News

The former Cheeky Monkeys soft play centre in Montrose has reopened under a brand new name.

The centre on George Street is now called Scallywags.

It is a second location for husband-and-wife team Alan Williamson and Moira Cooper, who opened their first soft play in Stonehaven last year.

Alan, 38, and Moira, 32, want to make visiting soft play centres a better experience for adults.

And Alan says that their integrated Old Salt Café is key to achieving this.

He said: One of our key focuses of the business is that the adults decide where the kids are going to go.

“It’s important to have a fun and safe place for the kids to go but it’s the adults who decide and it’s the adults who will sit here for an hour, two hours.

“We want to offer good coffee and great food.

“Our focus is really on our coffee, our food, our charros, our ice cream – so that when adults come here it’s not a bad place for them to come.

“As parents ourselves we know sometimes the thought of going and sitting in a soft play can be unappealing – sitting with rubbish coffee and rubbish food and screaming children.

“If we can say, ‘the kids are going to have fun but you can get a nice coffee, a nice hot chocolate’, that makes the experience a bit less painful for parents.

“We have got chicken goujons, chips, sandwiches and chunky bread.

“We also do churros – we make fresh churros on site fresh to order.

“There’s not many places here which are doing churros.

“We have an in-house cinnamon-sugar recipe which we coat them in and have nice dips like luxury white chocolate, milk chocolate and salted caramel.

“It’s quite an indulgent thing which is catered to adults.  It’s the adults who are going to think, ‘Oh, I quite fancy that’.

“We are parents ourselves and we would get something like that and then let the kids have a wee bite.”

Alan and Moira, who are from Stonehaven, have two children aged three and one.

They have increased the number of staff employed at the centre and plan to be open seven days a week, between 10am and 4pm.

The owners of Cheeky Monkeys announced earlier this year that the soft play would close after deciding it was time to “pass the baton”.

Scallywags opened for the first time on 14 March and received a “good turn-out” with people queuing to get inside.

Alan added: “It’s been mildly stressful but that’s to be expected.

“That’s why we wanted to open mid-week, so we are ironing things out for the weekend.”