The citizens of Yorkshire’s North Riding are noted for their modesty, so it is no surprise to discover that the shop on Pateley Bridge High Street calling itself The Oldest Sweet Shop in England is, indeed, the longest continually opened purveyor of aniseed balls, liquorice and sherbet flying saucers on Earth.

When it opened in 1827, George IV was King, the Duke of Wellington commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces and the country was running through prime ministers at a then unknown rate.

‘I don’t think of myself as owner so much as custodian,’ admits Ben Howie, a former agriculture student who fulfilled every child’s dream by buying his local sweet shop in 2021. ‘Everything in here has history attached. It’s a living, working museum. I grew up in nearby Knaresborough and came here as a youngster. My mother did, too, so I know the place the shop has in people’s lives and memories.’

The timing of the shop’s opening was propitious, because Britain was entering a golden age of confectionery. The world’s first branded sweet, the liquorice Pontefract cake, had been created 60 years earlier some 50 miles away. Toffee was invented in about 1800. In the 1820s, these sweetie-jar staples were joined by the mint humbug. With increased mechanisation and the abolition of punitive sugar taxes, an industry emerged.

In 1847, Fry’s of Bristol made the world’s first chocolate bar. Barley sugars, marshmallows and acid drops appeared on the shelves in the 1850s. A decade later, jelly babies (first sold under the disturbing name of ‘unclaimed babies’), coltsfoot rock and Victory V lozenges made their debuts.

Fry’s created the chocolate cream as its rival in York, Rowntrees, produced the first fruit pastille in 1881. Wine gums arrived in 1893. Yorkshire was the epicentre of the British Empire’s sweet trade and Pateley Bridge was well placed to enjoy the fruits of its invention.

'We sell all sorts, but the traditional hard-boiled sweets — pear drops, humbugs, cola cubes and rhubarb and custards — are by far our bestsellers,’ Howie notes. ‘I’ve sampled every sweet here. When I came here, there were old-fashioned items such as sweet peanuts that were popular with an older generation of locals, but of which I’d never even heard.’

By 1900, the sweet shop — selling chocolate, ‘aerated water’ and Pateley Bridge rock — had become a fixture of the High Street. There were bumps along the way, of course. The confectionery trade in Yorkshire suffered fallout from the infamous 1858 Bradford Sweet Poisonings, in which trader ‘Humbug Billy’ Hardaker caused the deaths of more than 20 people after adulterating his boiled sweets with what he thought was gypsum (a cheap sugar substitute), but which turned out to be arsenic.

International events have also disrupted business at the sweet shop. Rationing during the Second World War limited Britons to 2oz of sweets a week. The relaxation of the ration, in 1949, caused troubles of its own. The Pateley Bridge & Nidderdale Herald reported that the shelves of the sweet shop were empty due to ‘bulk buying, mainly by adults’ and scolded that the ration might not be repealed fully if people didn’t get a grip and ‘show some restraint’.

As it was, sweet rationing stayed in place until 1953. It was at the start of the new millennium, when Keith and Gloria Tordoff took over what was then called The Olde Sweet Shop, that its days in the international spotlight truly began. Keith Tordoff is a former police detective with a gift for entrepreneurship (he was awarded an MBE for business services in 2018).

The appearance of the shop in Julian Calder and Alastair Bruce’s 2005 book The Oldest: In Celebration of Britain’s Living History sparked regional and national interest. Then, in 2014, the newly named Oldest Sweet Shop in England was crowned by Guinness World Records the world’s oldest confectioner, creating further headlines.

Today, customers come from as far afield as Australia and China and the tiny shop — no bigger than the average sitting room — is often filled by coach parties from Germany and the Netherlands. They find an interior that would be recognisable to its Edwardian patrons.

There is a long, wooden counter polished to a sheen by thousands of elbows, dark wooden shelves lined with hundreds of sweet jars, an ancient cash register that rattles up totals with a sound like a tommy gun and weighing scales that might have been used by Mrs Beeton.

There’s an antique vending machine that once dispensed Beech-Nut chewing gum, stacks of striped paper bags, tin signs advertising Ovaltine and Velvet Lady ice cream, wicker baskets filled with packets of cinder toffee and candy walking sticks hanging from a string above the fireplace.

Reputedly, the building, which dates from 1661, is haunted by a ghostly pipe-smoker whose spectral tobacco smoke still wafts from open doorways, although how you would smell it over the jolly scent of pear drops and Turkish delight is anybody’s guess.

The sweet shop’s array of what Yorkshire folk call ‘goodies’ is immense and sometimes bewildering. ‘We often get people standing trying to decide between raspberry bonbons and Black Jacks for 20 minutes,’ notes Howie. Not that he minds. ‘Sweets conjure up a lot of memories. It’s great to hear people’s stories.’

Despite financial crises since he took over, including the pandemic, Howie reports that the appetite for sweets has not diminished. In fact, it’s increased. In tough times, people find comfort in sweets, he explains: ‘Whatever’s happening, most can afford to buy a quarter-pound of Midget Gems or sherbet lemons. For a small amount of money, the enjoyment, well, it can last a lifetime.’

All this bodes well for the future. ‘It’s my hope that people will still be coming in 200 years’ time, to buy a bag of dolly mixtures and have a chat,’ avers the shopkeeper.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Courgette carpaccio with burrata

Ingredients

• As many courgettes as you like (and their flowers)
• One ball of burrata
• Olive oil
• One lemon
• Sea salt
• A handful of basil

Method

Shave a small courgette into delicate, thin ribbons using a vegetable peeler and season with sea salt and a squeeze of lemon. Set aside to soften.

Set a burrata ball on a serving plate, gently tearing open the centre so the cream spills and then drape it with the courgette ribbons and scatter with torn courgette flowers (stamens removed).

Add basil leaves, a drizzle of olive oil, a squeeze of lemon and seasoning. Serve immediately.

Courgette-flower galette with brown-butter ricotta

Ingredients (serves 4–6)

For the dough

• 125g unsalted butter, cubed and cold
• 150g plain flour
• 50g rye or wholemeal flour
• 1tspn sea salt
• 1tspn apple cider vinegar
• 2–3tbspn cold water

For the filling

• 30g unsalted butter
• 1 clove garlic, grated
• 2 anchovy fillets, mashed
• 150g ricotta, drained
• 50g Parmesan, finely grated
• 1 lemon, zest of
• 8 courgette flowers
• 3 small courgettes, green and yellow ones, ideally
• 1 egg, beaten
• Fresh basil
• 30g pine nuts, lightly toasted
• Bottarga cured fish roe, available online (optional)

Method

With your fingertips, rub the butter into the flours and salt until the mix resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Add the vinegar, plus cold water as needed, and gradually bring the dough together. Flatten into a disc, wrap with clingfilm and chill for an hour.

To make the filling, brown the butter in a pan over a medium heat until brown flecks appear. Remove from the heat and add the garlic and anchovies, letting them melt in the heat. Cool to room temperature and beat in the ricotta, Parmesan and lemon zest. Season with pepper, but taste to see if salt is needed.

Open four of the courgette flowers and remove the stamens before piping a little ricotta mix into each. Set aside.

Preheat your oven to 180˚C fan/200˚C/400˚F/gas mark 6. 5 Take the dough out of the fridge and roll it out to the thickness of a £1 coin (about 3mm). Roll it to 30cm (12in) diameter and transfer to a lined baking sheet.

Spread the rest of the ricotta mix onto the dough, leaving a 4cm (1½in) border. Finely slice or use a mandolin to slice the courgettes into coins and arrange these in a shingled spiral design. Nestle the stuffed flowers into the spiral and fan the unstuffed flowers in between them. Fold in the dough edge and pleat it all around. Brush the edges with egg and bake for 35 minutes or until the edges are golden and the base crisp.

Serve the warm galette scattered with basil and toasted pine nuts, and grate over more lemon zest and the bottarga, if using. A lightly dressed salad will complete this summery lunch.

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Our collective tastebuds have never been more a-tingle. The traditional world of British condiments has become decidedly heated in recent times, with hot sauces blazing their way into the mainstream like never before. Adding a fiery pep to our food has turned into something of an obsession — be it soups, sandwiches, steaks, salads or scrambled eggs — and our kitchens now regularly see chilli-laced bottles standing shoulder to shoulder with old stalwarts such as ketchup and brown sauce.

This rise in popularity is more than anecdotal. Waitrose reported a 55% jump in hot-sauce sales earlier this decade; Tesco revealed in mid 2025 that its customers had purchased an additional 2.5 million bottles of the stuff over the past 12 months; and almost every farmer’s market worth its salt (or should that be spice?) now features artisan hot-sauce producers.

Where has this enthusiasm come from? Those in the know point to everything from the effects of the pandemic lockdowns — basic sauces being relatively easy to make at home — to an ever-growing interest in different global flavours. Another factor is the simple, colourful pleasure of growing your own chillis, a joy requiring little more than a gardener’s eye and a south-facing windowsill.

The sauces themselves can be addictive, too: scientific studies suggest that consuming chillis tricks our brains into releasing endorphins to counteract the ‘burn’ of the heat. None of this would hold as much weight, of course, if it wasn’t for the fact that hot sauces can elevate a dish like little else. They now come in such a dizzying array of different strengths and varieties that the best of them have heat and flavour profiles that please the palate to delicious, and well-balanced, effect.

Craft chilli growers and hot-sauce producers are now dotted all over the UK. We speak to five British makers of hot sauce to hear how and why they got started, as well as what makes their piquant products very much worth a dollop or two on your plate.

Sheldrake & Sheldrake, Aberdeenshire

When chef and fermentation aficionado Jonathan Hope met brothers Cosmo and Merlin Sheldrake — a multi-instrumentalist musician and a microbiologist, respectively— in 2018 with a view to collaborating on a condiment, the results were always going to be out of the ordinary. The process of finalising a recipe at Sheldrake & Sheldrake, however, was not quick.

‘The Sheldrakes had always made one at Christmas to give to family and friends and they wondered if it was possible to turn that into a business,’ recalls Hope. ‘This conversation went on for about 18 months. They’re very detailed, so it developed at a glacial pace, but then we got it right.’

The end result takes the Sheldrake family recipe and combines it with koji — an ancient fermented food made by introducing a specific fungus to cooked rice — to produce a thick, umami-rich sauce. The brothers are renowned mycologists (‘they’re presently on field work digging for mushrooms in Nepal,’ explains Hope, so the approach seems fitting. ‘It’s essentially like a textured, hot, soy sauce,’ he continues. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone else doing it this way.’

Hope makes the sauce from his base in Aberdeenshire, using largely organic ingredients from places as diverse as Scotland, Galicia, Japan and Mexico.

How should the sauce be enjoyed? ‘The thing I do most often is put it on eggs, whether they’re poached, scrambled or fried,’ reveals Hope. ‘Second to that is making chipotle mayonnaise. I take a tablespoon of our hot sauce, whip it through with a dollop of mayonnaise and put it on roast potatoes.’

Great Scott Hot Sauce, Cornwall

‘To be honest with you, I put it on absolutely everything apart from a roast dinner,’ laughs Freya Scott. When she and partner Joseph Love went travelling to Mexico and Central America in 2016, they weren’t expecting to come back with a business idea. Then serendipity stepped in.

‘In Mexico, we noticed that everywhere made their own amazing hot sauces,’ recalls Scott. ‘We started keeping a diary of the ones we’d tried at different restaurants, then we visited a small hot-sauce factory in Belize, which was a very cool set-up.’ Back home in London, they started experimenting with making their own.

A move to Falmouth in Cornwall followed and, after striking up a relationship with a local chilli farm, they began selling hot sauces at markets and food festivals around the region. Scott and Love now produce 10 different hot sauces as Great Scott Hot Sauce using Cornish chillis, ranging from milder choices such as Apple or Gooseberry & Serrano to ‘not for the faint-hearted’ options, such as the Black Garlic & Balsamic Reaper.

Pairing a chilli with ingredients that complement it needs careful thought. ‘It really helps if you try the chillis raw,’ explains Love. ‘It’s like wine tasting, there are background notes: some chillis have more of a stone-fruit flavour, others are more citrussy or have an immediate peppery harshness to them. Balance is key.’

Legendary Sauce Co, Cumbria

When the pandemic forced Richard and Sarah Gore to close permanently their café in the Yorkshire Dales, they needed a fresh outlet for their culinary skills. ‘I’d always been really interested in chilli sauce and tinkered with it,’ says Richard. ‘I did a couple of flavours and they went down very well, so we took it from there.’

A few years — and a move to Cumbria — later, the small-batch sauces they produce have already garnered two Great Taste awards and eight prizes at the National Chilli Awards, with flavours ranging from Pineapple Scotch Bonnet to Blueberry Armageddon.

The name they gave to their start-up business, Legendary Sauce Co, is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Impressively, Gore still makes all these sauces from scratch in his kitchen at home in Carlisle. ‘A batch of 200 bottles will generally take a full day,’ he explains. ‘That’s an hour or so of prep work, three to four hours of cooking, then the same again to bottle and label it all. Then I have to give the air some time to settle for a few days.’

The key to finding the right flavour profile? ‘You’ve got to be able to taste the chilli. That’s the important part. You’re not just trying to blow people’s heads off,’ he smiles, ‘although that’s a good byproduct.’

South Devon Chilli Farm, Devon

‘Most people aren’t looking for really, really hot sauces,’ believes Amrit Madhoo. ‘The average person wants something to add some zing to their tacos or chili con carne. If you reach for a generic supermarket chilli sauce, it’ll just taste very vinegary, but a good one allows you to add that spike of heat without altering the dish’s core flavour.’

He and his wife, Jenny, took over the long-standing South Devon Chilli Farm, a few miles inland from Salcombe, in 2022. Since then, they’ve overseen a roll-out of renewable energy across the farm and Madhoo has appeared on Gardeners’ World and James Martin’s Saturday Morning. The farm is a large-scale operation. ‘We’ve got eight crop tunnels, each of which is about 50 yards long,’ notes Madhoo.

‘We’re growing about 3,500 chilli plants overall — they grow directly in the ground and we’re harvesting about 40 varieties each year. They differ in their spiciness, their style and their heat. We’re on a nice south-facing slope, but the main challenge is getting the seedlings ready to be planted at the start of the season — about May time.’ The chillis go into a range of fiery jams, chocolates and some 17 different sauces, including the ‘truly evil’ Green Demon sauce, featuring unripened ghost, reaper and scorpion chilli varieties.

Big Ginger Sauce Co, Surrey

Peter Bennison can trace his obsession with spicy food back to his schooldays. ‘My best friend was Pakistani. Whenever I was at his house, his mum always brought out these incredible foods — I was instantly hooked.’ Fast forward a few decades to the pan-demic and Bennison, by now a fan of making his own heat-laden dishes, occupied his time by chilli-growing.

It bore fruit, in more ways than one. ‘I ended up with about 30kg of chillis in my freezer, thinking, "What on earth am I going to do with them?"’ The answer was experimenting with small-batch hot sauces. Feedback was not only effusive, but sustained. Therefore, after leaving a finance job in 2023, he founded Big Ginger Sauce Co.

His five sauces already have seven Great Taste stars and several National Chilli awards between them. Based in Pirbright, Surrey, Bennison now sources all his chillis from his local green-grocer, who has ready access to the London fruit and vegetable markets.

‘You’d be surprised what you can get,’ he says. ‘Even some of the more exotic varieties are readily available.’ Although he produced more than 20,000 bottles in 2025, the cooking remains his own work. ‘It’s only me,’ he admits. ‘Me, a big pot and a big stove. I love the creativity of it.’

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on July 8, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Depending on how you measure it, Britain has somewhere between 7,000 and 11,000 miles of coastline (the exact figure is surprisingly hard to define with precision due to a curious phenomenon known as the coastline paradox).

That’s more than France, Italy, Spain or Denmark; amazingly, only the European coastlines of Norway and Greece are longer, and that’s largely because of all those never-ending islands.

With so much coast, it’s not really surprising there’s a smörgåsbord of places to dine along the seashore, from beachside cafés to old harbourfront pubs and Michelin-starred seafood bistros.

We’ve chosen 15 of our favourite eateries around the UK here; a mix of well-known and out-of-the-way. Some we’ve selected for their chefs or the quality of their produce, and others for their settings, with views of craggy cliffs, coves or harbours.

Argoe in Newlyn, Cornwall

Cornwall has no shortage of top seaside restaurants, but this little diner down in the rough-and-ready fishing port of Newlyn is a locals’ tip. It’s lodged in an old whitewashed fish-packing warehouse, opposite the harbour where dayboats land their catch, so the fish couldn’t get fresher, and chef Rich Adams keeps things simple, allowing the catch to speak for itself.

£££ | Mains £50-68

The Seahorse in Dartmouth, Devon

Devon has shoals of seaside restaurants, but the Seahorse in Dartmouth is a stalwart. Now run by Ben Tonks (son of Mitch, the original chef-patron, and Rockfish founder), it’s in a pink building overlooking the quay. Have a pre-dinner drink in Joe’s Bar, then sit down for whatever has flopped in from the Brixham Fish Market that day — perhaps a whole Dover sole, turbot or John Dory, with Italian-inspired flavours. At £35 for three courses, the lunch menu is great value.

££ | Three-course lunch menu, £35; dinner menu, £60

Sandro’s in Lyme Regis, Dorset

An under-the-radar find, run by the titular chef (full name Alessandro Strillozzi), who’s returned to his roots at the same premises his mum and dad ran two decades ago. Sandro’s CV includes River Cottage, the Gaff in Abergavenny and three years as head chef at The Walnut Tree Inn, so he knows his seafood stuff, and the menu showcases his Italian heritage. His partner Vicky runs front-of-house. The location in cobbled Lyme Regis is lovely, but there are only 16 covers, so bookings are essential.

££ | Mains £27-30

The Grain Store in Weybourne, Norfolk

Foodie pitstops abound along the Norfolk coast and this restaurant at the Maltings Hotel in Weybourne deserves a detour. The focus is on sharing — small plates of Brancaster Staithe smoked salmon, Malting’s fried chicken with coriander or a deliciously crispy asparagus, goat’s curd and black garlic tart. Alternatively, splash out on a platter of lobster tail, crab, oysters, rollmops, prawns and pickled cockles. The setting in an old flint barn, with exposed brick and steel beams, adds atmosphere.

