Britain’s Best Delis – Delilah Fine Foods, Nottingham

There’s no stopping Delilah Fine Foods founder Sangita Tryner when it comes to her favourite topic – food!

The entrepreneur (whose business turned 20 this year), fizzes with excitement on all things food and drink. For her one thing is clear – Delilah is not just a job, it’s almost an extra limb. She adores what she’s created.

A spark of an idea

Winding back the clock, Sangita was laying the foundations for what Delilah would become even before it was on the cards.

Working for Northern Foods, her accounts were brands such as M&S, helping them to create enticing new ready meals and prepared foods. “I had the privilege of taking buyers and product developers to places like China, to come up with some of the most amazing things. We had a lot of fun. But when it came to creating amazing products, cost got in the way,” she says.

There was, Sangita felt, a lot of red tape to wade through the industry. “I loved playing with the products day-in, day-out, coming up with fabulous ideas, it was such a pleasure, but I did start to feel a bit disenchanted. I needed to find somewhere that loved food and sells food how it’s meant to be eaten.”

A chance trip to Valvona & Crolla in Edinburgh stole her heart. “Twenty-five years ago they still had the ladders that slid over the shelves, and were climbing up and down, chucking things to each other, with all the banter. It was just phenomenal,” Sangita says. “I came back to Nottingham and thought there was a real gap in the market. I was so inspired I quit my job six months later and started planning Delilah.”

A new start

It took a while to find the right premises. “At that time, 2005, nobody wanted to lease their property to a first timer. It took me a year to find a place, and really, I was ready to go three months after quitting.”

Sangita managed to buy the lease from another business, laying down the foundations, ethos and mission of Delilah very early on. “I’d been to visit Villandry in London, and they had this little food bar with tasting boards. Back then, the idea was fairly new. I loved it – the fact you could teach people what food was and share it with them.”

This experience very much informed the beating heart of Delilah – focused around a small bar area with just nine seats in a 1,000sq ft space.

“I found I could cut cheese and cook a whole breakfast without moving very far,” Sangita laughs. “It was tiny. You walked in the door and you had olives (which people helped themselves to), low level fridges with the charcuterie in, an upright multideck full of cheese, shelves of condiments, and the food bar with the kitchen beyond that. We were making anything from a full gourmet breakfast to lots of platters, fondues, and we even used to have Raclette machines you could plug in over the bar.”

A huge number of regulars would find themselves perched at Delilah. “It was called the ‘Cheers’ bar of Nottingham,” Sangita recalls. “People would have to stand behind the bar waiting for others to leave to get a seat. It was a busy old place.”

Amazingly, all this was happening as Sangita’s husband tried to set up his own business, having been made redundant during the time she was making her plans. It was, she admits a tricky period, but also exciting for both of them.

Both of their endeavours grew, with Sangita able to take on a general manager, Nick, who she says was quintessential in the early days, during the two years he spent with her. “He came from Piccolino and was just really really enthused by proper foods, and he bought into Delilah’s ethos. I felt I could leave the business in safe hands.”

Sangita worked seven days a week until the birth of her first child, laughing that she was still doing paperwork in labour. Now that’s dedication!

Time to grow

The award-winning food hall, as we know it today, was shaped in 2012. “Our landlord wanted to put the rent up by something like £15-£20k. We couldn’t sustain that and, also, paying that much, we knew we couldn’t grow anymore. That last Christmas I saw people queueing out the door and we couldn’t get enough staff behind the counter to serve them fast enough. People were walking away. I just got to the point where I thought, ‘I’ve got to close this’. It wasn’t sustainable to stay another year.”

The hunt for Delilah 2.0 was on, but, as before, there were slim pickings thanks to a downturn in the market. “One day we walked past this massive, massive building and there was a for sale sign on it,” Sangita remembers. “I thought there was no way we could afford it, but I was desperate. It was the old HSBC bank, and the last part of it that was open. And it was five times the size of our other shop.”

Sangita and Richard were tentatively thrilled by the possibility of the place. “The opportunities were massive. It was three stories high. And banks looked after their properties, so it was still impressive, with high ceilings. I fell so in love, and we begged and borrowed to get it. It’s the best thing we ever did!”

