Everything my Heart Desires — Dexter and Jones in Knutsford, Cheshire
It’s half an hour before Dexter and Jones, the actor and singer’s bar and bottleshop he owns with his wife Katy, opens and he greets me warmly as he takes a break from a growing list of tasks. More deliveries of cans and kegs arrive as we chat, and he lets a regular in early so he can show around a friend who’d heard about the “fantastic” beer selection on offer.
Immediately after speaking to me, Adam has a meeting with Sheffield’s Heist Brew Co. Then he has to get ready for a tap takeover to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Cornwall’s hop-forward favourites, Verdant. This is just a typical Thursday morning for him these days. By the evening, the Knutsford venue will be packed with punters. There’s a feeling it’s a bit like spinning plates at Dexter and Jones, but also that Adam is exactly where he wants to be.
“I’m exhausted a lot of the time but I love coming to work here,” he tells me, before adding a grin.
Photography by Matthew Curtis
You also don’t have to talk to Adam long to realise the notion of being a ‘celebrity’ doesn’t mean a whole lot to the 46-year-old these days. He’s perhaps best known for roles in popular soaps like Coronation Street and Hollyoaks or—if you’re old enough to remember—the 1999 UK top five hit, I Breathe Again.
Married to Adam for 10 years, Katy Rickitt is also a well-known fixture in the public eye, largely due to her stints as a presenter on Good Morning Britain. But since they took on the bar in 2019 their work life looks very different, particularly Adam’s. He’s at Dexters, as it is affectionately known by locals, 10 hours a day, six days a week..
“A lot of people don’t even know we own it,” Adam, who grew up right here in Knutsford, says. “To me, TV work is a job like any other, but the staff do have a laugh when people come in and ask me for a selfie!”
But how did a ‘celebrity’ couple come to take over this regionally-renowned boutique bar? For that, you’d have to go right back to when it first opened, in 2016.
“Katy kept saying she wanted to move somewhere in the countryside but where you can also get a gin and tonic,” Adam says. “So I said: ‘That’s Knutsford.’ I spent so long persuading her to move here. Eventually she agreed and the day we moved in was the day this place opened.”
Adam visited the bar for old time’s sake more than anything else, as the building used to be a restaurant called David’s Place where his family were best friends with the owners. Little did he know that those walls would retain that sense of home and community when he and Katy became the third customers through the door.
“Of the first two customers, one was a barrister waiting for his train and the other guy was doing some building work across the road,” Adam says. “They were chatting the whole time and I thought a place that can bring a brickie and a barrister together is the sort of place we want to be.”
“When we walked in, I went a bit fuzzy and emotional,” Katy adds. “The vibe has just always been so homely and comforting, almost like an adult sweet shop.”
That connection grew stronger every time they visited—to the point that Adam and Katy convinced the owners to give them a heads up if they ever considered selling. That call came in 2019, and they’ve never looked back.
“We were planning the ideal life together and the very next day the former owner, Karen (Murray), rang us and said she was putting the business up for sale and asking if we were serious about wanting to buy it,” Katy says. “The whole thing felt very fated.”
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Five years on, the venue feels even more embedded into the community, largely thanks to the pair’s unique way of doing things. This is reflected in the way Adam and Katy take every opportunity to build rapport with their guests. Visitors are made to feel more like friends than customers, while the couple’s warmth and openness with anyone they chat to is nothing short of disarming.
From DJ sets and dog shows to charity calendar launches and Christmas choirs, their host of events throughout the year also continue to bring together various sections of the community under one roof.
““The staff do have a laugh when people come in and ask me for a selfie!””
Dexters’ growing success has seen it double in size after they knocked through to a former salon next door in 2021, and now it’s become the sort of place where beer geeks brush shoulders with locals and dog lovers. Its welcoming nature and inclusivity has also seen it become a focal point for social groups like Knit and Natter, an informal knitting, stitching, and crochet club. Those who think of ‘craft beer’ bars as niche may quickly change their mind if they witness the bustling energy of Dexters on any given weekend, and the sheer breadth of drinkers it attracts.
“I think the recipe is doing a job you love,” adds Katy. “I mean who wouldn't want to spend Mondays with a bunch who are as talented at gin quaffing as they are at knitting, Tuesdays finding outfits for customers at a swap-shop, Wednesdays running a quiz and Thursdays having the best breweries take over our taps? We basically wanted something we could run and take pride in together.”
My own early experiences of Dexter and Jones mirror Adam and Katy’s. I remember visiting when it first opened and being completely won over by its intimacy, rustic charm and ever-changing beer selection. Back then, rows of thick wooden tables were pushed together to encourage drinkers to chat and share their evening, and it was one of the first beer venues in Knutsford to break the cask-led mould, showcasing instead the modern, impactful, hop-forward keg beer that was beginning to make waves in nearby Manchester because of new influential breweries like Track and Cloudwater.
It made the bar a surprising addition to a leafy Cheshire market town, best known regionally for being on the doorstep of one of the National Trust’s flagship sites, Tatton Park, and steeped in tradition. But something about it just clicked.
Carl Mullin lives in Pickmere, about five miles from the bar, and has been visiting every week now for a number of years.
“There’s a nice buzz about the place,” he says. “Adam is always looking for the next up-and-coming breweries but also supports local businesses such as Weekend Project (a recently established brand from the nearby Mobberley Brewhouse) which is so important. Every time I’ve taken someone to visit there, they’ve been in awe of the vast selection of beers. I’m proud to call it my local.”