££ | Three-course lunch menu, £33; mains £24-36

The Suffolk in Aldeburgh, Suffolk

There’s something quintessentially English about Aldeburgh, with its shingly beach, colourful houses and higgledy-piggledy streets: Benjamin Britten called it home for almost 30 years. The seafront Suffolk slots right in, serving classy seafood a pebble’s throw from the beach. Formerly a pub, it’s been prettied up with banquettes, parquet and willowy lampshades. Standout dishes: lobster and chips, herring on toast, smoked mackerel rillettes or a whole brill to share.

££ | Mains £22-26

Whitstable Oyster Company in Whitstable, Kent

Never mind Margate: for oysters, head east to Whitstable and snag a table at this red-brick beauty, which sheds its bivalves from the beds opposite. The oysters are the stars, of course — served plain with a dash of lemon, dressed up with wild garlic butter or black truffle, or spiced with chimichurri — or you could go for Kentish scallops or mussels, or a whole cracked crab. For drinks, try a local Gusbourne wine, or an ‘oyster shooter’ with bloody mary or black stout.

£££ | Mains £32-59

Beach House in Oxwich, Glamorgan

Hywel Griffith is a Welsh boy through and through — from Bethesda in Gwynedd — and his Michelin-starred restaurant beside Oxwich Bay champions the best his home nation has to offer: Gower saltmarsh lamb, Swansea Bay seafood, Middle White Pork from Myrddin Heritage in Carmarthenshire, biodynamic wines from Monmouth’s Ancre Hill Estate. His signature bara brith soufflé is a wonder. Also worth visiting is Lan Y Môr, Hywel’s new venture at Coppet Hall Beach in Saundersfoot, which he runs with Gerwyn ‘Gez’ Jones.

£££ | Three-course lunch menu, £78; six-course tasting menu, £122

The Potted Lobster in Abersoch, Pwllheli

This cute spot is just the ticket for a Welsh seaside lunch: simple, tasty seafood in Abersoch on the Llyn Peninsula. Tuck into big bowls of moules marinières, crispy calamari or the house special potted fish platter (lobster, shrimp, crab and crayfish): you can’t really go wrong here. On a sunny day, the front terrace almost has the feel of a Provençal bistro. There’s a second outpost in Bamburgh, Northumberland.

££ | Mains £12-30

Stark in East Mersea, Essex

With its six-course set menu, evening-only opening and resolute refusal to cater to dietary requirements, Ben Crittenden’s cultish restaurant on the Essex island of East Mersea won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s an experience to be savoured if you can put up with the strictures. It’s open for dinner from Wednesday to Sunday: check tide times if you’re driving, as the road to the mainland is sometimes submerged.

£££ | Six-course tasting menu, £100

Lury in Hastings, East Sussex

Hastings hasn’t quite got Brighton’s culinary cachet, but it’s getting there — as evidenced by Jack Lury’s lauded little restaurant, where the young chef explores his Sri Lankan heritage with a cheffy showcase of emulsions, powders, foams, gels, hits of subtle spice and sour notes. The space is tiny — a maximum of 10 covers — so it feels more like a chef’s table than a restaurant.

£££ | Tasting menu, £90-100

The Hut at Colwell Bay, Isle of Wight

Unless you’re a regular to the Isle of Wight, you might have missed this chilled cafe near Ventnor, but it’s popular with locals who come here for morning coffee, laid-back lunches and suppers, and late night cocktails. It caters for all eventualities: go big with a surf-and-turf to share, or stay small with a selection of taster plates for the table. The food here is unfussy, and in summer, the patio is the place to be.

££ | Mains £20-48

Riley’s Fish Shop in Tynemouth, Tyne & Wear

Adam Riley opened his original fish shack on King Edwards Bay a decade ago, and he’s now expanded with this upmarket fishmonger in Tynemouth village. The open counter is stocked with catch from the North Shields fish market, five minutes down the road, and you can watch the chefs at work, or pick up preparation tips while they make your lunch. By evening, the shop becomes a bit more like a bistro, and the menu gets a little fancier.

££ | Mains £20-40

Seafood Ristorante in St Andrews, Fife

Beach views don’t get better than here, a statement of glass-and-steel beside St Andrews Bay. It’s the chicest place for a seafood supper in town, and a favourite for graduation celebrations: Orkney Scallops, Shetland crab, Aberdeen smoked salmon, North Sea turbot. While it’s not cheap, the view is worth the price-tag on its own.

£££ | Lunch menu £50; dinner menu £105

The Pierhouse in Port Appin, Argyll

Hunkered on the banks of Loch Linnhe, framed by pine forest and the Morvern hills, the Pierhouse is one of the best small boutique hotels on the Scottish west coast. Its restaurant is a belter. Chef Michael Leathley is from Newcastle, but his food shines with Scottish flavours, whether it’s an Aberdeen Angus steak, langoustines, mussels and lobsters harvested from Loch Linnhe and Loch Etive, or oysters from Loch Creran. The whisky menu alone is four pages long.

££ | Mains £22-34

Cafe Canna on Isle of Canna, Inner Hebrides

This beachside restaurant requires a pilgrimage, on a Hebridean island a two-and-a-half-hour-long ferry ride from Mallaig. Spend an hour or two hiking round the seaweed-strewn shore, then head here for hearty, honest grub: big bowls of Arisaig mussels, Canna-caught crab langoustines served in baguettes, or homemade mackerel slathered on thick-cut toast. The CalMac ferry only runs five days a week.

£ | Mains £15-25

It would be a stretch to call Chez Wong a restaurant. Situated in Puebla Nuevo, one of the less salubrious parts of Lima, the capital of Peru, it’s little more than a sitting room with a few random tables, hidden behind a nondescript door. There’s no menu, wine list or waiters, only chef proprietor Javier Wong, a small, brusque Chinese-Peruvian man, armed with knife and chopping board. Entry is strictly by reservation (no walk-ins here) and the place is only open for lunch.

Wong serves just two things. A stir fry, which is decent enough, and ceviche, raw fish ‘cooked’ in lime juice, the national dish of Peru and the real reason for my visit. His is said to be one of the best on Earth, and the dozens of awards and accolades that plaster the walls seem to wholeheartedly agree.

Freshness is everything: the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. This is no place for frozen fish, nor specimens even a moment past their prime. Before the days of mass refrigeration, ceviche was not even traditionally eaten after lunch. Wong still goes to the market early every morning, choosing only the firmest, fleshiest and most bright-eyed of specimens.

Once back at Chez Wong, he gets to work, slicing red onion before filleting the fish (which are vast) with the precision of a neurosurgeon and cutting them into hearty chunks. Some cooked octopus is added, alongside a fistful of salt and a flurry of black pepper. Freshly squeezed lime juice next, rivers of the stuff. One good stir and the dish is ready to eat. Aji chillis, fierce and fruity, come chopped on a plate by its side.

Dear God it’s good, bracingly pure and startlingly clean, as if you’re supping on the very soul of the sole. This is high-octane eating at its finest, each mouthful a heady riot of citrus zing and chilli heat. The fish, however, is very much the star, its delicate, almost winsome texture in marked contrast to the muscular chew of the cephalopod. At the bottom of the bowl is a milky puddle of ‘leche de tigre’ (or tiger’s milk), containing the essence of the dish. It’s said to work wonders with hangovers. Wong’s ceviche may be minimalist, but it’s also a bona-fide masterpiece.

Lima is a magnificent place for those craving ceviche and you’ll find everything from the quick hit of the street-cart classic, guzzled on the hoof, to the elegantly heady highs of Maido, where Nikkei (or Peruvian-Japanese fusion, made famous by Nobu Matsuhisa) cuisine reaches its shimmering peak: ceviche served with dashi, ginger and shoyu, a masterclass in subtle restraint. You’ll also find tiraditos, a close relative, for which the fish is cut sashimi style, rather than cubed.

For those after something a little more baroque, there’s chef Gastón Acurio’s Criollo at La Mar in Miraflores, where flounder is tumbled with tiny shards of crisp calamari. And don’t miss the sole tiradito with sea urchin at El Mercado, dark and thrillingly dangerous.

Although the Peruvians may have perfected the dish, they didn’t necessarily invent it. Limes were only introduced by the Spanish conquistadors in the 15th and 16th centuries, meaning earlier versions used alternative acidic ingredients. Two millennia back, the Moche people of present-day Ecuador and Peru ‘cooked’ their fish in tumbo (or banana passion fruit) juice, whereas the Incas, a little later, used chicha, a fermented maize drink.

The Polynesians have their own cured-fish tradition, best seen in poisson cru, and I’ve eaten a dish called kinilaw in the Philippines, raw fish dipped in vinegar — very good it was, too. Yet every Latin American country with a Pacific coastline, from Mexico to Chile, Colombia to Ecuador, has its own take on ceviche and usually also claims it as its own.

One of the very finest I’ve ever eaten, up there with Wong’s, is at El Guero, a small and very famous seafood stand in Ensenada, Mexico. Its sea-urchin ceviche is served on a crisp tostada and will blow your mind. Everything else is pretty magnificent, too. You’ll also find agua-chile, or ‘chilli water’ across Mexico, a close cousin to ceviche, where raw prawns meet lime juice, onions, avocado and chilte-pín chillis for a dish with both kick and bite.

As for the fish, I prefer firm white flesh to the oily varieties, usually bream, bass or sole, although trout and tuna work, too, alongside clams, octopus, prawn and lobster. Do feel free to add whatever you want, from tomatoes and coriander, to deep-fried onion and cucumber. Simply seek out the very freshest fish and never leave it in the lime juice for more than 15 minutes. Too long and the fish firms up, becoming tough, woolly and dull — which is, of course, to totally and utterly miss the whole damned point.

Classic ceviche

Like Chef Wong’s recipe, this is the most simple of ceviches. Add chillis to taste. It’s hard to get hold of Peruvian aji over here, so substitute either three jalapeños (not too hot) or one scotch bonnet (fierce and fruity). Traditionally served with boiled corn — Peru has more than 50 varieties — and sweet potato, you can also use tortilla chips or tostadas.

Ingredients

Serves 4

1kg sole, bream or any other white fish, filleted, skinned and pin-boned

Juice of two fat juicy limes

3 jalapeño chillis, or 1 habanero, finely chopped (remove seeds and white for less heat)

1 red onion, finely sliced

Big pinch of sea salt

Big handful of chopped coriander

4 soft tortillas, fried until crisp (optional), to serve

Method

Slice the fish into long strips, then cut into 2cm (1in) dice.

Put in a bowl, mix with the lime juice and leave for 5–10 minutes.

Gently mix the chillis, onion and coriander, as well as the salt.

Serve alone or with fried tortillas

There's a Bordeaux rule of thumb that years ending in five turn out great. This is by no means infallible: 1965 was one of the most disastrous vintages of the late 20th century. However, when you consider the legendary 1945, then add 1975 (uneven, but classic in parts), 1985 (precocious and lovely), 1995 (firm and fine), 2005 (magnificent across the board) and 2015 (ripe and forward), the theory, which has no scientific basis, seems worth entertaining.

What’s in no doubt is that 2025 is another very fine ‘five’ vintage in Bordeaux. Could it be even more than that — a vintage that for once, and for its own special and unique reasons, justifies the torrents of hype that gush out from wine merchants some six months after the harvest, as they send out their en primeur offers for wines that are still in barrel and will be bottled in the spring or summer of 2027?

The en primeur system has not had a good press in recent years. The case against it is pretty compelling: this seems to be a system that favours the seller (the châteaux) more than the buyer. For the châteaux, there’s an obvious attraction in getting money up front for a wine that’s a long way off being ready to drink or even bottled. For the consumer, there is a number of risks: for a start, the development of very young wines is always somewhat unpredictable. Wines that present attractively in extreme youth may go into their shells and never quite emerge, as with 1928 and 1975.

Secondly, how can you be sure the sample that you (or your merchant) taste is an honest reflection of the final bottled blend, rather than a particularly well- favoured component? Thirdly, there is always the risk that the merchant you buy from may go out of business, leaving you with a problematic claim on some of the contents of a barrel. Fourthly, and probably most importantly, you may find that you can acquire exactly the same wine, at a lower or not higher price, several years down the line, as has occurred with recent good, but large vintages, such as 2019, 2020 and 2022. Your en primeur purchase could turn out to be the opposite of a bargain.

Why, in this case, therefore, is your wine correspondent proposing a reverse ferret? There are a number of reasons. To answer the question about whether the vintage is truly special, a recent tasting of 2025s in London convinced me that this latest ‘Bordeaux 5’ is exceptional. To put it less formally, I fell in love with the vintage. I can’t remember a year that had quite these qualities: a sort of delectable spring in the step combined with ripeness, a perfect dancing balance.

What is special about the 2025 vintage is the combination of great ripeness — this was one of the hottest summers of recent times — with finesse. Alcohol levels are lower than in some recent warm vintages — often about 13.5%, as opposed to 14% or 14.5%. Although there was extreme heat in August, with 10 days above 35˚C, nights were quite cool and the rain that came in September was generally (if not universally) welcome. Yields were also low, in some cases dramatically so. This evokes comparison with 1961, that greatest of all vintages, and also the thought that these wines will not be as easy to come by in the future as those from bigger vintages.

This is a Mozart, not a Beethoven vintage. The wines are already attractive; tannins on the whole are not massive and forbidding. For the mature en primeur purchaser, there is hope that these wines will be ready to imbibe before the hopeful drinker passes the point of no return. Finally, in a time of such global gloom, a beautiful vintage surely gives cause for innocent celebration and enjoyment. My favourite poet Horace, who enjoined us to savour the day, would surely have given the thumbs-up.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

For a Victorian hostess, serving ice cream at dinner, turned out from thrilling moulds shaped as beehives, asparagus or swans, was the 19th-century equivalent of showing off on Instagram, ‘afford[ing] the cook the opportunity of making some of the prettiest dishes it is possible to send to the table’.

Leading the charge was the original cookery influencer, Agnes Bertha Marshall (1852–1905), an English culinary entrepreneur who became a leading cookery writer, producing two of the most important books on ice cream — Ices Plain and Fancy: The Book of Ices (1885) and Fancy Ices (1894) — earning herself the title ‘Queen of Ices’.

Born in Haggerston in the East End of London, Marshall was an illegitimate child, raised by her grandmother in Walthamstow. Little is known about her early life — or where exactly she learnt to cook — but it is believed that she trained in Paris, detailing in the preface to her 1887 tome Mrs A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book that her recipes are ‘the result of practical training and lessons, through several years, from leading English and Continental authorities, as well as a home experience earlier than I can well recall’.

Her promotional tour for this title saw her cook elaborate luncheons in front of large audiences across the country, securing her reputation as a household name. In 1878, she married Alfred William Marshall, a union that allowed her to take advantage of the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act. In 1883, she bought a plot of land and opened the Marshall School of Cookery at No 67, Mortimer Street, London.

In 1885, Marshall patented a device that could freeze a pint of ice cream. The hand-cranked machine promised ‘smooth and delicious Ice produced in 3 minutes’. She also toyed with using liquefied gas as an ultra-rapid freezing agent — a century before Heston Blumenthal popularised the liquid-nitrogen technique in the pursuit of molecular gastronomy. When he called the ‘Queen of Ices’ one of Britain’s ‘greatest culinary pioneers’, he wasn’t exaggerating

As well as teaching Londoners how to cook, she ran a domestic staff agency business, sold domestic and cooking equipment and campaigned for better standards of food hygiene. Her 1888 recipe for ‘cornets with cream’ would put edible ice-cream cones on the culinary map, using finely chopped almonds, fine flour, caster sugar, one egg, a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of orange flower water, mixed to a paste.

Once baked, cornet shapes were quickly cut out of the paste and wrapped around a cornet tin, baked again ‘till quite crisp and dry’ and then filled ‘with any cream or water ice’. This serving suggestion was a novel concept to Victorian Londoners. Cheap ice creams had hitherto been served in small glass containers called ‘penny licks’, which were rarely cleaned between customers. They were eventually made illegal in 1926 for their role in spreading diseases such as tuberculosis.

North Oxford in the early 1980s, sometime around noon. It’s a typically dreary Lenten day and, as dozens of ravenous prep-school boys clatter into the dining hall, battered aluminium trays are unceremoniously dumped upon scruffily scuffed tables. One glance at their contents and the happy hubbub suddenly ceases. Salad.

Oh, God, please not the salad. For this is no crisp, refreshing bite, well dressed as a Jermyn Street dandy, nor happy hors d’oeuvre, designed to pique the palate for the pleasures to come. Hell no. It’s an insidious study in sorrow, a masterpiece of barely edible melancholia, a poisonous paean to the limp and unlovely.

There’s the mass of flaccid lettuce, still soaked from its desultory wash, harbouring the occasional invertebrate beastie; a half-hearted grating of carrot, alongside a chunk of something that might officially be known as a tomato. Rock hard, this sorry fruit has all the flavour of distilled water. A few slices of cucumber, gently rotting, add their primal slime, alongside hard-boiled eggs that seem to have been on the simmer since Cain killed Abel.

Worst of all — more deranged than the shiny flaps of processed ham, with a mean splodge of salad cream so acidic it strips the enamel from your teeth — is the beetroot, deep purple and sinister, which stains the whole sorry melange with barely contained contempt. Our hearts sink. Our spirits droop. Welcome, dear reader, to the Great British salad.

Back then, it was the same in cafés and institutions across the land, the Winter of Discontent in vegetal form, a hangover from rationing, 30 years on, something to endure, rather than to enjoy. This joyless medley was made all the more awful in comparison to the simple green salads of home. Butter lettuce, freshly dug from the garden, cleaned, dried in a plastic spinner, then tossed in a mustard-heavy vinaigrette.

For us, salad was a delight rather than dirge, no mere side dish, rather a star in its own right — but it is a dish that defies easy definition. From the blessed simplicity of tomatoes, sun warmed and fresh from the vine, eaten with a pinch of salt, to the modern Instagram excesses of the Baroquely bonkers, salad has something for everyone.

What unites them all, I suppose, is not so much the ingredients (although vegetables, pulses and herbs will generally play a role), rather some form of dressing involving oil and vinegar, which takes a bunch of disparate elements and gathers them into one harmonious whole. Had I the space, and you the patience, I could fill tomes on the subject.

Caesar salad, born in Tijuana and splendidly punchy; the abundant generosity of the Cobb (see recipe) and the robustly American, blue-cheese-drenched charms of an iceberg wedge. Panzanella, all sweetly sharp, juice-soaked bread; the lactic cool of a proper Greek salad and the eternal allure of caprese. There’s that salad in Brideshead Revisited, of ‘watercress and chicory in a faint mist of chives’, and the niçoise, of course, seasoned with sun. There’s even salad as ritual and remembrance, maror, the bitter herbs eaten at Passover Seder to symbolise the bitterness of slavery.

