Thyme Restaurant, high above Elbow Beach on the site of the old hotel staff club, opened in mid-April. Chef, food writer and television personality Joe Gibbons is the man in charge.Mr Gibbons became well known in the culinary world for his writing about food and restaurants for rg magazine and for hosting the television programme Cooking with Friends. And then — “I was largely retired,” he said, when — “This opportunity opened up. I had worked in and around restaurants, and written about them. Everyone wants to run their own restaurant, although it is a labour of love — you don’t do it for the money, you do it for the fun of it. You have to love food and have to love the industry — it is a tough business.”“Now, Thyme is under new management,” said Mr Gibbons, who works now closely with veteran chef Rene Maypa, a culinary artist who has worked in some of Bermuda’s best known kitchens for more than 28 years. “We were a three-person partnership and now the restaurant is under my sole proprietorship.”Being the sole proprietor is “an enormous challenge — working six days a week, four of which are double shifts.”Thyme is located in the Fritholme Estates condo complex on Cataract Hill, at The Club at Elbow Beach Properties; it is a cool, clean-lined retro-styled restaurant and lounge with the light beat of jazz ebbing the background. With winter looming there are plans to warm up the decor as well as the cuisine.“Elbow Beach Properties had envisioned a lounge and restaurant for the residents who live here,” he said, and pointing to a large swimming pool just outside the restaurant, added: “They wanted to create a vibe, an atmosphere.”Mr Gibbons explained: “It originally opened as a bar, and they didn’t do food. The concept didn’t work so well — so I came in, in January, and offered to take over and run it. I made some changes to the kitchen and now we are operating it as a cafe bistro.“A bistro is less structured — it’s a less formal style — and it’s a personal style.” He said in Europe a bistro would be a ‘mom and pop’ operation. “It would be run by a couple, typically — one in the front, and one in the back and a friend or a child on the floor.”Here, it is only a little more formal. “The recipes come from the chef or myself — so there should be a home feel about what we’re doing. Our customers should feel a personal connection to people who work in the place; that’s the bistro-type operation — that’s the personal connection. You greet people — you’re friends with them. Many of the customers we know, because it’s Bermuda.”Thyme emphasises salads and fresh foods on the constantly changing menu. “There is no deep fryer, so we can’t do French fries, so we have to focus on salads so we do a lot of grilled fish. We’ll do a burger with a salad or a Caesar salad.“We do have a couple of signature dishes and two or three specials. Our key ingredients are wahoo, tuna, chicken and sirloin. We’ll work those into sandwiches and salads, or for a main course for dinner. There’s always a lot of shrimp, lobster, scallops — we’ll work them into a pasta, or at night into sauces or rice, on an open face of puff pastry, for example.“We make all our own sauces, salads and vinaigrettes — our own Béchamel sauce, our own Café de Paris butter sauce. And we trim our own beef for cuts for dinner steaks.“Because we are small, we like to try different things — like chicken stuffed with feta and spinach, salmon en croûte on one of the nights, for example. We will do a beef Wellington. We might do a roast pork.“We will do these as a one-off. There might be something I put on tonight, and then I won’t put it back on for another two or three weeks. Or, if someone calls up and says — ‘There are six of us coming for dinner and we would like wahoo,’ because we are small, we can adjust.“As the weather cools down, we will move away from salads — the dishes we are going to be serving will be things like savoury and seafood pies, for example, and heavier soups, stews, one dish meals.”At lunch time, main courses run between $19 and $21. For dinner, a sirloin steak or a lobster will be between $27 and $28. Desserts are all freshly made by a “superb local baker” although Mr Gibbons would not give away any secrets. The choices range from strawberry shortcake, Black Forest cake, chocolate mousse and lemon custard merengue.“We have a small wine list, and we rotate our wines once every three months or so — we always have a sparkling one, a Pinot Gris, a Sauvignon Blanc, a Cabernet Sauvignon and feature one or two other varieties, like a Riesling, Chardonnay or Prosecco, and a Champagne — but it’s very limited.“These are not your average wines. We select our wines with our suppliers; we’ll do a little tasting. And we mix old and new world wines.“Because we are a lounge here you can come on a Thursday evening, or a Friday or a Saturday and have a glass of wine with us. We price our white wines all one price, and our reds all one price.“We will also make after dinner drinks and coffees — and some speciality coffees for the winter — we have half a dozen we are getting geared up to offer.”The kitchen closes at 9pm-930pm, and Thyme is open from Tuesday through Sunday, and for dinner on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Lunch runs from 11.30am to 2.30pm, and the restaurant opens for dinner at 5.30pm. The last order is at 9.15pm.