The first few months were spent converting the downstairs banking hall, while work went on upstairs to create five two-bedroom flats. “It’s actually now our home,” Sangita reveals. “We got a bar put in, with 15 seats, and 70 covers in the restaurant, and some low-level seating too. We brought in a mezzanine. It’s just so much bigger. We’ve got something like 200 types of wines, 200 cheeses, and we’ve gone from eight to 21 members of staff.”

It’s clearly a winning formula, with Delilah Fine Foods l named Retailer of the Year at the Farm Shop & Deli Retailer Awards 2025. “That was overwhelming. I was so pleased for the staff. They do put their all in. It takes a lot to run this place. I say it’s like the inside of my brain – chaotic. If I think it will work on the shelf in my head, it’s there before they know it. A pallet will arrive and they’ll be like, ‘where will we put this?’.”

Standing out from the crowd

It’s Delilah’s staff, Sangita continues, that make the place. “I pay a lot of attention to training and finding the right people,” she says. “And that means we have so many regulars. We have one guy who was my first ever sale - £1.20 for an Americano (which I’ve still got). He still comes in to this day religiously because he wants to talk to us and find out about the latest things. We do regular food and wine evenings every six weeks or so and often it’s the same people. They’ll book well in advance so they don’t miss out!”

The food bar and cafe side of Delilah is another feather in the business’s cap, with the kitchen team using plenty of the ingredients and products available from within the food hall as their ‘starting point’, demonstrating how customers can use them at home. “That’s the purpose of every dish. The idea is to have at least three products in each one from the shelf. Delilah is like the shopping basket for them to get creative. They have free reign to try any products they want to us on the menu, or just for kicks on the staff dinner. I want everyone to try things and talk about them, because then they can relay more information to the customers. There’s not one of my staff who wouldn’t be able to tell you three products they love and why. That’s what makes us who we are!”

Two decades of great taste

To mark Delilah’s 20th anniversary, Sangita worked closely with brands in and around Nottingham and beyond to create 20 delicious own-label products. Not only was it huge fun, but it’s meant there are some extra special items to be found in store.

One of her favourites is the Brinjal Pickle, which she worked on with Maria at Hawkshead Relish. “Ludlow Farm Shop make our Chai Marmalade which is absolutely banging. We’ve got our own wines and ale, and an unusual one is our chocolate. It’s made with Gjetost cheese, blended into bars and truffles by a chocolatier in Leicester for me. Honestly it works amazingly well, with a few salt crystals in there for that sweet savoury kick. It’s pretty special. He also made us a Pedro Ximenez raisin-soaked bar. Oh, and one of our chefs is trained in gelato and makes all our gelato here. He used the soaked raisins for a rum and raisin version which is absolutely incredible!”

What makes a great deli?

Thing ‘big’ and ‘more, more, more’, says Sangita, who feels it’s better to have a huge range, than to offer customers a threadbare shopping experience. “You need plenty of products.” Going ‘big’ on range is especially important at the cheese counter, she adds. “When I first opened I thought I was going to have so much wastage, but it was having that much stock that kept people coming back!”

Sangita says another clincher is being able to demonstrate more knowledge than the people you’re talking to. “I always say to my guys they should be able to give two to three more sentences of knowledge on products than customers. That’s why it’s huge for us that they try things. Then they can tell customers about what they like, and that passion shows.”

Delilah Fine Foods’ best-sellers

1. Category-wise, people come in for our cheese and wine. Wine sales are definitely growing. People are always telling me nobody’s drinking anymore, but we sell and deliver a lot.

2. We sell a lot of olives. We used to put out six varieties for people to mix and match into pots, but we’ve taken that down to three and sales haven’t dipped.

3. We’ve very much tapped into the Asian market with all kinds of miso-based products. A favourite is All Dressed Up who we found last year at Speciality & Fine Food Fair. In the cafe we serve a prawn toast that’s quite unique, like a spiral, with their Miso & Sesame Dressing. Any time someone tastes it they buy it.

4. We had a tasting with My Burrito. That’s a sauce in a bag, where you put in your vegetables or protein, shake and cook. People have really been buying into that and it’s doing well for us.

5. Anything hot and spicy is great for us. We have a lady who makes chilli sauces like Miso BBQ and Miso Peanut Chilli – Gee & Gees. We started with three of her products but now we take eight of them. She’s really really creative and works so hard to get her brand out there.

Images: Dirty Tactics