Move east, to tabbouleh, that Middle Eastern masterpiece, and Thai som tum, as fiery as it is bracing, eaten on the streets of Bangkok; Laotian larb mixes finely chopped meat with a tangle of herbs and warm chilli burr. Smashed cucumber from China’s Sichuan province combines the numbing (ma) with the spicy (la), whereas Indonesian gaddo-gaddo and karedok provide a riot of tastes and textures, as do Malaysian kerabu timun and Mexican ensalada de nopalitos.

Every culture has its own take, each individual their own taste. As to its construction? It takes four people, according to the old Roman saying, to create the perfect salad — a miser to put in the vinegar, a spendthrift to add the oil, a wise man to season and a mad man to toss it all together. At their most basic, Roman salads, known as ‘salata’ or ‘salted things’, were little more than raw vegetables or herbs, sprinkled with a little salt, vinegar and oil.

Recipes from the likes of Columella and Apicius were altogether more complex affairs, featuring everything from almonds and fresh cheese to figs, octopus, olives, dates and bread. Dressings often used garum (Roman fish sauce) with liberal aplomb. These salads were as much medicinal as gastronomic, gentle digestive aids to prepare the stomach for the oncoming onslaught.

Greek physician Galen not only believed that raw vegetables were essential in balancing the four Humours (blood, phlegm and biles black and yellow), but managed to cure his insomnia, too. The Romans may have introduced the concept to our shores, but it was here, from medieval times, where the dish flourished. The Forme of Cury, a 14th-century proto-cookbook, defined ‘salat’ as a variety of herbs, flowers, chives, green garlic and onion, wearing a dressing made from oil, vinegar and salt. A few years later, slices of orange and lemon were added for decoration.

Then came Robert May, in 1660, with The Accomplisht Cook. In it, 14 recipes for the ‘grand sallet’, which were, like salmagundis a century or so later, epic feasts for eyes as well as belly. Cold capons, salt beef, pickled oysters, potatoes, olives and samphire were all thrown in with reckless abandon. These were the stars of the Golden Age, upwardly mobile salads, food as a show of one’s wealth.

It was with the publication of John Evelyn’s 1699 classic, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, that the art of the salad reached its peak. For here was an entire book dedicated to the subject. ‘We are by sallet to understand,’ wrote the great herbalist, ‘a particular Composition of certain Crude and fresh Herbs, such as usually are, or may be safely eaten with some Acetous juice, Oyl, Salt, &c. to give them a grateful Gust and Vehicle.’

He lists 82 different vegetables and herbs, together with notes on their growing seasons and a nine-step guide to their dressing. Another salad obsessive was the French novelist and playwright Alexandre Dumas. ‘There is almost always some on hand, and it generally tastes good,’ says the sage of the salad bowl, before going into intricate detail as to exactly when to eat what.

Chicory in autumn, seasoned with nothing more than a stale crust of bread rubbed with garlic and placed in the bottom of the bowl. At Easter, lettuce dressed with herbs, marinated oysters, shrimp, turtle’s eggs, Indian pickles and Chinese soya sauce. Salad, for Dumas, was no mere whimsy, rather a concoction worthy of serious study. However, the less said about Russian salad, a modern mountebank, the better.

I once had a deconstructed version in a grand Milanese place where the pea-studded mess (which resembles cat sick) was topped with a dome of spun sugar. It still haunts me to this day. Waldorf salad holds little appeal, a turgid mess of grape and apple — I share Basil Fawlty’s pain. As for those American ‘Jello’ aberrations… get thee away, Satan.

But enough of the base and deranged. Great salad is not only about balance, of taste and texture, oil and acidity, but about feeding a very personal yen. ‘There are few dishes which are used so widely in all classes of society as this one,’ says Dumas — nor any quite as universally adored. Salads were once in a sorrowful state in Britain, but they can be a thrilling riot of tastes and textures.

Cobb salad

The Cobb is an American classic, created in 1936 at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood, California, either by, or in honour of, owner Robert Cobb. This should be big and unashamedly bounteous, with gently poached chicken, and a dressing that is sharp and coats every part. If you’re not a fan of blue cheese, replace with a similar amount of Comté, cut into smallish cubes. The greens are traditionally mixed, then the rest of the ingredients laid out in colourful lines or blocks on top.

Ingredients

Serves 6

2 skinless chicken breasts

6 black peppercorns

1 bay leaf

1 celery stalk, split

½ onion

6 strips of smoked streaky bacon

Bunch of watercress, thick stems removed

1 head of chicory, separated

1 large head of Romaine lettuce, separated

4 hard-boiled eggs, finely chopped

1 avocado, chopped into small cubes

4 tomatoes, finely chopped

100g/3½oz Roquefort or other well-behaved blue cheese, diced or crumbled

For the dressing

3 tbspn white-wine vinegar

Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Big pinch of mustard powder

½ tsp caster sugar

Jig of Worcestershire sauce

150ml/5fl oz extra virgin olive oil

Method

• Put the chicken breasts in a pan with the peppercorns, bay leaf, celery stalks and onion and add water to cover. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to a mere ‘blip, blip’, cover and poach for 15 minutes, until the chicken is piping hot and cooked through, with no sign of pink in the juices when the thickest part is pierced with a skewer. Transfer the chicken to a plate and leave to cool

• Fry the bacon until crisp, then roughly chop and set aside.

• Cut the chicken meat into 2½cm/1in cubes and put in a large bowl. Add the bacon, watercress, chicory, romaine lettuce, eggs, avocado, tomatoes and cheese, and toss

• Make the dressing by whisking together the vinegar, salt, pepper, mustard powder, sugar and Worcestershire sauce. When combined, whisk in the oil. Taste for seasoning, then dribble over the salad so every leaf is gleaming with it, but not drenched

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When one thinks of typical English ingredients, a picture of root vegetables, local catch or native cattle tends to take shape. Apply that same mindset to cocktails and one might think, instead, of elderflower, honey or black treacle.

Today’s mixologists, however, are going off-menu. From east London to Somerset, the modern English cocktail mines from more left-field corners of the terroir. Ingredients such as gorse, Cornish seaweed or even gourmet mushrooms are, increasingly, de rigueur. When did this all happen—and why?

On a rainy February afternoon at Canal, a restaurant in Maida Vale, W9, mixologist Paul Lougrat was asked to serve a low-ABV cocktail to pair with a new bouillabaisse. As the founder of A Bar With Shapes For A Name, E2, an east London institution, Lougrat is used to partnering with restaurants and concocting drinks for special events. This one, however, proved to be an interesting challenge.

‘We were looking to serve something very crisp and clean,’ he tells me. ‘That was always going to be a martini.’ Without the tang of a vodka, however, how did he plan to give the whole thing a kick? Enter Cornish dulse, a seaweed that boasts a ‘complex and smoky’ flavour, Lougrat explains, ‘counterbalancing the strength of a gin or a vodka’. First, the team combined dulse with an orange wine, ‘to lend the whole thing some tannins’. After leaving the two flavours to combine for 24 hours, they strained the concoction through a coffee filter and added the mixture to the base of Seedlip Grove 42 alcohol-free spirit.

Lougrat notes that such a mixture could work just as well with a proper vodka or gin. One could also serve the cocktail ‘dirty’, adding olive brine to the mix, or use the wine-and-dulce concoction in a separate drink (‘it would pair well with whisky,’ he says). The dulse martini is now served at Club Warehaus, E8, Mr Lougrat’s new outpost down the road from A Bar With Shapes. He and his team are among a growing school of mixologists who are not only mining the terroir, but actively playing around with it.

The Firmdale group — the hotels of which include Ham Yard in London and The Whitby in New York — have found in Kevin Fry a food and beverage manager with a wild imagination. In March, he launched the Nine Regions cocktail menu at London's Soho Hotel, which covers ingredients stretching from the North-East to the South-West. Fry’s personal favourites are the South-East, which blends together Kentish corn whiskey and vermouth, and the South-West, which uses a Cornish rum as a base.

The story of these cocktails is equally a story about the local producers who make their base ingredients. Jon Mills, who crafts award-winning English whiskies at the Foundry in Canterbury, Kent, is one of Fry’s most important partners. ‘A corn whiskey is very unusual for the UK,’ he tells me. ‘What we produce is, effectively, a bourbon, although we can’t call it that because that’s a protected label for those made in the USA.’ His company uses southern English corn and vintage American oak barrels to age the concoction according to traditional methods. This usually lasts for four years; then the results go out to market. ‘We employ about 20 people in total,’ Mills says, ‘and it’s only two people over on brewing and distilling.’

The Foundry’s success belies its size: its very first whiskey, produced as recently as 2023, ended up shortlisted in the World Whisky Finals and a successful restaurant appended to the distillery — seating up to 126 — has cemented the Foundry’s prime position among the Kentish set. Now, the company is growing mushrooms, too, using the spent grain, warm water and residual heat left over from the brewing process. These, Mills tells me, are rich in a highly beneficial compound (I suspect it’s ergothioneine) and can be distilled into drops that can then be added to cocktails, soft drinks or even food. ‘We are looking into how we might be able to grow and licence this at scale,’ he tells me.

The English have been blending drinks together for centuries. Punch became popular in the 17th century as travellers brought spices and citrus home from overseas. The word ‘cocktail’, however, with all its mathematical and alchemical implications, came later. Emerging in the USA in 1806 to describe a mix of spirits, sugar, water and bitters, it evolved to cover a range of more precise concoctions as bartenders across the newly ascendent nation honed their craft and flexed their muscles. Transatlantic travel kickstarted the importation of American culture in the 19th century, accelerating the cocktail’s move to London. The Gin Sling, Mint Julep and John Collins (later Tom Collins) were quick to cement their preferential status among the city’s fashionable elites.

It was 1920s Prohibition, however, that proved the biggest motor. As bartenders fled a hostile environment, Mayfair’s five-star hotels espoused the speakeasy. Cocktail bars gained a mystique that, until then, had eluded them, as presentation and technique improved. Since the Roaring Twenties, cocktail culture has ebbed and flowed. As concerns about provenance have grown in the past decade, so, too, has a cocktail culture rooted in Englishness.

In Cornwall’s Tamar Valley, Sally Harvey (whose great-great-grandfather helped build the Great Western Railway) has found a niche producing cordial from mulled cider apples. ‘The trees they come from have been around for generations,’ she muses, recalling that she began pressing apples in the West Country aged 16. Her cordial ‘works particularly well in the winter months,’ she notes. ‘I use a fairly sharp tannin-based apple juice from the trees, which I then sweeten with spices such as cinnamon, coriander seed, and a bit of orange.’ Today, she supplies both Rick Stein and Fry, who blends her Mulled Apple Cordial together with her Very Berry Cordial and a pineapple and pink grapefruit rum, to make the Soho Hotel’s South-West Cocktail.

Another abundant West Country ingredient is gorse. At The Culpeper, E1, a pub and restaurant in London’s Spitalfields with hotel rooms and an enviable rooftop, the cocktail menu’s pièce-de-résistance is none other than a Gorse Spritz, made with a syrup of the yellow flowers and topped with sparkling wine, sparkling water and an orange-peel twist. Four ice cubes are recommended.

For the most adventurous and original blends, however, one ought to head to Farringdon, EC1. Beside the neighbourhood’s oft-lauded St John, a two-year-old cocktail bar has been making waves ever since it opened. Queues snake down the road as punters vie for a spot and no photographs are permitted inside. What makes Space Talk so special, besides the cultivated mystique, is its cocktail menu. This changes often, founder Ramzi Abou Chalach explains, leaving ample room for experimentation. The bar is also known for serving in-house liquor — in April, it launched its own whiskey.

Yet it’s English ingredients, not Scottish, that they have been exploring recently. Created just in time for Country Life’s English issue, the Rhubarb & Lovage is a thing of alchemical beauty. ‘We started with rhubarb,’ explains Space Talk’s head bartender, José Domínguez, ‘infused in gin for five days, which allowed us to extract its natural acidity and fresh, slightly green character, avoiding heavier, stewed notes. The result was clean, bright and true to the ingredient in its raw form.’

Alongside that, the team used a homemade lovage cordial. ‘This is a classic, but often overlooked English herb,’ Mr Domínguez explains, ‘with a distinctly savoury, almost celery-like profile. We infuse it in water at room temperature to draw out its aromatic qualities and then balance it with sugar and acids to shape it into a bright cordial.’ Bringing everything together are Tio Pepe Fino sherry, ‘for a dry, slightly saline edge’, and a hint of Nonino grappa, which ‘adds body and a soft fruit note in the background’.

Drink responsibly: drink English.

The Rhubarb & Lovage, created for Country Life

(Available until July 10 at Space Talk, Farringdon)

- 35ml Hepple Gin-infused Rhubarb

- 15ml Tapalio Tequila

- 10ml Tio Pepe Fino

- 2.5ml Nonino Grappa

- 15ml Lovage cordial

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It was 20 years ago this month that I found myself in a small tent in a large field near Lynchburg, Tennessee, with my right hand raised before me, solemnly swearing ‘to objectively and subjectively evaluate each barbecue meat that is presented to my eyes, my nose, my hands and my palate’.

I was not alone. Because all around me, 100 Southern accents solemnly incanted the same mantra, some with their eyes closed, as if in hushed benediction to the Lord. ‘I accept my duty to be an official Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS) Certified Judge,’ we went on, ‘so that truth, justice, excellence in barbecue and the American way of life be strengthened and preserved forever. Amen.’

Proof, if proof be needed, that American barbecue is more carnivorous cult than mere cooking technique.

As Lolis Eric Elie writes in Smokestack Lightning, barbecue is ‘a metaphor for American culture in a broad sense. Barbecue alone encompasses the high-and-lowbrows, the sacred and the profane, the urban and the rural, the learned and the unlettered...’ And entry into the KCBS, this most prestigious of barbecue associations, is strictly controlled.

An entire day’s training was required before I was allowed anywhere near the judges’ table at the Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue, the Champions League of professional ‘que’.

Meats were to be scored on appearance, taste and tenderness. Rules were strict (‘the only garnish allowed is green-leaf lettuce, common curly parsley and cilantro’) and standards exacting (‘I will stay silent and maintain a neutral body language while I and the others at my table are judging’). This was a process that made judging Olympic gymnastics, say, or the Nobel Peace Prize, look positively slipshod in comparison.

Barbecue, in the USA, is all about the slow and low — tough cuts of meat smoked over indirect heat — and is a noun as well as a verb. Grilling, on the other hand, is what we know as BBQ over here and sees mainly innocent cuts of meat cruelly carbonised over direct heat. And although entire volumes can be filled on the regional idiosyncrasies of different barbecue styles (whole hog versus Boston butt; sliced rather than pulled; dry and wet rubs; vinegar- or mustard-based sauce; hickory over oak- or applewood), I want to talk about ribs. Because there is something gloriously primal about gnawing meat off a bone.

Give me spare ribs, large, flat and meaty, hewn from the lower portion of the ribcage; St Louis style (basically trimmed spare ribs) and baby back, the smallest, shortest and, for me, sweetest of them all.

My first taste was way back in the 1980s, at The Chicago Rib Shack in London’s Knightsbridge, where, with plastic bib tied around neck, things got merrily messy. It’s a memory heavily seasoned with nostalgia, just like the ribs at Sweeney Todd’s in Bath, the final feast before trudging back off to prep school the next day. But it was in America where love turned into obsession.

I want dry-rub Memphis ribs, scented with paprika, or Kansas City style, slathered in sweet, tangy sauce. Give me west Texan beef ribs, cooked over mesquite and naked, save salt and pepper, and eastern Carolina baby backs, with a sharp, thin, spicy sauce. I crave the woody tang, the chewy bark (or outer layer) and that slim layer of pink just below, proof that smoke has permeated flesh. The quest for the perfect rib is eternal. The joy, as ever, lies in the trying.

Proper ribs

This comes from my book Let’s Eat and is the result of many sauce-stained, dry-rub-crusted experiments. The best way to cook proper ribs is on a dedicated smoke or a Bradley smoker, which runs on wood briquettes, but it works equally well on a Weber Kettle charcoal grill.

Ingredients

Serves 4–6

500ml cider vinegar

2kg baby back pork ribs, membrane removed

500ml BBQ sauce of choice (I love the Memphis-style Hot Smoky from Lillie’s Q or Hot ’n’ Smoky BBQ Sauce from South Devon Chilli Farm; www.southdevonchillifarm.co.uk)

For the dry rub

2 tbspn hot paprika

2 tbspn ground black pepper

2 tbspn sea salt

1 tspn cayenne pepper

2 tbspn muscovado sugar

2 tbspn garlic powder

2 tbspn onion powder

Method

• Mix nine litres of water with the 500ml vinegar, then soak the ribs in this mixture, covered and in the fridge, for one hour. Drain and dry with kitchen paper

• For the dry rub, mix all the ingredients together, then rub the mixture into the ribs (reserving the rest for later). Wrap in foil and leave in the fridge overnight

• If using a kettle barbecue, pile charcoal on one side of the base of the barbecue, and put an old small roasting tin filled with water on a couple of bricks on the other side

• Light the charcoal and heat until the coals are white hot. Sit the ribs, wrapped in the foil, on a rack over the water. Cover the barbecue with a lid, with the smoke holes half open. Use these holes to regulate the temperature, so when it begins to drop close the vents and open them when it gets very hot. Cook for three hours — you will need to top up the charcoal about every 40–60 minutes

• Rub the ribs with the remaining spice rub, rewrap in the foil and return to the barbecue for another two to three hours, until tender, topping up the charcoal from time to time. An hour before the end of the cooking time, open the foil and baste the ribs with barbecue sauce. When ready, the ribs should pull apart easily; the meat should not be falling off the bone, but will come off cleanly when tugged by the teeth

Morning light pours through the fan-vaulted ceiling of St Mary Aldermary, spilling between laptops and cups. The gentle hum of conversation rises beneath the carved-stone ribs of the building, one of Sir Christopher Wren’s lesser-known works. This is Host Café, EC4, an ethical, non-profit coffee shop run by the church itself — where City workers, freelancers and tourists alike sit in pews once reserved for prayer.

Londoners have long sought communion through conversation — and, for centuries, they have congregated in the caffeinated sanctuaries of the city: coffee houses. Long before St Mary Aldermary began serving single-origin espresso, another London pioneer, Pasqua Rosee, was pouring his first cups for a curious crowd in St Michael’s Alley in 1652, igniting a social revolution. By the late 17th century, London had become addicted, home to hundreds of so-called ‘penny universities’, each one a microcosm.