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The way the venue has integrated into Knutsford life still feels very rewarding to Katy. She admits there was some cynicism when the couple went to the other side of the bar and entered a beer scene that can often take itself a little too seriously.
How would regulars respond to a couple who had become renowned for their exuberant synchronised dance routines on Instagram? They needn’t have worried. Now it’s hard to imagine Dexters without their playful energy on social media, and the bar has become something of an extension of their personalities. This is most felt at Halloween or during the festive season when the couple are always found dressed head-to-toe in costume and the venue is adorned with decorations.
It’s hard not to get swept up in the couple’s buoyancy and enthusiasm, but Katy reminds me it took some time, not to mention a global pandemic, to get to this point.
“Our biggest fear was that the regulars would worry we were going to ruin the place in some way,” she tells me. “To be honest, in that respect, lockdown was the best thing that could have happened to us. The whole rulebook went out the window. At one point I was delivering to 50 homes a day. I suppose we had a chance to show we were willing to really graft.”
The pandemic is also partly responsible for the dizzying selection of beers that Dexters boasts. Adam used that period of uncertainty to build direct relationships with independent breweries—banishing dependence on wholesalers and making his bottleshop much more of a curated experience.
“It’s a horrible thing to admit but Covid was the making of me in relation to this place,” Adam admits. “I wasn’t worldly wise with beer but nothing will educate you better than trying stuff. In 542 days, I only had Christmas Day off but it was the best learning experience.”
Now Adam has what he considers to be ‘possibly one of the biggest beer ranges’ in the North West, and is on first name terms with many of the country’s modern breweries.
“I love that side of it,” says Adam. “I’ve got nicknames for every person now. I’ve got huge respect for some of the bigger independent breweries because they’ve got to where they are because of the quality of what they produce. And also because they’re good people. In this industry, you stand or you fall by who you are as a person.”
The feeling is mutual as far as Chris Schofield, northern sales rep for Verdant, is concerned.
“It is a pleasure working closely with such enthusiastic people who live and breathe hospitality,” he tells me. “Adam, Katy, and the team are among the easiest, funniest, and enjoyable people we get to work with.”
Adam’s continuing mission now is to support the UK’s finest independent breweries and help some of the smallest start-ups to grow—as long as they can impress him first, that is.
Quality is the watchword while his tongue-in-cheek rule is “it’s not a democracy, it’s a dictatorship—if I like it, we sell it,” and with 600 different beers in stock at time of writing—which will rise to about a thousand by Christmas—he’s become a pretty influential man in the beer business to know.
““Who wouldn’t want to spend Mondays with a bunch who are as talented at gin quaffing as they are at knitting.””
One of Adam’s latest discoveries is Dark Element Brew Co in Caerphilly—with Dexter and Jones becoming one of the first venues to support the emerging microbrewery outside of Wales and buying in all of their beers since.
“They took a chance on us and it’s been so valuable in getting our name out to the brewing world. They are great people,” adds Tom Kendall, founder of Dark Element.
There are so many stories Adam could tell like this. His passion for the UK beer scene is infectious, and he’s pretty protective of it too. That’s why you won’t find many American imports at Dexters.
Part of that is Adam simply thinks the UK’s best beer is now as good, “if not beating” the US equivalents. But also “jumping on the bandwagon” with beer made more than 3,000 miles away also doesn’t feel right at a time when breweries a lot closer to home are fighting to survive.
“This is the time to be supporting UK beer,” says Adam. “It’s hard enough as it is with things like the duty laws and electricity prices. I struggle to think of an industry that has had more of a caning during the cost of living crisis.”
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Our chat lightens in tone somewhat when I recall Wealth of Geeks’ list of ‘top rated celebrity side hustles’ in the UK, of which Adam’s bar made the top five. It comes to mind because of the huge contrast between Adam’s passion for his business and the almost comical concept of Dexter and Jones being brushed off as a ‘side hustle’.
“It was quite cool. We came fourth,” Adam laughs. “But it isn’t a ‘side hustle’. I work six days a week on this place!”
He even admits it’s the TV work which is more the side hustle these days. He drives his agent mad by declining most TV jobs. Offers for Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing on Ice can wait—he’d “rather be here,” immersed in the beer scene and the community. But there is one show he’d drop everything for.
“If my agent had any hair he’d have pulled it out by now,” jokes Adam. “I turn down jobs all the time, but I do say to him: ‘put me down for MasterChef!’ I want to go on and bring beer into it. If you matched food to beer or did a brownie with something like an Omnipollo chocolate imperial stout it’d be epic.”
Essentially, Adam sees it as another opportunity to share his passion. Adam’s own ‘beer journey’ has taken him from his old favourite, Newcastle Brown Ale, to the first hop-forward indie beer he fell in love with, Drop Project’s Vanguard, where he was stunned by how you could get that sort of flavour from hops and the brewing process.
This year, the beer that’s blown Adam’s mind is Blueberry Cheesecake Scoop from Liverpool’s Azvex Brewery, while you’ll also find him banging the drum for breweries like Gravity Well, Heist, and Verdant.
“What I love about craft beer is it’s always changing and people are still enthusiastic about it,” Adam says. “I think we’re just very lucky to be somewhere that means so much to the community and, for me, it’s always been a massive passion project.”
