Unsung Heroes: Paul Gilks

Unsung Heroes
No. 17: Paul Gilks of the Brighton Sausage Co.
How come your sausages and sausage rolls are so amazing?
It’s the quality of the meat and the amount of meat that makes them taste good. We only use pork shoulder and back fat in the sausages, we don’t use scraps of bits and pieces. Sausage rolls normally have a lot more rusk added to them but we don’t do that.

Sausages have had a real resurgence from the old Wall’s days. Do you have to win people over to the idea of sausages?
Attitudes have changed in the last 10 years or so. People expect a little shop like ours to have decent meat products. We’ve been here four-and-a-half years now so I think people are aware of what we do.

What are the most popular sausages you sell?
The more weird and wonderful ones that we do tend to be the most requested ones. We do a pork and marmite sausage, and smoked bacon and maple syrup. The traditional breakfast sausages are the most popular otherwise.

Have you always liked sausages? How come you ended up with a sausage shop?
Me and my co-owner Dave Barr both worked with food, and sausages, a few years before, so we had a passion for it. We sort of did what we knew already, and thought it would work in Brighton as a nice little niche shop. If we did it right and were nice to people we thought we could get a following.

For crazy people who don’t like sausages, what else do you sell?
Our bacon’s very good, it’s traditionally cured. We also do some very good steak, we’ve got the room to hang it for a good 30 days to get some flavour into it. And we’ve got a well-stocked cheese counter too.

Words by Lydia Stockbridge
Photo by James Kendall