Step inside and you’d find sailors arguing with scientists, poets needling politicians and merchants huddled over ledgers by candlelight, akin to ‘rats in a ruinous cheese store… some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, others jangling,’ wrote London Spy author Ned Ward in 1704. The air was thick with smoke, gossip and the smell of roasting beans. As Ward himself admitted: ‘When I had sat there for a while… I myself felt inclined for a cup of coffee.’ Early brews were tar-black, gritty, strong as hell and sobering. They woke people up, literally and figuratively, in an era when the safest drink was stupefying ale.

Each house had its speciality. The Grecian was a haven for duelling scholars and scientists — Isaac Newton once dissected a dolphin on the table. Jonathan’s echoed with stockjobbers bellowing prices; at Lloyd’s, the bustle of shipowners, merchants and sailors seeking reliable shipping news evolved, improbably, into a global insurance empire. Button’s on Russell Street was awash with pamphleteers and poets, housing first offices of Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Gay and The Spectator. Literary contributions were submitted through the mouth of a marble lion. What united these dens was convivial conversation. For a penny, one could buy entry into a new way of thinking: egalitarian, restless and caffeinated.

‘No man might refuse your company,’ stated one set of coffee-house rules. Equality was the order of the day — a radical idea in a city built on hierarchy — and ideas were prized more highly than titles. Anyone could enter and speak freely. Long communal tables, filled with manuscripts and printed papers, invited conversation between strangers and no seat could be reserved. As the historian Thomas Macaulay observed, you might have seen ‘earls in stars and garters, clergymen in cassocks, pert templars, sheepish lads from the Universities, translators and index-makers in ragged coats’, all blended together. Engaging with someone new was de rigueur and debate flowed as freely as the coffee itself.

Historians still argue whether women were seated at the table or written out of the scene, yet diaries and literature of the period place them inside these rooms — not only as patrons and participants, but often as proprietors and servers. They shaped the coffee-house world as much as any man.

A revolution in democratic discussion, the coffee house was equal parts newsroom, salon and free-school. A space where art and argument shared common ground. Their subversive chatter so alarmed authority that, in 1675, Charles II attempted to close them altogether, denouncing them as ‘places where the disaffected meet’. The ban lasted 11 days, overturned by public outcry and caffeine withdrawal.

Three centuries later, that same spirit survives. The tables are smaller now, the beans more expensive, but Londoners still gather around cups to exchange ideas, contend opinions and, occasionally, change the world. Button’s itself may now be a cheerless Starbucks, but, across the city, a handful of cafés, bars and salons still quietly uphold the noble art of conversation.

The Poetry Café in Betterton Street, WC2, sits in what Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, calls ‘the Hogarthian heartlands of Covent Garden’: a fitting heir to London’s coffee-house past. ‘Poetry’s main hangout,’ she tells me, ‘is where poets come to launch books, try out new material or simply swap views.’ She notes the same collaborative energy now stretches far beyond the capital: 136 ‘Stanza groups’ gather across the country ‘meeting in village halls, above pubs and in each other’s kitchens… workshopping over a creative cuppa’.

A stroll away in Bloomsbury, the London Review Bookshop Café, WC1, has been given a new lease of life by St John, of nose-to-tail fame. It now serves up coffee alongside Proustian madeleines, literature and lively event nights. ‘When the good folk at The Review asked if we’d be interested in their former café space, we were intrigued,’ says Trevor Gulliver, St John’s co-founder and CEO. ‘A bookshop has its own calm and activity, a sense of purpose to its existence. The more time we spent there, the more it felt like a happy relationship — light-filled, full of ebb and flow between café and bookshelves, the many people who come through the doors, even the square behind.’

In Piccadilly, W1, the effortlessly elegant Maison Assouline hums with salon glamour for a new age. Recently named by 1000Libraries as the most beautiful book-café in the UK, this former bank hall is now a destination that invites ideas and human connection.

Then there are the new gatherings that widen the circle still further. The story-telling night RAW Talks seeks to champion ordinary people with extraordinary tales. As co-founder Christine Charitonos tells me: ‘There’s no shortage of events where one listens to experts or celebrities talk about their achievements. But do these types of nights satisfy the need for human connection? RAW platforms everyday people and their true-life stories in an environment where everyone is equal.’

‘The coffee houses of the past were about ideas,’ she explains, ‘but they were also about finding belonging — a space where you could walk in, join the conversation and be accepted into the fold.’ The same might be said of Geist Talks, a cultural salon that began as a post-lockdown gathering of friends in a West End warehouse. ‘People were clearly longing for in-person conversation as an antidote to the screen-based isolation of those years,’ says co-founder Sara Sjölund. ‘Our first talk was on the science of the mind, with a Tibetan Buddhist monk and a Yale neuroscientist and, when we hosted our second, with the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, people were practically fighting for tickets.’ Today, Geist hosts monthly events in striking venues, each followed by an informal dinner ‘where people can continue the conversation’.

Echoing their Hanoverian predecessors, these modern salons are an antidote to loneliness and remind us that culture thrives in communal settings. The fundamental desire remains the same: to gather, to converse and actively listen.

As evening falls, Host Café’s last patrons drift out into Bow Lane and the aroma of roasted beans lingers in the nave like incense. Centuries ago, the same invigorating smell would have percolated through the alleys of Cornhill and Covent Garden, beckoning Londoners in search of warmth, wit and wisdom. The decor changes, but London’s truest communion endures: a table, a cup and the shared pleasure of being together.

So, farewell then, Gentleman’s Relish, that splendidly pungent spiced anchovy spread, stalwart of the savoury and best friend to buttered toast. Launched in 1828 by John Osborn, a Briton living in Paris — and formally known as Patum Peperium, a Latin and Greek hodgepodge meaning ‘paste of peppers’ — its demise was announced last month by owners AB World Foods.

‘Although we recognise that this Victorian relish has a niche and loyal following,’ the company said, ‘it sadly does not have wider commercial appeal and, despite our best efforts, retailer distribution has dwindled.’

AB World Foods may have hoped the news would go gentle into that good night, but the company didn’t count upon the thousands of passionate Patum Peperium devotees who raged, raged, against the dying of this salty bite. Garments were rended, teeth were gnashed and many a saline tear was shed, to such an extent that there are whispers of talks underway to discuss its survival. For this magnificent mix of anchovy fillets, butter and a top-secret blend of herbs and spices is no mere toast topper, but rather the pride of Britain in spreadable form, the culinary equivalent of an umami sucker punch.

Ok, so Gentleman’s Relish may not win any prizes for looks, being a glum, muddy brown, with a pong more suited to cat sanctuaries than kitchen. But, spread ‘sparingly’ (as the packaging demands) on hot, toasted cheap white bread, this is a teatime treat and late-night snack like no other — a taste of an age long passed.

As a store-cupboard ingredient, too, Gentleman’s Relish is unparallelled, adding gentle depth to roast lamb, Scotch woodcock, scrambled egg, Welsh rarebits, stew, braises and gravy alike. Anywhere, in fact, you’d use preserved anchovy. Sudi Pigott, anchovy aficionado and author of the excellent new book Consider the Anchovy (Headline, £20), has long adored its ‘funky savouriness’. She tells me that the original recipe was made with a whopping 60% Spanish Cantabrian anchovies, ‘although probably not the highest spring quality, when prices were at their peak, rather [those caught in] later June and September’. Still, these were some of the best anchovies on earth, mixed with that ‘secret blend’ of herbs and spices, which probably included ‘classic Victorian flavours’, such as nutmeg, mace, cayenne and black pepper.

Pigott, however, was certainly not a fan of the most recent incarnation of Gentleman’s Relish and fears that corners may have been cut. ‘I doubt very much, without knowing for certain, that the current iteration manufactured in Poland was even made from European anchovies,’ she whispers. ‘I suspect it uses much less expensive South American or Moroccan fish, which simply don’t have the plump complexity of flavour.’ For her, the new recipe is ‘not at all the same. It tastes like a soapy, fusty old boot room’.

She, like me, prefers the ‘vastly superior’ Fortnum & Mason Anchovy Relish, ‘creamy, less harsh, but more piquant’ and sold in ‘an exquisite china eau-de-nil pot’. It really is a superior spread, but has been unavailable for a while. We’re all praying for its return. In the meantime, you’ll still find it served on soldiers, at Simpson’s in the Strand, restaurateur Jeremy King’s magnificent revival of the original Strand grande dame. ‘My chef found and adapted a classic Victorian recipe for Patum Peperium,’ said King. ‘It is similar to mass-produced versions, but, dare I say, I prefer it.’

Another version, called ‘The Gentlelady’s Relish’, can be found at The White Hart in Wiveliscombe in Somerset. ‘Why should gentlemen have all the fun?’ asks proprietor William Sitwell. My fellow MasterChef judge was so devastated by the demise of Gentleman’s Relish that he asked his chef Dom Hewitt to create their own homage. ‘I’m delighted to share the salty love with my favourite magazine.’ The recipe is below.

Recipe: The Gentlelady's Relish

Makes a small pot, which is plenty for two on toast.

Ingredients

100g of anchovies in olive oil (don’t drain them)
1 lemon, rind and juice
½tspn cinnamon
½tspn mace ground
½tspn ground ginger
½tspn ground white pepper
1–2tspn capers, depending on taste
30g soft unsalted butter (optional)

Method

Mix everything in the food processor. The recipe gives you a lovely paste, much like the original version.

If you want it to be creamier, add 30g soft butter and it becomes more like a buttery spread.

Lunch, during the week? Have you lost your mind? Nobody takes lunch anymore, do they? Not a proper lunch. Nobody has the time. It’s a quick salad at the desk for those traipsing into an office, or a boiled egg on toast for those of us who toil away at home. But a lunch? A proper lunch in a restaurant? Oooh, fancy!

Every now and then, it’s delicious to punctuate the working day with a proper table, and perhaps even a tablecloth. To sit across from someone and converse as if you’re characters in Mad Men. OK, maybe not exactly like that. Go easy on the single malts before you roll back to the office. But is taking an hour or a smidgen more to sit in a restaurant and eat at a civilised pace so very terrible? No, is the short answer. The sky will not fall in. You may even manage two courses. Dare I say it, even a glass of wine. Come on, loosen up. The Europeans do it and they’re not so bad, are they?

The trick, I reckon, is to take a lunch on a relatively quiet day. It’s no good booking a table somewhere decent for a two-courser when you have an important presentation to make that afternoon. Put in a good shift that morning. Send several emails and make yourself known in the office before heading off. Then you won’t necessarily worry about daring to step away from your keyboard for a mere hour or so.

Enjoy it. Don’t clock watch. Don’t panic as every minute passes that you should, really, be behind your computer. That’s akin to going on holiday and checking your emails every five seconds from the sun-bed, and it’s deeply unrelaxing for your lunching companion, if there is one. Try and switch off. Help yourself to the bread basket. Look at you, out for lunch! What a pleasure. Lunch is for wimps, snarled Gordon Gekko. No, lunch is for the bon viveurs among us, for the radiators, not the drains, for those who like to find the small joys in life rather than give into the gloom. Put it another way, do you want to be known as someone who’s simply too uptight to take lunch? Exactly.

Taking a midweek lunch is also immensely helpful to the struggling restaurant industry, and many do excellent set menus accordingly. Slink into any Noble Rot for two courses at £24, for instance.

At that bastion of sophistication, Bellamy’s, in Mayfair, you get two courses (sea bream ceviche followed by roast poussin, perhaps?) for £38. You may also be able to get a midweek table more easily than an evening one at wildly fashionable joints. Last week, I bagged a 12.15pm midweek table at The Devonshire where they offer a jolly decent set lunch menu of prawn cocktail followed by skirt steak and chips (very Rivals) for £25. If you fancy sticky toffee pudding on top, it’s £29. A bargain. You can barely get a sandwich and crisps in Pret for that, these days.

Coffee, if you need it as a sharpener, followed by a Smint, and you can bounce back to your desk restored and revived. You’ve made something of your day. You’ve got out. You’ve given yourself a little treat. Tomorrow it's the return of the Meal Deal. But today, you lived. You ate a proper lunch. Bravo.

What are the ingredients of a thriving market town? A decent butcher and deli, a pub or two and bonus marks for a bookshop — but the real jackpot is surely a good independent wine merchant. As supermarkets deploy convenience and discounts to great effect and ever-expanding Majestic combines scale with specialism, it’s easy to be lulled into regarding your local wine shop as an anachronism reserved for claret-related emergencies. Yet the reality is more likely to be a champion of artisan producers, a free-thinking guide through classic regions or more off-piste terrain and a dynamic business that is deeply woven into its community ecosystem.

‘The important word is independent,’ declares Philip Amps, the fourth generation of his family to run Amps Wine Merchants in the Northamptonshire town of Oundle. ‘What you get with independents is a little bit of panache, that stardust, because they work with small growers who are perhaps only producing 3,000–4,000 bottles.’

It’s a scale that lends itself to originality, rarity and passion projects from families that prefer to spend their time among the vines rather than completing supermarket compliance forms. Unlike the store manager of a large chain, notes Philip, ‘our specialism is that we only sell wines we like’. In fact, the company’s unofficial motto is: ‘If you don’t like it, bring it back because we’ll drink it!’ It’s a manifesto echoed by Tom Ashworth, CEO of Yapp Brothers, which was founded after a long lunch in 1969 when his stepfather, Robin Yapp, enthusiastically ordered a pallet of wine to his garage in Mere, Wiltshire.

Now based a few miles down the road in Sparkford, Somerset, and directly representing about 100 producers, Yapp remains true to its original ethos, which doubtless still includes the odd good lunch. ‘What we’re about is best-in-class wines from family producers,’ explains Tom, noting that in many cases this relationship is now on its third generation of vigneron. Such precious continuity cultivates an affectionate thread between producer, retailer and customer that is a world away from the price-driven loyalty on which larger corporations rely.

Although UK cities boast their fair share of excellent independent wine shops, more rural locations tend to engender a slightly different mindset. ‘Our producers are small farmers from communities not unlike the one we trade in,’ remarks Gareth Groves, managing director of Stone, Vine & Sun in Hampshire’s fly-fishing Mecca of Stockbridge. That resonance is amplified by his freedom to offer ‘a range that meets local rather than national tastes’. As many independents do, Stone, Vine & Sun has embraced online sales and serves customers across the UK, but relishes an opportunity to deliver more personal service in the shop. This is also the perfect environment in which to show off local heroes, such as Exton Park Vineyard, Black Chalk, Northbrook Vineyard and — just over the Wiltshire border — Domaine Hugo.

Then there are all the events, which not only represent such an important element of a country wine merchant’s business model, but also embed it within the wider community. Weddings are only the start, suggests James Tanner, managing director of Tanners, whose forebears founded this Shropshire-based wine merchant in 1872. Today, in addition to its original Shrewsbury flagship, the firm has five shops dotted either side of the border along the Welsh Marches. He flags Tanners as a regular supplier of ‘hunt balls and point-to-point bars, where you need someone who can manage delivery into the middle of fields’. Venturing back through the post-party quagmire to collect empty bottles is all part of the service.

Back on firmer ground are the regular talks and tastings, as well as more intimate tutored events with visiting producers, all hosted at Tanners’ historic headquarters, where the cellars also provide a handy customer storage service. In addition to advising clients on how best to fill their own cellar, augmented by popular en primeur offers (in which a wine is bought before it has been bottled) and a ‘Wine In Time’ two-monthly or quarterly mixed-case subscription service, Tanners will also buy back mature bottles from country houses in need of a declutter. ‘They’re often a really good source of old Bordeaux,’ reports James, who recently reclaimed a collection of 1970 Port, safe in the knowledge that these bottles had been gently maturing in the same place since his father originally delivered them.

If Tanners epitomises the traditional wine merchant, The Somerset Wine Company shows a different side to the independent scene. When Camilla Wood set up her Castle Cary business in 2014, she ‘saw a gap in the market for a younger style, a more vibrant wine shop’. In particular, Camilla felt well placed to engage with fellow female wine lovers. ‘Women have a lot of interest in wine, great noses and great palates, but they tend to hide behind their — dare I say it — more pompous wine-buying husband,’ she smiles. ‘We say: “Come in, have a chat, share the troubles of the day, get some really good advice.”’ Although her team all have wine qualifications, this expertise comes packaged with the ability to be ‘great people connectors’.

The wine itself is a perfect tool to make that connection. ‘Wine is a very joyful product; it can be life-enhancing. I just love that alchemy.’ Beyond its own Castle Cary neighbourhood, The Somerset Wine Company taps into the significant footfall offered by nearby Teals Farm Shop, which has established itself as a superior stop-off on the A303 artery to the West Country. ‘The raison d’être of Teals is organic and sustainable, so we reflect that with our wine curation there,’ explains Camilla. She has also forged connections with other local businesses, including Paul Nicholls Racing, whose team and owners require a healthy supply of Champagne magnums.

One challenge that independent wine merchants share is the perception that they should be kept for special occasions. These smaller players may lack the economies of scale and loss leader tactics that allow supermarkets to offer their cheapest deals; nonetheless, you don’t have to shop far north of a tenner with an independent specialist to find similar, indeed often superior value. Walk into any wine shop and the manager will be able to rattle off the cumulative effect of duty, VAT, packaging and logistics costs on every bottle before you factor in the quality of the liquid itself. It is a shame, however, that the additional post-Brexit administrative burden tends to fall disproportionately on smaller importers, not least because they focus on all those interesting wines that tend to be produced in modest quantities.

More happily, it’s testament to the sourcing skills of a company such as Amps that it still manages to offer about 20 wines priced at less than £10. If you can nudge your spend up towards £15, however, you’ll hit today’s real independent sweet spot, enthuses Amps' Philip: ‘That’s when you get really interesting wine that is exciting and worth drinking.’ Over at Yapp, Tom agrees. ‘I think you should be able to find really drinkable wine at under £15 a bottle,’ he observes, drawing a parallel with shopping at a butcher. ‘If you want sustainable, good-quality meat, you will pay £15 for a good chicken.’ Extend this same notion of value to the contents of your glass and there’s yet another good reason to push open the door of your friendly local wine merchant.

This feature first appeared in the May 27, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that all most people really want to eat outside are crisps and olives. Buy twice as many of both as you think you need. Marks & Spencer Extra Virgin Olive Oil Crisps with Black Truffle are chefs’ favourites for a reason, and, as Tom Parker Bowles says, you can’t beat jumbo Perelló Gordal Picante olives. Look out, too, for smoky griddled Turkish ones; many big supermarkets now stock them. Decant all the olives into Tupperware to avoid filmy pot lids flapping around and covering everyone in oil.

