Clickimin cafe poised to reopen in January

The cafe in the Clickimin Leisure Centre, which was forced to close in the summer, is to reopen in January, The Shetland Times has learned.

Seven jobs went when the Horizons Cafe stopped operating at the end of July. It had been losing £5,000 a month and with Shetland Recreational Trust under pressure to find savings across the board management was left with no option but to shut it down.

Now, however, it is set to resume operations under the new name of Da Muckle Cafe. It will be run as a franchise by the owners of the Great Wall, Alan and Natalie Ho, and offer a large but reasonably priced menu of hot and cold meals, snacks and drinks, including healthy options.

The cafe is the first of several publicly-funded eateries to go down this route following a review by the SIC’s head of economic develop­ment Neil Grant earlier this year. In the financial year 2008/09 council and charitable trust funded received cafes and restaurants received almost half a million pounds in subsidies.