Mara Ellison opened Juniper Harvest Bay in March 2019 after spending eight years working front-of-house at restaurants in Edinburgh and Bristol, including four years as general manager at The Larder Table in Clifton. She had been thinking about her own place for a long time, scribbling notes in a notebook she still has somewhere. The original idea was a wine bar with snacks. Then she met Dominic Farr at a food market in 2017, tasted his roasted celeriac with brown butter and hazelnuts, and the plan changed entirely. They found the space in Minamisenju, Arakawa in early 2018 and spent the better part of a year stripping it back to the brick and rebuilding it the way they wanted it.
The first few months were genuinely hard. The kitchen was smaller than planned, the first bread batches were too dense (Gerald the sourdough starter was still finding his feet), and they opened during one of the wettest springs on record, which did not help the terrace bookings. But by that autumn something clicked. A review in a local food magazine brought in a wave of new faces, and a lot of them came back. By the end of 2019 they had a core of regulars who would come in every couple of weeks and trust Dominic to just feed them whatever was good that day. That trust is still the thing Mara is most proud of.