Heart set on serving picnic canapés? Get a box of Rahms Croustade Cases, which are packaged with travelling in mind, and bring a disposable piping bag of your chosen filling — ready-made dips come into their own here — plus scissors to snip the end off so you can assemble them in situ using the car boot as a workstation. If it’s a blustery day, you do this at your own risk.

If you feel compelled to make something, do a big pesto-pasta salad: a universal winner among all age groups and barely more work than boiling a kettle. Use the best pesto available (fresh or jarred) and the fiddliest pasta shape you can find: Northern Pasta Co’s deliciously nutty radiatori and casarecce, made from British-grown spelt in Cumbria, hold dressing brilliantly.

Do not, under any circumstances, try to transport a pavlova. Individually packaged puds are your friends and Bonne Maman will always see you right: the chocolate pots, crème caramels and impressively boozy babas au rhum are all tried-and-tested picnic fare. Alternatively, pop the company’s madeleines in the oven just before you set off, wrap them in foil and they’ll still be warm when you arrive. Could you conceivably get away with ducking out of sight, dusting them in icing sugar and passing them off as homemade? No comment.

Swish fizzy pop covers a multitude of sins, turning the most slap-dash spread into a Blytonesque delight. Belvoir’s delicious (and, crucially, not too sweet) sparkling elderflower, raspberry lemonade and ginger beer now all come in cans and Rapscallion Soda’s strawberry and rhubarb summer special editions are worth stocking up on.

A decent insulated flask isn’t only intended for keeping drinks hot — it’ll also keep Pimm’s, pale rosé or pre-mixed Bloody Marys ice cold. Black+Blum’s Explorer Flask features two built-in cups, a stable base that helps it to stay upright on grass and a removable strap so that you can stick it straight in the dishwasher when you get home.

Investing in advance in a melamine or enamel set of picnic plates means no last-minute shopping panic. Royal Doulton’s Pacific Outdoor melamine range and Toast enamel plates are guaranteed to attract compliments; John Lewis has stylish and good-value reusable designs.

Create an impression of picnic proficiency with accessories. Wicker hampers are a one-way ticket to a bad back: Fortnum & Mason has instantly recognisable eau de nil cool-bag totes and even an insulated backpack, all of which are as comfortable to carry as they are good-looking. The British Blanket Company’s rainbow-hued woollen picnic rugs all have waterproof backs and come with leather carrying straps — as Somerset Maugham put it, ‘there are few things so pleasant as a picnic eaten in perfect comfort’.

Finally, fold up two sturdy bin bags and stash them in your chosen carrier: one for rubbish and one for everything that needs to be washed when you get home.

There, on a slope of orchard, Francis laid
A damask napkin wrought with horse and hound,
Brought out a dusky loaf that smelt of home,
And, half-cut down, a pasty costly-made,
Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay,
Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
Imbedded and injellied; last, with these,
A flask of cider from his father’s vats…

Trust Tennyson, in Audley Court, to give us one of the greatest of British picnics, his Platonic ideal of an alfresco feast, a blessed union of sylvan bliss and clement weather, scintillating company and splendid food. If only it were always so easy. ‘Sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea,’ as Betjeman so beautifully put it. The true essence of the great British picnic.

When will we ever learn? Our love of outdoor feasting is as peculiar as it is endearing, the eternal triumph of hope over experience. I’d understand our obsession rather more if this country had the climate of Sicily, say, or Sydney, where the prospect of a picnic is not so sullied by matters meteorological, where azure, cloudless skies are a given, rather than mere vain hope. How many times have we packed the basket and chilled the wine, then set off for the great outdoors with a tune on our lips and a spring in our step, only to end up back in the car, masticating sullen sandwiches to the pitter-patter beat of an ‘unseasonal’ storm?

There was no gastronomic nirvana to be found in the traditional picnic food of the 1970s and 1980s, either. Lunches were to be endured, rather than enjoyed, a sort of culinary chamber of horrors, the greatest hits of bad British food, all cheap pork, bad breath and heartburn. Scrofulous chipolatas, clad in a thick coating of grease; great wedges of cardboard quiche, soggily anaemic and seasoned with despair; pallid chicken legs that taste of defeat and bloater-paste sandwiches, heavy on the margarine. Crisps, too, always crisps, usually ready salted. To drink, weak tea, hopelessly milky, and blood-warm orange squash. Not so much a treat as a penance, often devoured in a crowded lay-by on a busy stretch of the A303.

It was all a long way from Milton’s Garden of Eden, perhaps the earliest picnic of all, where Adam and Eve feasted upon ‘Nectarine fruits’, sitting on a ‘soft downie bank damask’d with flowrs’ — although that particular picnic did not, as we all know, end well. Yet the picnic (meaning a specific outdoor meal, rather than just munching bread and cheese on some pilgrimage) is certainly nothing new, with roots in the royal hunting feasts of Tudor and Stuart times. These were serious, meat-heavy affairs, with loins of veal and beef, cold capon and mutton, pigeon pie, sausages and ox tongue. An old superstition decreed that the venison would turn rancid unless suitable quantities of grog had been drunk before the carcass was broken down, so lashings of booze were required, too.

The idea of picnicking for pure pleasure, rather than pure outdoor sustenance or sporting fuel, came rather later. Throughout the 18th century, the noble, rich and reliably indolent, inspired by their Grand Tour through the pavilions, grottos and formal gardens of Italy, came home and re-created follies, gazebos and the like in the grounds of their estates. Some, such as the Temple of the Winds at Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland and the castle at Saltram in Devon, even had subterranean kitchens, from which elaborate banquets mysteriously appeared. The word picnic, however, was first recorded in 1748, in a letter from Lord Chesterfield to his son — although it must have been in pretty general usage already. It derives from piquenique, a French word first recorded sometime towards the end of the 17th century, and closely related to the German picquenic, a term for an 18th-century Hanoverian ball. Italian and Swedish etymologists have found words that describe similar sorts of social occasions.

Still, the first official ‘picnics’ were rarely eaten outside. ‘A picnic supper,’ explained The Times on March 18, 1802, ‘consists of a variety of dishes. The subscribers to the entertainment have the bill of fare presented to them with a number against each dish. The lot which he draws obliges him to furnish the dish marked against it, which he either takes with him in his carriage or sends by servant.’ In short, a pretty upper-class affair. It was probably, argues Jackie Gurney in The National Trust Book of Picnics, ‘nothing more than a diversion, a novelty entertainment for a section of society with too little to do and too much time to do it’.

At the very pinnacle of that foppish society was the Prince of Wales (later George IV) who, with his mistress Mrs Fitzherbert, was a member of The Picnic Club (or Pic Nic Society), founded in 1802 as a ‘harmless and inoffensive society for persons of fashion’. Although this involved little more than trips to the theatre followed by a picnic supper, the club was seen as dissolute and immoral. It closed a year later and the word picnic was sullied, from then on associated with the silly, trifling and inconsequential.

Of course, there’s absolutely nothing silly about a proper picnic. Informality is the key. A few soft rugs, a couple of deckchairs and lots and lots of ice. My mother’s idea of a prep-school picnic was a last-minute supermarket sweep through the Chippenham Sainsbury’s, with endless sandwiches, sausages and packets of crisps. Absolutely fine by me. My aunt was slightly more organised, in that she’d raid Justin De Blanc (a sort of proto Ottolenghi) in London’s Pimlico for wonderful pâtés, pies, quiches and salads.

I do remember parents who would arrive at sports days with a vast oak table, formal chairs, thick linen tablecloths, silver candelabras and beef Wellington, served by a fleet of butlers. As we mucked about on the grass, they would sit, formal as a state banquet at Windsor, fiddling with those damned fish knives. It really can’t have been much fun and totally misses the point. A proper picnic should be eaten on or near to the ground. You can get up, wander about, come and go as you please, unsullied by the dreary conventions of the dining-room table. It is about the pure pleasure of languid ease, food without fuss or faff.

Decent cool boxes are a must (Yeti ones are very good indeed) for food and wine alike. Wine should be a light rosé or crisp white, ice cold, and flow like the Thames in full spate.

As for the food, it should require no more than a fork (plus a sharp carving knife), and plates should always be paper. Never be afraid of using your fingers. A whole roast chicken with a pot of freshly made mayonnaise is an essential, alongside lots of good crusty bread; fillet of beef, cooked rare, and a proper raised pork pie, with an excess of English mustard; good British ham, carved thick, and Spanish pata negra, sliced tissue-paper thin; potted shrimps, smoked eel, a few dressed crabs and a big bowl of lobster salad.

Salads should refresh and inspire — sliced tomatoes swimming in olive oil, a proper Niçoise or a couple of pan bagnat, basically Niçoise in a loaf, made a day early so everything soaks deep into the bread. Vitello tonnato works well, as does a brace of fat Spanish tortillas, oozing in the middle. Don’t forget the Scampi Fries, obviously, and those olives in the tin from Perelló. A tub of cornichons never goes amiss, either, alongside some good British cheese. For pudding, English cherries and strawberries, Cornish clotted cream and Scottish raspberries — and a big box of Maltesers.

One final note — do choose your company with care. The sun may be beaming, and the food divine. But if your companions are bores, it will all be for naught.

This article first appeared in the April 29 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

A pot of deeply dark honey has just arrived by post and I find myself staring at it as if it’s 18-carat liquid gold. It comes from Scotland and stems from heather. According to scientific research, it has many of the properties that have made New Zealand’s manuka honey world famous, from healing wounds to soothing sore throats, with the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant powers that have turned that far-flung nectar into a superfood.

In truth, I am gazing at this jar as if it can repel anything — even defend us from an impending Third World War. Wishful thinking, of course. However, if any substance could claim to save the world, it might be this one. This is all thanks to the honey bee and a new and exclusive cohort of bee and honey lovers called honey sommeliers, who attended the first British-based course organised by the UK Honey Guild in Edinburgh last summer to attain their qualification.

We’ve long hailed honey bees as the planet’s tiny saviours for their pollination skills: no bees, no plants, no plants, no people. We’ve also long recognised the medicinal properties of honey. Yet few of us pause to consider the excellence of what bees create beyond that, namely as a fine food product.

Among the first to recognise that officially were the Bolognese, the northern Italians famous for their appreciation of all things culinary and proud proponents of the slow-food movement. They began identifying the different types of honey bees can produce and established that honey doesn’t originate from a squeezy supermarket bottle, but from a terroir — the characteristic culture and environment of a region — and should be treated as such.

What followed was the creation of a honey sensory analysis course, said to be as challenging and prestigious as achieving a master of wine certificate. Those who have taken it often describe it as so difficult that we might wonder why anyone would subject themselves to it. ‘I’ve sat structural engineering exams, but nothing compared with this,’ admits Helen Rogers, one of the UK’s five fully fledged honey sommeliers, co-founder of the UK Honey Guild and a cantilever-stair specialist. ‘It was the hardest test I’ve ever done.’ Their determination could be said to equal that of worker bees, who live no more than five to six weeks to create a mere half a teaspoon of honey.

For the first time this year at Apimondia, the international federation promoting apiculture, a honey bar was established at its venue in Copenhagen, Denmark, and five British honeys featured at it, including a version of the heather honey I’m so enraptured by. This was all thanks, in part, to the establishment in 2024 of the UK’s Honey Guild, which was co-founded by its chairman Dr Gino Jabbar, a physicist and Scottish bee farmer, whose heather honey I’ve been tasting. Dr Jabbar also initiated the UK’s honey sommelier course, his aim being ‘to champion honey as a fine food. We want to develop a honey culture here and get people to ask for a particular variety of honey as they might do wine’.

The term honey sommelier was coined by American beekeeper and connoisseur Carla Marina Marchese in her book Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper: ‘I’ve never really understood why no one talks about honey the way they talk about wine or cheese or olive oil,’ she explains. ‘There are thousands of botanical sources that make so many types of honey.’ It’s a catchy term that trips off the tongue better than its true classification: member of the Italian National Register of Experts in the Sensory Analysis of Honeys. As Sally Chamberlain, chef, food judge and an attendant at the Bologna course elaborates, ‘sensory analyst sounds scientific and research-based, but sommelier invites people to taste, to explore’, which is what the mission of the UK Honey Guild is all about.

One of the most outspoken of honey experts and sommeliers, as well as adviser for the UK Honey Guild, is the writer Sarah Wyndham Lewis. Her husband, Dale Gibson, is a leading beekeeper, who is known for keeping bees on the rooftop of Lambeth Palace, London SE1, among other distinguished places and palaces. Together, they advise the Government, the Royal Household, Michelin-starred chefs and corporate businesses. Curiously, and not unusually for a honey sommelier, Sarah is allergic to bees. Perhaps that’s what drew her closer to them: creatures that could potentially kill her, yet also hold extraordinary healing powers. ‘What I quickly recognised was that the honey I was getting from different areas was very different,’ she points out. ‘I also understood that the only way that beekeepers are going to survive is if people buy and appreciate really good honey and become much more attuned to the fact that it’s a luxurious food product.’

Fellow sommelier, vintner and award-winning beekeeper Rebecca Beveridge agrees: ‘People look at a jar [priced] at £8.50 and think it’s expensive, but they’d happily spend that on a bottle of wine,’ she elaborates. ‘If you think about the journey of honey, and what it takes to produce it, it’s incredible value.’

There’s been extensive research in which scientists have studied samples of cheap honey from supermarket shelves and discovered that 98% of everything imported was ‘adulterated or cheap plant syrups’, Rebecca continues. In short, we might as well be using golden syrup in our food rather than what we imagine is a natural product. As a result, certain shop-bought honeys have been described as one of the ‘most fraudulent products on the market’. Cooks, too, have been misled, as Sarah laments: ‘I would be astonished at how, on MasterChef, contestants would go on about wild thyme or garlic they’d foraged, then add what they call honey from a squeezy bottle as a sweetener.’

By contrast, there are those often major landowners who understand food and beekeeping. At Buckingham Palace, honey appears on menus in everything from lemon possets to honey-roast hams, and at Highgrove, Gloucestershire, The King has long championed his estate honey as part of his passion for provenance. The Queen sells her own jars of honey through Fortnum & Mason, raising money for her charities in the process, and, when The Princess of Wales invites schoolchildren to taste honey from the hives at her Norfolk home, she asks them whether it ‘tastes like flowers’.

Honey here is not merely sweetener, but also a statement: a food with a sense of place, as reflective of its surroundings as the claret in the cellar or the lamb from the parkland. It’s no coincidence that The King chose a bee to represent industry — and its ability to create something significant — on the first pound coins minted after his coronation. Today, many great houses — from Blenheim, Oxfordshire, to Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire — that once might have produced honey for beeswax candles to illuminate their rooms, now proudly jar their own honey, often for charitable purposes.

Certain chefs, too, are beginning to recognise the way that honey offers nuances of flavour that can transform food. Country Life’s own Gill Meller and food writers Nigel Slater and Diana Henry have waxed lyrical about it and Merlin Johnson of Michelin-starred Osip in Somerset is a key advocate. Former River Cafe pastry chef Anna Higham spins Helen Rogers’s beekeeping produce into queue-worthy honey custard buns and pies, honey and yoghurt scones and honey and ricotta tarts at her bakery, Quince, London N1. Meanwhile, fellow chef Sally Chamberlain eulogises: ‘Honey doesn’t only sweeten, it adds depth and character. It elevates rather than masks. It can often save and flavour dishes in a way that sugar can’t.’

To understand more, I attended a honey-tasting course at The Newt in Somerset, which champions bees in its Beezantium attraction, initially created by another honey advocate, Paula Carnell, and now curated by her former understudy, Kerry Redman. Both have attended the Bologna course. In the old cellars of the main house, 10 tiny glasses containing morsels of honey are set before us, ranging in colour from darkest gold to translucent yellow. With each jar, we are given a wooden stick — ‘something metal might interfere with the flavour,’ says Lady Redman — and told to ‘stir, savour and sniff’ before tasting.

‘Coo, this smells like cheesy feet,’ declares one attendee, referring to a rare dandelion honey that turns out to be delicious. Another tastes like lemons and comes from lime trees. One of my favourites is from the Lowther estate in Cumbria, described by Lady Redman as the most ‘Pooh Bear type of honey’ — in other words, one you might enjoy unashamedly snuffling at. Each has a glorious individual flavour that captivates all of us and none of our comments is dismissed as ridiculous, smelly feet and all.

The message I learnt: honey sommeliers do for nectar what wine sommeliers do for grapes — sniffing, swirling, identifying and, most importantly, teaching the rest of us how to recognise and describe what lies within the jar on our breakfast table. As one member of the course put it: ‘I’m never going to look at honey in the same way again.’

Each spoonful of heather honey is a moorland in miniature, each jar of lime honey a summer avenue of trees. The bees themselves are the alchemists, drawing on blossoms we might pass by without noticing and transforming them into flavours that speak of time and place more eloquently than we ever could.

Meanwhile, I am still staring at what I now know is truly a pot of gold.

For more information about the Honey Sensory Analysis (honey sommelier) course in Bologna, Italy, visit www.beesources.com

Marcus Wareing is gearing up to start filming the newest series of MasterChef: The Professionals. It has been ‘a bit hectic,’ he admits. He tells me that he only sees co-host Monica Galetti every nine months, when they film. Presumably this is because they are both so busy with work.

That hasn’t stopped him from preparing for this interview, however. ‘I’ve gone through your [set] questions and I’ve written them down,’ he says, ever prepared. ‘They’re actually really interesting questions to dig deep into… it’s not really questions I thought your magazine would be asking… normally I flick through. I just love the imagery of it,’ he says, either not realising, or simply not caring, that this is basically the equivalent of me admitting to coming to one of his restaurants to take a photo of the food and not eat any.

Marcus was born in Southport, Lancashire, in 1970. The 55-year-old was the son of a fruit and potato merchant, which sparked his interest in food. He started his culinary career at the Savoy Hotel under Anton Edelmann, before going on to join Albert Roux at the Michelin starred restaurant Le Gavroche. Here he first met Gordon Ramsey, who he later went on to work with at Aubergine and on other cookery projects. The pair were inseparable (Ramsay was Marcus’s best man) until a much-documented feud that lasted for many years, to the delight of tabloid journalists in the British media (in 2008 he called Ramsay a ‘sad bastard’ who he ‘still adores’ in Waitrose Food Illustrated magazine, of all places).

