Couple behind Cambridge Street Collective reveal how Gordon Ramsay helped spark food hall empire
The helpful advice came in contrast to how he “battered them on camera”
The couple behind Sheffield’s Cambridge Street Collective shared how Gordon Ramsay had a hand in growing their food hall empire.
Two years on from the launch of Europe’s largest food hall, founders Matt Bigland and Nina Patel Bigland revealed their trials and tribulations in an interview with The Times.
Along with stories of their early money troubles as well as how they ”met on the first day of university in Sheffield” before getting together after Valentine’s Day, the duo shared the impact left by the one and only Chef Ramsay.
Their first endeavour in 2007, The Milestone gastropub, was featured on the Ramsay’s Best Restaurant television series where they admit he “battered them.”
“But off-camera he was really helpful and gave us very good advice about running it as a business.”
The boost from appearing on national airways “put bums on seats” and led the couple to open their second gastropub soon after.
Today, they are the brains behind the Blend family, owners of Cutlery Works in Neepsend and the cavernous Cambridge Street Collective, winner of the national British Street Food Awards’ Best Food Hall in both 2024 and 2025.
The couple also spoke about their ambitions in the early 2000s to make a nascent foodie scene in Sheffield.
They went so far as to buy a dilapidated pub in Kelham Island for The Milestone - long before “Sheffield’s trendiest district” was gentrified. It didn’t even have streetlights at the time.
Matt told The Times: “Sheffield was very much an industrial city, and with food it was ‘pile it high, sell it cheap’, and I found such inspiration in what these guys were doing with gastropubs, in that it was a really informal setting but it was amazing food.
“We thought, ‘We can do this.’”
Cambridge Street Collective is renowned for welcoming traders from around the world, giving people plenty of choice when it comes to cuisine with Mexican, Vietnamese and Chinese dishes all on offer along with burgers and a whole host of other tasty offerings.