier Charity has said that it couldn’t have become the 2017 ‘Pier of The Year’ without the ‘major contribution’ from Centerplate.

The team added that it was ‘grateful for their assistance in supporting the project during the very earliest phase of the pier’s rebirth’.

Pier CEO Jo Stewart said: “We are very grateful to Centerplate for their hard work in setting up the infrastructure for catering on the pier and are now excitedly looking forward to developing the pier’s own catering brand.”

Matthew Nicholson from Centerplate said: “We have thoroughly enjoyed working with Hastings Pier Charity to create a dining experience befitting of the spectacular pier and the Hastings area itself. As catering and events specialists it is important to us to work with the communities within which we operate and having heard of the potential for the pier to be granted additional funding if the food and beverage services were taken in-house, we felt that it was an option that we needed to support.”

Erika Holland, who used to run the popular and much-missed Gritti Palace on the pier, will take over as catering manager on July 1.

Erika has spent the last few years as a catering lecturer at Sussex Coast College.