Marcus earned his first Michelin star at the age of 25. Great British Menu followed, then came MasterChef and a slew of cookbooks alongside other television appearances. This year he was awarded an MBE. Today, Marcus is mostly out of the kitchen. One of his roles is as an ambassador for Seven Seas, the Omega 3 suppliers. ‘I love fitness… I am going to do 10-15K today, because it’s just great for thinking,’ he says. Due to his active lifestyle, people often ask Marcus what supplements he takes, the chef tells me. Being an ambassador for the brand was a natural fit, since he’s been taking their supplements since childhood. Running, however, was not something he had time for earlier on in his career.

‘I’ve sacrificed more than any other chef,’ he says. It’s an enormous claim. ‘It’s my way of saying to myself; you can’t compete with me, you can’t keep up with me … you couldn’t drag me out of the kitchen [at the start]. Aged 11, my dad had taught me how to work like no other young person,’ he says.

‘When I came to London at the age of 18 it was no fitness. It was just pure work — head down. Once you sort of get into marriage and having a family it makes you do other things,’ he says. He doesn’t run to music, preferring silence so that he has time with his thoughts. The marriage in question is to Jane Wareing, who he met aged 22 at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex. Marcus was the sous chef and Jane the front of house manager: a tale as old as time, as far as hospitality goes. She seems to be, based on the way he talks about her, pretty crucial to the Marcus Wareing operation as a whole. Without her I suspect that his life would have far more work in it, but far less joy. They have three children together aged 24, 21 and 18.

Marcus will be cooking at Wimbledon again this year for many of the tennis championship’s punters and he may be part of a new TV show, in a different style to MasterChef, but it is still currently up in the air. Although he is the least busy he has ever been, he also works with Speakers for Schools for the charity Futures for All to help young people break into the workforce. Marcus mentors adults too, as part of Forward with Marcus Wareing, his culinary training program. ‘I've got a lot to give back. I've got a huge amount of experience. So now, believe it or not, I enjoy not running restaurants,’ he says.

Your aesthetic hero

Muhammad Ali, for many reasons really; for his connection with people; for what he stood for — not as a fighter, but his political views and what he fought for in America. For not fighting a war; changing his name from Cassius Clay, his ‘slave name’, as he called it; and also for the beauty and the brilliance of him in the boxing ring and for creating a style of boxing that's never been replicated and never will be. I just think his philosophy in life was quite extraordinary. He said, in an interview with Parkinson, once: ‘If I was a bin man, I’d be the greatest bin man of all time.’ That’s one of those messages that, as a young person, sticks in your head.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

Recently, I was very fortunate to have been awarded an MBE. So I went and bought a suit from Hackett, which is really nice, to go and collect it in. I’ve not bought a suit for ages, really, and I've got lots of jackets and lots of different things, but it's quite rare. And I was like, I've got those things in the wardrobe already, but Jane said: ‘No, you're going to go out and buy a new suit.’ So I bought a suit, which meant that everyone [in my family] bought something. But it’s a special occasion — it is your life's work.

A book that you’ve found inspiring

I’ve never been a colossal reader. I’ve never had time during my working career. I read when I’m on holiday. I also don’t have an amazing attention span for focusing on something, unless I’m in a kitchen, but my son has introduced me to an author named David Goggins. He is a retired navy SEAL and a black man — in his time there weren't many black people in the marines, so he was part of the top elite. My eldest son is in the forces and he said: ‘You’ve got to read this.’ It is about how he never gave up. I read both books and now I am halfway through reading them both for a second time. I find them so inspiring because they just give me energy. He gets a lot of stick on social media, but he is the genuine article.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

Do you know, I am going to be really stupid here as I've actually not really been to many. There is one that I do want to go to see. It's the Bayeux Tapestry, which is coming to the British Museum. My wife and I watched The King and Conqueror, the TV series, and I loved that. I love history and I love watching period dramas. I remember watching it on the news and seeing that it was coming. It is quite extraordinary that they are going to move it here. My son is into fashion, and did an art A-level, along with my daughter — they've always gone out to so many different museums and things, and I never really had the time to do that, but this is the one I do want to go and see.

A possession you’d never sell

My watches, I think. They're the things that I will leave to my family. I love watches. I had quite a few of them at one point and, unfortunately, they all got stolen bar one, which was on my wrist. I had them all marked out for my children's 18th birthdays. My eldest son had his, but my other son and my daughter obviously didn't, and I had two watches lined up for them. The watches I've got now are the two things that I won't sell, because they're you — they're quite personal. I don't have jewellery. They're the only bit of jewellery that I have that I can pass on to my children.

The music that you work to

Work? No. Work out? It’s my Spotify playlist, really, whatever happens to turn up on my phone. I never used to listen to music. There was never a radio in our house, or on in the car or at work. Now I like all sorts.

The last podcast you listened to

My son introduced me to The Rest is Politics. I listen to a lot of LBC Radio and Times Radio. Every now and again I'll pop this on, and it's really good. I like both of them and they're both really good at debating. They make a good podcast.

Your favourite painting

When I opened a restaurant at The Berkeley they did all this beautiful design work, and I said to the designer: ‘What about paintings?’ He took me to art fairs around London and he chose this, which is called Oranges and Lemons by Tobias Till. It’s a massive piece showing London over different eras — it’s about six feet long. I’ve looked at it for 10-ish years and there’s always something on it which you’ve never seen before. When I closed the restaurant I took it with me.

What you’d take to a desert island

Guess what? Omega 3. Because I won’t be able to catch enough fish.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

Noise, my wife getting up going to the gym or pilates and my work — it makes me really energised.

The items you collect

Wine. Since I've run restaurants, wine has been the alternative passion. I sometimes look at them as pieces of art, some of them undrinkable because of their age or their value, even down to simple bottles of rosé. I just love that whole world. I used to love just standing listening to the sommeliers’ knowledge and their passion about wine in my restaurants, and that's become one of my collecting things right now. I like to look at the bottles. Sometimes we go into the cellar and have a drink and just stare at them, because they’re beautiful.

The person that would play you in a film of your life

It's very funny, I was chatting to my wife about this one earlier and of course you want the obvious ones — all the good lookers. But I was on The One Show last year, and I sat next to Tim Robbins, who was promoting his new TV show, and he had the same beard and the same sort of coloured hair as me. We just look like father and son side by side, it's so funny. He is also an incredible actor.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

I've had a lot on many different occasions, but where I'm from, there's a town outside Southport called Ormskirk, and there was a chef called Mark Birchall who was working there, and as time went on, this guy just got more and more known and recognised. Moor Hall now has three Michelin stars. Jen and I went there with our family, and just had one of the most extraordinary meals. I hadn't seen a dining room and a kitchen work together so beautifully, and also at the same time deliver stunning food.

The best present you’ve ever received

My wife stopped me from going to work on my 40th birthday, and we went into central London. She took me for a fabulous breakfast in a restaurant in Mayfair and then we walked to a shop called Pogson & Davis and she bought me a tailor-made suit. Jen had set this all up. It was a really little shop just around the corner from Claridge's with two amazing proper tailors — real characters. We drank champagne, chose some materials, and made this suit. I can see them right now in my head. I put on a shirt and a tie, and one of the men saw me doing my tie up and said: ‘Leave it to me.’ He tied the most perfect tie — absolutely perfect. I've never undone it. I've still got it today, 15 years later, I tell my children: ‘Do not touch that tie.’ It's the only tailor made suit that I've got, and it was my birthday present from Jane.

A hotel that you could go back and back to

Gravetye Manor, where I worked. It was an amazing place. I always wanted to run a country house hotel, because I just love the countryside, and I met my girlfriend there, who's now my wife. We go back periodically for birthdays and celebrations.

Marcus is working with the Omega 3 supplement brand Seven Seas to raise awareness of Omega 3 and healthy ageing. You can find out if you're getting enough Omega 3 in your diet with a quiz from Seven Seas here.

London’s cognoscenti gathered at Notting Hill's The Fat Badger last Friday to drink not wine, nor Martinis, but Showerings fine cider. It seems an odd idea: a drink usually associated with picnics or pub gardens suddenly being paired with tagliolini or whatever trendy dish Londoners are serving nowadays. Nick Showering, whose family has been making cider in Shepton Mallet for nearly 200 years, is ebullient about his product’s ascending fortunes. Only last week, the brand went live in 490 Tesco stores at a price point nearly double that of supermarket staples such as Aspall. ‘It shows an appetite for fine cider,’ Nick says, ‘even among those who previously wouldn’t have known about it.’

Fine cider — made from 100% fermented apple juice — is different to the stuff we are used to drinking as a casual, afterwork tipple. It boasts a more complex flavour; perhaps a more acquired taste. When Clare Smyth, Britain’s only three-Michelin-starred female chef, cooked a gourmet fish and chips on the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen last year, she paired the meal with Showerings ‘because the tannins and bitterness of the fine cider cut right through the fattiness of the fish,’ says the brand’s heir apparent. ‘West Country cider is closer to a red wine: characterful, bodied and tannin-rich,’ Nick explains, ‘because the orchards here produce cider apples, unlike in the South-East.’ There, orchards tend to produce dessert apples, a sweeter variety whose cider is ‘lighter bodied’. Could cider tastings be the new wine tastings?

For young people, perhaps. ‘As they get priced out of fine wines,’ explains Hannah Crosbie, a wine critic for The Observer, ‘they can turn to fine cider, as it’s a more accessible entry point.’ The drink, she adds, is a far richer and more varied drink than people give it credit for: ‘It can range from peaty flavours to something more PetNat-adjacent' — the latter shorthand for Pétillant Naturel.

A purist may well turn their nose up; yet they’d be missing out. Near Taunton, the Temperley family has been making fine cider at Burrow Hill Farm since 1971. Their Somerset Pomona, a 20% ABV apple liqueur blending young cider apple juice with matured apple brandy, and aged in oak barrels, won gold at the Women's Wine and Spirit Awards last year.

Envelope-pushing chefs are keen to explore fine cider’s potential in cooking, too. Diarmuid Goodwin, a Northern Irish cook who trained under Angela Hartnett, says he used fine cider to make the base in a nettle and haddock chowder, which he recently prepared live on Virgin Media’s Six O’Clock Show. ‘I’m not usually a fan of cider,’ he laughs. ‘It reminds me of drinking behind a church when I was 15. In my ripe old age, however, I’ve learnt to appreciate the complexity of the real stuff.’ Sip slowly…

This feature first appeared in the April 29, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Oh, the US of A. Land of the free, home of the brave. Land of the people who switch their knife and fork from one hand to the other. Home of the strange.

I am being entirely facetious, of course. It is, after all, a great American tradition. (‘I hope you’re all Republicans,’ Ronald Reagan told his surgeons as he went under the knife having been rushed to hospital following an assassination attempt.) Allow me, then, to return the favour for a moment — starting, bien entendu, with the matter of the knife and fork.

The knife and fork is one of the few cases in which the American makes life unnecessarily difficult for himself. It is also one of the few cases in which the European does not. For the uninitiated: Americans believe that one should use their dominant hand to cut their food and that the knife then be returned to the subjugate hand, so that the fork can be transferred to the stronger one for picking. The habit, of late, has become a popular talking point in British circles keen to dissect our so-called ‘special relationship’ with Uncle Sam as The King embarks on his very own State Visit.

For some time now, the President has been lamenting how far the British have fallen. He believes the only way we can now save ourselves is by adopting the Anglophile ways of our great-great grandparents. Last I checked, however, the Anglophile tradition held that the knife should always be placed in the dominant hand. This doesn’t exactly square with American dining etiquette.

Perhaps our transatlantic cousins ought to rethink their table manners, at least for as long as they believe that aping a chocolate-box version of Britishness is tantamount to cultural salvation. After all, you wouldn’t be caught dead swapping your knife and fork from one hand to the other on this side of the pond: it would be considered wholly inefficient, and that’s without even having to contend with American portion sizes. Just imagine having to swap your knife and fork around non-stop for so large a meal as is customary in the US. It could take several days.

Perhaps the President, in his remembrance of things past, intends for us to ape the mannerisms of our yet further-flung ancestors, who didn’t use forks at all — viz., the Tudors. It’s a logic that might explain his own predilection for cutlery-less foods and may recast my own penchant for 2am chicken wings as a grand, patriotic gesture.

Osip, the Michelin-star restaurant just outside Bruton, Somerset, as acclaimed as it is notorious, is now launching a £75-a-head table d’hôte menu. This will run alongside its classic 10-course tasting menu — £165 a head, sans wine — in a sign that fine dining has to adapt its offering to overcome what restaurant critic Giles Coren predicted might be its death in 2026.

Consider this a metonym for what is happening in dining more widely. A redistribution of high-low values is taking place across the restaurant scene as punters seek both fairer prices and simpler food — and smaller portions become the norm everywhere, courtesy of Ozempic.

Thus it is that a Michelin-starred restaurant such as Labombe by Trivet (Old Park Lane, W1) can serve a two-course lunch for £30 a head, whereas a one-person bill at Bar Vallette (Kingsland Road, E2), a hip east London joint that specialises in pintxos and where the food holds rather more starch than the tablecloths, can easily come up to £60 without drinks and before the service charge is applied.

Anyway, Osip’s table d’hôte menu is reportedly inspired by the spirit of the French auberge, with menus that change according to the local harvest — the restaurant is attached to a farm — and using offal left over from the meats used in the tasting menu. Here’s hoping you like tripe...

Foxtrot Oscar. A classic old Chelsea restaurant that, not uncoincidentally, happened to share its initials with the British military term for ‘get the hell out of here’. Or words to that effect.

Yet Foxtrot Oscar, on Royal Hospital Road, was one of London’s louche and lovely greats. Joe, the barman, shook up restorative bullshots, as racing from Epsom, Ascot or wherever played eternally on televisions above. Dogs were not so much wel- comed as embraced, the ever-pulchritudinous waitresses plucked from the pages of Debrett’s and the idea of lunch without a drink tantamount to treason. The only real sin here was being rude to staff. Quite right, too.

At its heart was the late, great Mike Proudlock. With film-star good looks and lashings of charm, he was a restaurateur of the old school, ensuring glasses were kept brimming over, cigarettes lit (Foxtrot was a smoker’s paradise) and kümmel on crushed ice in constant supply. Le patron always manged ici. I had my 18th birthday party there — and my 21st. Both times, things got rather out of hand and a couple of friends fell asleep in the loos, only to wake up, after midnight, to find themselves locked in. Hey ho. Those were the days.

The food was never really the point, mainly classic British nursery, with a slight American twang. Potted shrimp and herring roe on toast, steak-and-kidney pie, a burger and a fairly edible fishcake. One dish stood out above all others, however: eggs Benedict, a golden-hued, oozing eggy beacon, both blessedly simple and slyly sophisticated. Take an English muffin, split, toast, top with a thick slice of good English ham, then a poached egg, soft boiled, and drape with an excess of hollandaise sauce. It soothed the most vicious of hangovers, the only possible justification for that ghastly thing called ‘brunch’.

As ever with recipes of such renown, there are endless pretenders to its culinary crown. In one story, a retired stockbroker by the name of Lemuel Benedict turns up at The Waldorf Hotel in New York, sometime in about 1894, with a monstrous hangover. He demands ‘buttered toast, poached eggs, crispy bacon and a hooker of hollandaise’. The chef replaces the toast with English muffins, the bacon with ham, and so eggs Benedict was born.

Not true, argues Edward P. Montgomery in a letter sent to The New York Times in 1967. No, the dish was in fact invented by a Commodore E. C. Benedict, who had passed on the recipe to Montgomery’s uncle. It most certainly wasn’t, retorts Mrs Mabel C. Butler in yet another missive to the newspaper. The ‘true story’ behind the original recipe was ‘well known to the relations of Mrs Le Grand Benedict’, a lady who asked for ‘poached eggs on toasted English muffins with a thin slice of ham, hollandaise sauce and a truffle on top’ at Delmonico’s, also in New York, sometime around the turn of the century.

The truth is more prosaic, in that the recipe had probably existed for some time before them all, albeit under a different name. Anyway, eggs Benedict first appeared in a cookbook, Eggs, and How To Use Them, published in 1898, and quickly became an American classic.

Foxtrot Oscar has gone the way of all flesh, but the memories still endure. For those looking for a taste of the real thing, that master restaurateur Jeremy King is your man. His version at Le Caprice (see recipe below) was every bit the equal to those in Chelsea — as they are now at Arlington (or Caprice II: The Return), SW1, and The Park, W2. It just goes to show that times may change, but good eggs Benedict endure forever.

Recipe: Eggs Benedict

This comes from Le Caprice, the cookbook that combines the words of A. A. Gill with the recipes of Mark Hix. Don’t panic about the hollandaise: the key is to add the first two thirds of the butter in a slow trickle. If it splits, take it off the heat, reserve the mixture, clean the bowl and add another egg yolk. Then whisk the split sauce slowly back in.

Ingredients — serves 4

For the hollandaise sauce

70ml white-wine vinegar
80ml water
2 small shallots, peeled and chopped
A few sprigs tarragon
1 bay leaf
10 black peppercorns
400g unsalted butter
5 medium egg yolks
Salt and freshly ground white pepper

To serve

8 slices kasseler (or English) ham
4 English muffins
8 medium eggs
400g of the hollandaise sauce

Method

• To make the hollandaise sauce, place the vinegar, water, shallots, herbs and peppercorns in a saucepan and reduce the liquid to about a tablespoonful. Strain and put aside.

• Melt the butter and simmer it for 5–10 minutes. Take off the heat, leave to cool a little, then pour off the pure fat where it has separated from the whey and discard the whey. This helps to keep the sauce thick.

• Put the egg yolks in a small stainless-steel bowl with half the vinegar reduction and whisk over a pan of gently simmering water until the mixture begins to thicken and become frothy.

• Slowly trickle in the butter, whisking continuously; an electric hand whisk will help. If the butter is added too quickly, the sauce will separate. When you have added two-thirds of the butter, taste the sauce and add a little more or all of the reduction. Then put in the rest of the butter. The sauce should not be too vinegary; the vinegar should just cut the oiliness of the butter.

• Season with salt and pepper, cover with clingfilm and leave in a warm, not hot, place until needed. The sauce can be reheated over a bowl of hot water and lightly whisked again.

• To serve, lightly toast the muffins and soft-poach the eggs. Place the ham on the muffin with the poached egg on top and coat it with a couple of generous spoonfuls of the hollandaise.

Depending on who you ask, the food and drink scene in London is either in a state of despair or it's never been in better health. As always, when there is this much noise, it's best to get an expert on to cut a path through the metaphorical fog. Who could be better than Leonie Cooper, food and drink editor at Time Out London, and co-host of Messy Lunch with Gizzi Erskine.

Where can you meet a man called Otto, wear a viking hat, and grind up a pigeon into a sauce? Where was ground zero for the natural wine movement? Where are the best pubs in our capital? You'll agree, all very important questions, and thankfully Leonie has all the answers. Somehow, we even get into the contents of her fridge, which will no doubt impress plenty of our regular listeners.

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We also talk about messy lunches (should we be having more of them? Are they allowed? Why were they ever allowed?) and her new show Messy Lunch, which she co-hosts with Gizzi Erskine. Messy Lunch sees Leonie and Gizzi take the great and the good from the world of music and interview them over a slap-up meal, greasing the wheels of gossip and drawing out the best stories from some of the nation's most famous musicians. Not only will it make you hungry, it will also make you wonder why you ever took a job in accounting.

I don't say this often, but Leonie has been one of the best guests we've ever had on the podcast, so make sure to tune in and listen. And then go and book a decent restaurant afterwards. Or become a rockstar. Or both.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Leonie Cooper

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Pubs are not the same as they once were.

Once upon a time, they kept food to ham or cheese rolls, served wine of two kinds (red or white) and didn’t do music beyond a regular on the piano. Once upon a time, pubs — at least this side of the Irish Sea — were no guarantee of finding Guinness.

If the first three examples speak to a world long since disappeared, being hard up for a Guinness is no lifetime ago. Until 2005, it was so slow to shift in English pubs that the brewery pasteurised it to give it a longer shelf life. By 2011, it was so unpopular that the day after then President Barack Obama was pictured with a pint, 400 jobs were cut in cost-saving measures.

‘When I moved to London 10 years ago, I would get people telling me where to go to get a good pint of Guinness and, frankly, it was usually awful,’ observes Aaron Wall, a Dublin-born bartender who now runs a brace of venues in the capital, Homeboy, N1, and The Prince, EC1. He knows his pints — Guinness asked him to train the team at Covent Garden’s new £73 million Guinness Open Gate Brewery — and his years in London have coincided with the astonishing resurgence of a brand that had been largely unloved since its pre-Second World War heyday. For decades it tried, and failed, to shake off its reputation as a heavy old man’s drink, from 1979’s Guinness Lite (‘Ladies’ Guinness’ to punters, if you can believe it) to the wheat beer Guinness Breo in the 1990s.

Now, the stuff roars down the lines: since 2023, industry estimates suggest one in every nine pints poured in the UK is a Guinness. Around the world, 10 million pints of it are sunk every day. What’s interesting is that this resurgence doesn’t speak to stout in general, or at least the kinds of big, boozy, treacle-soaked stouts that often lurk in craft beer places. Guinness has a style of its own, sometimes called Irish dry stout, a term invented for the Dublin beer.

‘Guinness is called a pint of plain for a reason; it’s just good, plain stout that goes down easy,’ says Dublin-based Daragh Curran, who in the past few years has picked up more than half a million followers on social media as ‘the Guinness guru’. Yet there are others doing something similar, both old and new. Murphy’s (established in 1856) and Beamish (1792), both founded in Cork, are extremely similar: ‘Murphy’s I love; a little bit of a sweeter, more chocolatey taste than Guinness. Beamish has the more smoked, roasted flavour, more of an acquired taste,’ says Daragh. He’s also a fan of O’Hara’s, rarely seen in British pubs.

The Guinness style of stout is non-traditional: stout originated as a term for a strong porter beer and, for a century, there was no difference between the two. Even now the difference is slight: porters are traditionally sweeter, marked by chocolate notes; stouts are usually darker in colour, more bitter, and taste more like coffee. However, neither began in Dublin. ‘Porter and stout were as much London as Irish,’ notes chef Richard Corrigan. ‘Unfortunately, the Napoleonic wars came along, and [in Britain] the grain went to feeding horses for Wellington’s Peninsular wars. Of course, the Irish didn’t agree and kept brewing their porter with their barley. There is a whole thing of stout being Irish, but I think it’s very much a London drink.’ In other words, when Britain was off fighting France, Dublin’s St James’s Gate Guinness brewery made haste.

As then, today: Guinness’s astonishing popularity means others are now trying to muscle into the market: Brewdog has released Black Heart and Jeremy Clarkson’s Hawkstone brand launched its Black Nitro Stout. Even Marks & Spencer sells cans of Black Nitro. There is no escaping the black stuff.

Why has it come back? Daragh thinks the brewer had almost nothing to do with it — or at least, not in the way it might like. ‘I would put it down to the fact that when the pubs were closed [in the pandemic], people’s appetites really built up: you could get a can of Heineken or Stella at home, but Guinness was totally different. By the time the pubs reopened…’ In other words, Guinness can’t make a canned beer good enough to rival what’s poured in the local boozer. The company’s other slip-up was to run out over Christmas 2024: it helped open the market for Murphy’s, Beamish and all the others.

Why does the pub beat the can? Partly because pubs share lines for lagers, but Guinness uses its own systems and pushes the beer through taps pressured with a mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The nitrogen produces smaller bubbles, creating the beer’s trademark creaminess and preserving its head. Much has been made of Irish pubs running a ratio of 75:25 nitrogen/carbon dioxide and British pubs sticking to 70:30. How much does it matter? Guinness owner Diageo is strict in Britain, but some landlords are known to take matters into their own hands to do it like home. ‘The first time the Guinness technician came in to commission the lines, I wouldn’t let him near the cellar until we’d had a chat,’ says Aaron. ‘And then we worked on everything from the cooler to the pressure…’ He is far from the only one.

Temperature matters, as does glassware; some people swear the type of tap makes a difference. There is talk of the schtick, the two-part pour, splitting the G. The dome on the pint’s head. The countless nicknames. Those conversations are both fuelling and are fuelled by social media — Daragh is not the only Guinness influencer — and that in turn has spilled into real life, even inspiring clothing ranges, from JW Anderson to Next.

If this all seems nerdy, that’s partly the point, argues Oisin Rogers, whose London pub The Devonshire, W1, legendarily serves more Guinness than anywhere else in the world. People like to delve into things. Is that more important than the drink itself? ‘I listen to people talking about what they think of what’s in their glass every day. When it comes down to it, the taste of it is actually bland,’ he says. ‘When people get talking about the variances and the differences and the complexities of it, they become engrossed in the wrong stories, the wrong points of view. But it’s non-political and non-divisive and it happens in a space where there is no possibility of offence being taken. It brings people together.’

Eggs, eggs, eggs. Soft boiled with toast ‘soldiers’, scrambled, fried or poached. Breakfast owes them everything. Their versatility makes them one of the most beloved ingredients of a British pantry. From pickled, to devilled and truffled, to mercilessly deep fried until golden and delicious, there’s always a new way to eat an egg.

Selflessly, this Easter, I eschewed my usual devouring of one million chocolate iterations and instead pushed my stomach to the limit to bring you the ultimate guide to London’s most innovative eggs. Let’s get cracking.

What? Devilled eggs

Where? Rita’s, Soho

Devilled eggs, the sexiest sounding and most 1970s looking eggs of all, are done to perfection at Rita’s. Founded in 2012, the independent restaurant is led by head chef and owner Gabriel Pryce and beverage director Missy Flynn. ‘We use toban-djan in our devilled eggs,’ says Gabriel, and the Chinese fermented chili bean paste certainly makes them stand out from the crowd.

They are so popular that some customers flock to Rita’s especially for one. ‘One woman has been eating them since 2014,’ Gabriel told The Observer last year, which makes sense, because they are by far the best devilled eggs I have ever had the pleasure of hungrily gulping down. Slightly spicy and indulgently creamy, this is a new twist on a classic egg recipe that comes with a welcome tang, and is well worth a trip into Soho.

Or, try your hand at whipping them up at home…

Ingredients

• 10 medium eggs
• 1.5 heaped tablespoons of toban-djan
• 1 heaped tablespoon of mayonnaise
• 1 bunch of chives finely chopped
• 2 tsp toasted sesame seeds
• Sesame oil

Method

• Boil the eggs for 14 minutes then chill in ice water
• Peel the eggs and carefully cut them in half with a thin bladed knife
• Gently remove the firm yolks and add them to a blender with the mayonnaise and toban-djan. Keep the whites on a tray in the fridge
• Blend the yolk mix until smooth and silky and transfer to a piping bag (or use a spoon to gently fill them in if you don’t have one)
• Fill each egg white with the yolk mix and top each one with a sprinkle of chives, sesame seeds and a splash of sesame oil

What? Lobster omelette

Where? The Goring, Victoria

The hotel HRH The Princess of Wales spent the night in before her wedding is undoubtedly fit for royalty. As is their signature dish, the best-selling lobster omelette. Rich and indulgent, the budget meal beloved by Gwen from Gavin & Stacey reaches new heights of luxury in this dish from the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant. Sadly, executive chef Graham Squire is not an egg man. ‘Couldn’t think of anything worse,’ he tells me. ‘The smell of a boiled egg really upsets me. We make huge amounts of egg truffle mayonnaise mix for sandwiches and that mix itself, I will not taste it. I just cannot stand eggs.’

Fortunately, Graham is a consummate professional and kindly offers to show me how to make their lobster omelette anyway. They use Clarence Court eggs (the Financial Times of the egg world; well regarded for their quality, tinged a different colour from the rest and ‘quite pricey’ to quote Graham). Typically they sell about 24 a day which, I can confirm, is because they are utterly delicious.

Ingredients

• 150g butter
• 150g flour
• 180g egg yolk
• 450g lobster stock stock (buy or make your own)
• 15g Dijon mustard
• 90g grated parmesan
• 300g milk
• 750g double cream
• 18g Malden salt
• A tablespoon of white wine shallots (prep beforehand)
• A splash of lobster oil (alternatively use rape seed oil)
• 240g fresh cooked lobster meat
• 12 eggs
• Salt
• Pepper
• A sprinkling of dill

Method

• Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the flour and salt, and mix on the heat. After a while, a smooth paste should form and come away from the sides of the pan
• Add in the lobster stock, milk and half of the cream, Continue to cook out as for béchamel sauce, stirring continuously, over a low heat for around 5 minutes.
• Remove from the heat and add the egg yolk, mustard and parmesan. Mix until smooth, then allow to cool. Whip the other half of the cream and fold into the cooler sauce (do not over work)
• Preheat your oven to 220°C, leaving the door open
• Using three eggs per omelette, lightly beat in a bowl, seasoning with salt and pepper. Add a small amount of white wine shallots and a splash of lobster oil. Slowly cook in a non-stick pan, folding constantly until an omelette begins to form, but is still runny on top. Gently place the omelette onto a small ovenproof dish, runny side up. Continue four times for individual omelettes
• Place 60g of lobster meat on top of each of the omelette, add a generous spoonful of the thermidor on top of that and spread across
• Place the omelette in the oven and grill for about 5 minutes, leaving the grill door open until golden brown.
• Serve immediately, garnished with a piece of lobster and some dill

What? Egg hopper

Where? Hoppers, Soho

Nowhere is eating an egg more fun than at Hoppers. With four London outposts, this Sri Lankan and South Indian restaurant is led by its co-founder Karan Gokani and is much loved for its namesake dish — particularly its egg hopper. Traditionally a breakfast dish, it is somewhere between a poppadom and a savoury pancake. Making a hopper requires years of practice and specialised kitchen equipment. ‘There's a real art to it. We've got a couple of guys in the team that are specialists,’ says Karan. Best eaten with a curry and Pol Sambol, a Sri Lankan coconut relish.

What? Scotch egg

Where? Claridge’s Bakery, Mayfair

The heartiest dish on my egg list, the Scotch egg at Claridge’s Bakery is second to none. ‘The shape and using a great quality egg — and patience,’ are the keys to success, Gary Cutcliffe from the bakery tells me. Sophia Lambo, another baker, can make up to 80 of these at Claridge’s every day. Nutmeg, she tells me, is crucial to getting the flavour just right, as are Japanese breadcrumbs for the eggs’ crunchy coating. Claridge’s uses Cacklebean eggs, laid by Arlington white chickens, for their Scotch eggs. ‘They’re a stunning egg and the yolk is so, so vibrantly orange,’ Gary gushes. At the bakery they use a deep fat fryer but a good alternative at home would be shallow frying in a bit of oil before finishing it off in the air fryer or the oven, he says.

Ingredients

• 500g good quality sausage meat
• 3g fresh sage, finely chopped
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 6g fine sea salt
• 50g shallots, finely chopped
• 3g fresh thyme, picked leaves and finely chopped
• Pinch nutmeg, finely grated
• Pinch ground white pepper
• 100g plain white flour
• 8 eggs (5 whole and three beaten separately)
• 150g Japanese panko breadcrumbs

Method

• Heat a small saucepan on medium/low heat with olive oil. Add in the shallots and start to cook with no colour, stirring continuously for about 5 minutes. Add in the remaining ingredients and cook for a further minute before removing from the heat. You will need to chill this mixture in a bowl in the fridge before adding in the sausage meat. It is important the mixture and sausage meat are cold before mixing these together. Once fully combined, leave in the bowl in the fridge until needed
• When boiling the eggs use 5 Cacklebean eggs, stored at room temperature. Bring a pan of water to a rolling boil before gently adding in the eggs, trying to avoid any cracks. Cook the eggs for 7 minutes, then remove and submerge into a bowl of ice water to chill. Once cold, carefully peel the eggs leaving them whole without breaking into the white part of the egg
• Take the cold sausage mix and divide equally into 5 balls. Take one ball into your hand and evenly flatten across your palm. Add one egg to the centre of your palm and wrap the mixture around the egg. Finish by gently shaping the sausage meat around the egg into an even ‘egg’ shape before putting onto a plate. Continue to wrap the 4 remaining eggs and add to the plate
• Then pané the Scotch egg. Place the flour, three eggs beaten and panko breadcrumbs into separate bowls. Working one at a time, coat the sausage meat eggs in the flour, then add this into the beaten egg and finally coat the egg with the breadcrumbs, taking care to drip the excess beaten egg before adding to the breadcrumbs. You will now need to add the Scotch egg back into the beaten egg for a second coating before rolling through the breadcrumbs for a final time to create an even coating
• Repeat this stage for the remaining Scotch eggs.
• Using either a deep fat fryer or pan of oil on top of the stove, heat the oil to 160°C. Gently add in the eggs and set a timer for 10 minutes before removing them onto a piece of kitchen roll. If you have a temperature probe, this can be inserted into the meat casing and should read a minimum of 70°C. Allow the Scotch eggs to rest until cool
• These can be enjoyed warm or can be chilled in the fridge and enjoyed cold the following day

What? Pickled egg

Where? Whole Beast, Brixton

Not for the faint hearted when it comes to egg eating, Whole Beast’s pickled egg packs a punch and takes a good amount of time to make. Partners Sam and Alicja Bryant describe their Brixton restaurant as a ‘nose-to-tail, live fire concept’. Their pickled egg is a staple of the menu, and one of the only vegetarian items on it to boot. ‘The idea came from the pub The Southampton Arms in Hampstead Heath,’ Sam says. ‘There was a jar of pickled eggs behind the bar. A few of us were in there and we said: “Shall we just get one as, like, a rogue choice?”.’ They were surprised by the many accompaniments that came with it and immediately sold on the idea. ‘We put it on our menu as a bit of a laugh as we thought no one would order it, but we sell so many,’ Sam says. They sell about 30 on a Saturday night.

What? Truffled eggs

Where? The Devonshire, Soho

The Devonshire is known for its Guinness, and the crowd of gilet-clad finance bros that frequent its smoking area. But I think it should really be known for its truffled eggs. Only available on their private dining menu, co-founder and chef Ashley Palmer-Watts says carrying this out at home can be done with a poached or fried egg, ‘which I think would be equally as delicious as our way’. If there are any spare eggs after a service the chefs are very keen to scarf one down, I am told. After ‘scarfing’ one down myself I can confirm that I would high-vault any amount of Guinness-drinking finance bros at the restaurants threshold and gatecrash even the most exclusive private dining party to scarf down another myself. Eggs at their most beautiful.

What? Egg mayonnaise

Where? Bistro Freddie, Shoreditch

Bistro Freddie’s head chef Alex Henderson does an egg mayonnaise like no other. ‘I’ve eaten way too many during my time here,’ she laughs. They probably sell about 20 servings a day. ‘We use a really good quality egg: free range, lovely yellow yolk. We season it with salt and a little bit of pepper,’ she says, revealing her top tips for a quality egg mayonnaise. They also top with whole anchovies, perfect for any seafood fan — a high-quality take on a classic egg recipe, and probably the simplest to make at home from my egg-cellent list.

Ingredients

• As many eggs as you like
• High quality anchovies
• 1 egg yolk
• 25g Dijon mustard
• 17g malt vinegar
• Some ice
• 270ml sunflower oil
• 5g salt
• A small amount of pepper

Method

• In a Thermomix blend together the yolk, Dijon, malt vinegar, ice and egg salt. Slowly trickle in the sunflower oil until a thick emulsified mayo forms
• Boil the eggs in boiling water for 6.5 minutes. Cut the egg in half, season with black pepper and Maldon salt
• Assemble the dish by putting a small spoon of mayonnaise on the bottom of the plate for the egg to sit on. Add a generous spoon of mayo on top of each egg followed by a good quality anchovy

How can a warm-climate crop endure Britain’s lacklustre weather and do so in soil that appears so different from that of Greece or Spain, where olive trees traditionally thrive?

When David Hoyles, whose family has been farming in the Lincolnshire Fens for 200 years, found it was becoming ever-more difficult to grow vegetables for British supermarkets in our increasingly dry and hot conditions, he looked elsewhere. ‘I thought about grapes, as English wine has been really successful, but they didn’t suit our soil type, which is silt,’ he explains.

By chance, on a trip to learn about agriculture in Puglia, Italy, he noticed olives being grown alongside vegetables on a soil very similar to his own and began to delve into varieties and practices. Having always enjoyed the Mediterranean diet, with plenty of olives and olive oil, he was willing to take a gamble. In spring 2024, he ordered 1,800 one-year-old olive trees from Spain and planted them.

He wasn’t alone. A few years earlier, Pete Thompson in Essex had the same idea. His farm, in Great Oakley, sits on a small peninsula with its own microclimate — it’s believed to be the warmest, driest part of the UK, with the highest light levels, thanks to the sea — all things olives like. ‘I thought, if it is going to work anywhere, it is going to work here,’ he recalls.

His farm, with its nutrient-rich soil, had long been known for innovation, so he felt comfortable trying something left field. ‘We have trialled and tested lots of crops, such as citrus and figs.’ Like David, he did extensive research on everything from sunlight data to soil composition and reached the same conclusion: it’s a myth that olives grow only in poor soil. After careful deliberation, he decided to try it, picking varieties he thought might be better able to survive chilly winter nights. The cold isn’t necessarily bad for olive trees, although he clarifies: ‘They need that period of rest and recharge over winter, which triggers certain processes in the tree. Having said that, I don’t want it to go to -7˚C.’

Both growers are secretive about which varieties they chose, except to say they are ‘cold tolerant’. ‘Let’s just say the trees would rather be standing in a field in southern Italy than Lincolnshire, but they will tolerate it,’ notes David. ‘The second thing we looked for, in terms of varieties, was late flowering and early maturing, to avoid frosts on either side.’

Despite our warming climate, olives are still far from a safe investment in the UK. Our weather, as we all know, is highly changeable and unpredictable. Some years bring lingering, pleasant summers; others feel as if summer never happened at all. ‘Last year was spot on for olives,’ declares David. ‘We had a very nice spring when the trees were flowering, followed by a long, warm summer and good temperatures into autumn, which allowed us to harvest in time before winter.’

Growing olives in the UK is likely to remain a gamble — a question of whether enough, if any, fruit is produced to make oil — but both growers are optimistic. As the trees grow and mature, they believe the plants will become increasingly accustomed to the UK’s climate and conditions.

Interestingly, those conditions could end up shaping a flavour unique to English olive oil. As Pete explains, because the trees will need to be harvested early to avoid frost, a greater proportion of the olives will still be green rather than purple — the colour they turn as they ripen. Although this reduces yield, it produces exceptional quality. Many growers deliberately pick early because green olives contain higher levels of antioxidant compounds, known as polyphenols, which give extra-virgin olive oil its characteristic peppery, bitter taste and carry major health benefits.

Olives need to be pressed quickly after being picked and processed by an expert miller, but the UK lacks both mills and millers. David managed to acquire a mill and, in the spirit of the Mediterranean, where producers share, Pete used it, too. However, trial and error with the new equipment meant they both lost some of their precious end product.

Olive oil is made by crushing olives into a paste, malaxing (slowly mixing) that paste, so tiny oil droplets join together, and then spinning it in a centrifuge to separate the oil from the water and solids. Knowing when to do these things, and for how long, takes years of experience. Pete hopes interest in British olive oil might lure over a few curious millers who really know what they are doing. As for whether it is extra virgin, that depends on strict criteria, enforced by the EU. The olive oil must have no flavour defects, a free fatty acid content below 0.8%, be extracted without heat or chemicals (often called ‘cold-pressed’) and meet other chemical standards.

Although both growers are still waiting for the results, I can talk about flavour. I was the first journalist in the UK to try Pete’s 2025 olive oil and it was exceptional: intensely fresh, beautifully smooth and delightfully peppery. Pete aims to produce much more this year and earn the coveted extra-virgin badge of honour.

David hopes for the same: he sold a few hundred bottles last harvest under his brand The English Olive Company and would like to increase that, although he remains beholden, of course, to the weather

For the first time in 45 years, potato farmers in the East and North of England are experiencing a downturn in demand so significant, they’ve wound up with a surplus of spuds.

What seemed to be apocryphal reports were confirmed by the National Federation of Fish Fryers last week, who blamed weight-loss jabs for quelling the sale of full-portion fish and chips.

This comes after a bumper year for the crop in 2025, which forced sellers to lower prices as demand could not catch up to supply. Some growers said the spuds risked winding up as cattle feed or being destined for the anaerobic digestion plant: to them, a waste.

The big picture is murkier. The sale of fresh spuds has fallen dramatically since the 1970s, whereas the sale of processed potatoes (such as crisps and French fries) have increased by 100%. It is primarily their sale that is being affected by weight-loss jabs: to some, a long overdue correction and a victory over ultra-processed foods.

Notwithstanding Britain’s gift for growing potatoes (the vegetable thrives in such temperate climes as ours), a public campaign to integrate more fresh spuds into our diets, keeping sales strong, particularly in lieu of imported carbs, would not go amiss.

Keep calm and cook on

• The best British potatoes to grow for every meal, from roast potatoes and chips to mash and salads by Mark Diacono
• How the humble potato became the most important part of Christmas lunch, and how you can make them crunchier than ever by Emma Hughes
• Chips, mash, roasted or dauphinoise — all better with your own potatoes by Mark Diacono

‘Britain is now the home of the middleman,’ Baroness Cavendish trumpeted recently in the Financial Times. She was talking about the retinue of parasitic advisers in every corner of corporate life, but I have good news — at least as far as our food systems are concerned.

It seems we are cutting out the middleman (for which, read supermarkets) as more of us choose to buy produce directly from our farms.

There are now more than 1,500 farm shops across Britain, putting stock in the Wendell Berry adage that ‘eating is an agricultural act’. The success of establishments such as Daylesford or Farm Shop (above; yes, that’s its name), which retails produce from its Somerset farm both at home in Bruton and in London’s South Audley Street, has given rise to a new kind of middleman: Produce & Provide, an online marketplace that identifies the nearest farm to the consumer and is now inviting every producer to register their smallholding — many of them offering more affordable options than the above.

‘Our modern-day food system is controlled by big food business that strips it of taste and provenance,’ says Neil Darwent, Produce & Provide’s founder. ‘We are here to champion British farmers who produce wonderful milk, meat, vegetables and eggs.’ I’ll be sowing my own seeds after lunch.

The South-East and the Home Counties

The Goods Shed

This indoor farmers market has been on the radar of locals for more than 20 years who rush to the stalls of fresh veggies, baked goods, local cheeses and meat. It notably boasts the only independent fishmongers in Canterbury and the largest number of British bottled beers in the entire South East.

Weary shoppers can stop for an English garden-inspired cocktail at the on-site Wild Goose bar and restaurant.

The Goods Shed, Station Road, Canterbury, Kent CT2 8AN

Cobbs Farm Shop

Cobbs Farm is set on 55 acres of land and farms according to regenerative methods. The shop stocks a huge range of food and drinks including seasonal vegetables and fresh dairy ice-cream.

Tours of the vineyard, which is responsible for the delicious and award-winning Alder Ridger sparkling wine, are also available (as are, more importantly, tastings).

Cobbs Farm Shop & Kitchen, Bath Road, Hungerford, Berkshire RG17 0SP

Middle Farm

Middle Farm has been looked after by the same family for six generations and counting, and they’re known for their high welfare and environmental standards.

The shop sells an enviable selection of Sussex-produced food and drink, as well as 80 British-made cheeses.

The cider barn is a particular favourite, and a great way to pass the time whilst the children get acquainted with some of the animals on the open farm.

Middle Farm, Firle, Lewes, East Sussex BN8 6LJ

Cowdray Farm Shop and Cafe

The Cowdray Farm Shop is a Country Life-office favourite and the embodiment of high-quality, farm-to-fork produce.

The butchers stock Estate-stalked venison (in season), and Estate-reared grass-fed lamb and beef. Other meat and poultry are sourced from local suppliers.

Cowdray Park, Cowdray Farm Shop & Cafe, Midhurst, West Sussex GU29 0AJ

Ferny Grove Farmshop

Ferny Grove Farmshop is something of a jewel in Berkshire’s crown, best known for its award-winning, on-site butchers, Quintessential Meats.

Everyone’s favourite? The homemade sausage rolls, best eaten before you’ve even left the shop with a hunk of fine English cheese and some locally-baked bread.

Fernygrove Farm Shop, Hawthorn Hill, Warfield, Berkshire RG42 6HN

Norfolk and Suffolk

Alder Carr

Alder Carr is a proper hidden gem in the Suffolk countryside, comprising a farm shop, deli, cafe and craft store.

The various stores are arranged around a courtyard and windmill which dates back to 1796 (you’ll find William & Herbert Vintage and Antiques inside the windmill itself).

Don’t leave without a pint of Alder Tree’s own ice-cream and a quick trip to the cafe for a ploughman’s platter or hearty chicken curry.

Alder Carr Farm, Creeting St. Mary, Needham Market, Suffolk IP6 8LX

South-West

Teals

Teals has something of a cult-following, especially with those amongst us that spend a lot of time on the A303.

As well as the standard meats, fresh salad and veggies, cereals and condiments, Teals also has a pretty homeware and books section, health-foods section and a popular cafe — which serves up a particularly good breakfast.

Don’t leave without a sausage roll, arguably the best in the South West.

Teals, 1, Orchard Lane, South Cadbury, Somerset BA22 7FS

Padstow Farm Shop

This Cornish gem of a farm shop — surrounded by acres of idyllic farmland, which they manage themselves — boasts its own butcher, selection of homegrown fruit and veg, homemade meals, prized Cornish cheeses and vast selection of Cornish ales, wines and spirits,

The highlight? Padstow Pasta. Made by hand using flour milled at another, nearby farm.

Trethillick Farm, Padstow, Cornwall PL28 8HJ

Lobbs Farm Shop

Lobbs is supplied by three family farms, covering, in total, 850 acres of land. The native breed beef and lamb is reared to high ethical standards, and fattened up with feed produced by the farm they live on.

And you don’t have to wait for Spring to come around for the lamb because the sheep farmed are Poll Dorset sheep — prolific for their ability to breed all year round.

Lobbs Farm Shop, St Ewe, St Austell, Cornwall PL26 6EN

Scotland

Rothiemurchus Farm Shop

Rothiemurchus is part of a working Highland estate, and stocks its own beef and venison, as well as fresh rainbow trout, heather honey and cheeses created in partnership with IJ Mellis of Edinburgh — Scotland’s leading cheesemonger.

The shop is committed to a zero waste policy, with a ‘Rothie Refills’ station for food essentials.

Nearby Loch An Eilein was once voted Britain’s Best Picnic Spot so if you cannot wait to get home before tucking in then this is where you should head.

Rothiemurchus, Aviemore, Inverness-shire, PH22 1QH

Balgove Larder Farm Shop

Balgove is more than just a shop, it’s a school.

Join one of their butchery classes and learn about why slow-grown, free-range animals fed on a sustainable diet results in the best meat (which you can take home after your lesson).

Balgove Larder, Farm Shop, Butchery & Cafe, Strathtyrum, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9SF

Ardross Farm

The winner of The Best Farm Shop & Deli in Scotland 2021 in the Great British Food Awards, Ardross is a mixed farm that prides itself on exceptionally high standards.

The farm shop sells quality cuts of pasture-fed beef and lamb, reserving some for their highly prized pies, made on-site.

Ardross Farm, Elie, Fife KY9 1EU

Hampshire

Newlyns

The Janaways family have been producing food on their 500-acre mixed farm for four generations, with the fifth currently in training.

The farm shop sells a variety of local produce, but their newest addition, a huge walk-in Cheese Room, actively encourages you to try before you buy — a reason in itself to visit.

Newlyns, North Warnborough, Lodge Farm North, RG29 1HA

Wellington Farm Shop

Wellington Farm Shop was founded by Lady Honor Montagu, granddaughter of the 8th Duke of Wellington, and its opening officiated by Her Majesty The Queen (then HRH The Duchess of Cornwall) in 2005.

It’s still staunchly committed to His Majesty The King’s commitment to sustainable farming practices.

Arrives early because the cafe offers a ‘legendary’ all-day breakfast to fuel your shopping.

Wellington Farm Shop, Park Corner Farm, Welsh Lane, Hook, RG27 0LJ

Sky Park Farm Shop

Sky Park specialises in deer and offers visitors the opportunity to meet them close-up. The highly-prized venison is of course available to buy in the butchers.

The shop also sells deli goods, cheeses and freshly prepared meals, made in their in-house kitchen. Most suppliers live within a 30-mile radius.

Novelties include the milk vending machine — bring your own bottles and choose between traditional and flavoured milks — and The Grazing Rooms restaurant.

Sky Park Farm Shop, West Harting, Petersfield, GU31 5PT

Oxfordshire & The Cotswolds

Worton Kitchen Garden

Since 2005, Worton Kitchen Garden has been growing — literally. Made up of field crops, an orchard, greenhouses and poly-tunnels for delicate salads, the cottage garden is a little slice of green fingered paradise.

It also boasts of a small-scale animal husbandry and an on-site baker that churns out the freshest of loaves every morning — as well as quiches, tarts and pastries.

The restaurant offers a hyper-local menu with produce grown, foraged and hunted in the vicinity.

Worton Kitchen Garden, Worton Park, Worton Farm, Worton, OX29 4SU

Bosley Patch

Though small in size, the ethos, produce and hard work behind this independent enterprise is mind-blowing.

Locals make up the majority of Bosley’s loyal customers, but plenty travel from miles away just to get their hands on home-baked goods (you need to be there by 9am to snag a fresh jam doughnut).

Once devoured, you can fill your bags with high quality, seasonal and organic produce from the shop.

Bosley Patch, Swiss Farm, Marlow Rd, Henley-on-Thames, RG9 2HZ

The North

Tebay Services

John and Barbara Dunning opened Tebay Services in 1972 after the M6 motorway was built through their farm. Rather than shutting up shop, they decided to invite locals and drivers alike into their world.

Sourcing meat from their own farm and working with more than 70 producers, the shop sells lamb, mutton and native-breed beef, sandwiches, vegetables, cheeses, beer and more.

Westmorland Place, Orton, Penrith, Cumbria CA10 3SB

Doddington Hall & Gardens Farm Shop

Doddington opened in 2007, selling produce from their own kitchen garden, beef from their own herd of Lincoln red cattle, traditionally-milled flour, and Doddington Estate Honey and apple juice.

There’s also a wine shop filled to the brim with a wicked selection of global wines.

Doddington Hall, Main Street, Doddington, Lincolnshire LN6 4RU

North Acomb Farm Shop

North Acomb Farm Shop dates back to 1978 as a small-scale operation selling off surplus free-range eggs.

It’s come a long way since then, and now sells Aberdeen Angus beef, lamb and pork, all reared on the farm, as well as homemade black pudding, Scotch eggs, savoury pies, sweet treats and hearty meals.

Stocksfield, Northumberland NE43 7UF

Piercebridge Organic Farm Shop

Part of a 300-acre, organic farm, Piercebridge Farm Shop is run by a family who have been farming on the land since 1964.

In 2001, they converted some stables into a shop — now home to more than 2,000 organic products (including pork from Landrace Duroc pigs — renowned for their tender meat).

The farm itself has won awards for its conservation and diversification efforts — which must mean that every purchase is guilt-free…

Piercebridge Farm Shop, The Green, Piercebridge, Darlington, Co Durham DL2 3SE

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London wine bars have been through various different iterations since the 1990s, from the dimly lit dens with Keith Floyd-esque owners (who would take their ancient Volvos over to France every three months and bring them back groaning with claret) to the house-music-blasting All Bar One emulators and, briefly, the dangerously formatted pay-to-play venues with Coravin-powered vending machines.

Right now Parisian-inspired bar a vins are firmly in the ascendant, boasting left-of-centre wine lists and cheffy but accessible menus. They’re synonymous with east London: Hackney, Dalston, Clapton and Stoke Newington dominate most ‘best of’ lists. Not this one, though — here’s where to go for a really interesting and, dare we say it, cool drink in Zone One.

Lower Wine

The Cut, which runs beneath the Southwark side of Waterloo, never used to be much of a destination in its own right, but it’s had a significant spruce-up in recent years and is now home to the hidden gem that is Lower Wine, a wonderfully cosy and well stocked bottle shop slash bar.

Handily situated for the Old and Young Vics and the Southbank, it has a seriously impressive list, with Champagne-method wines a bit of a speciality: when we visited a Monmouthshire Pet Nat (a cloudy, gently sparkling fizz) by Ancre Hill was a standout.

Marjorie’s

Carnaby Street caught wine-lovers’ attention with the arrival of the ever-excellent Bar Crispin, with its grower Champagnes and seasonal small plates.

Now it has Marjorie’s too, a chic bar a vins occupying the former site of the mystifying Hawaiian burger bar. Brilliantly buzzy and staffed by a team with plenty of vinous know-how, it has an all-French list and an ambitious kitchen: think a savoury rocher alongside a glass of aromatic white, or blushing strips of bavette with a bearnaise-like egg-yolk emulsion to go with your chilled red.

Groups can book a roomy eight-seater table downstairs.

Farm Shop Wine Bar

All hail Artfarm, the independent hospitality group that has brought the fun back to Mayfair with The Audley, Mount St Restaurant above it, and delicatessen Farm Shop. Beneath (and alongside) the latter is what for my money is one of central London’s best all-round wine bars, with vibes as good as its list.

Pull up a chair in either the original cellar, which gets busy straight after work, or the upstairs former butcher, which is better for a date. Wines are mostly from small producers, including the in-house Maid of Bruton fizz, and the food is superb, with British cheeses and charcuterie as well as larger dishes like a roast chicken sharing board and proper puds.

Warning: depending on what time you visit, it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation to blow the budget on some provisions from the deli on your way out.

Bar Daskal

Where to drink in Borough Market without hordes of tourists spoiling the experience? Keep your blood pressure within a sensible range by heading for Bar Daskal, tucked away in the stylish and atmospheric new Borough Yards development.

A homage to childhood summers the owners spent on Mallorca, there’s an entirely Spanish list, with sherries (a real strength) cropping up on the cocktail menu too: look out for the Cosecha, a blend of Palo Cortado and Manzanilla with dry vermouth and prune. Gildas, smoked olives and tortilla wedges round things off nicely.

The Black Duke

A glass of Pol Roger for £5? Do not adjust your sets: the new cellar bar beneath south London legend Brunswick House is already an industry favourite for good reason. Its looks are handsomely Georgian, but the wine list is up to the minute, with plenty of interesting choices from independent producers all available by the glass or bottle, along with some excellent alcohol-free options and said bargain fizz between 6pm and 8pm.

Food-wise you’re spoilt for choice, with a ham, cheddar and boudin noir ‘bikini’ toastie and Brunswick House’s famous griddled wild garlic potato bread among the hits. This one’s only open from Tuesday to Thursday, so plan ahead.

Gordon’s

You could never call it a hidden gem in the traditional sense – the queue speaks for itself – but I’m including Gordon’s here because I think a lot of people (including me, until recently) have forgotten just how good it really is.

Scene of countless first dates since it opened in 1890, the Pepysian cellar beneath Charing Cross has now expanded out into a very smart heated terrace, and the tome-like wine list includes some exceptionally drinkable newer styles along with the buttery white burgundies and jammy riojas. The approachable staff really know their stuff.

Bar Brasso

Behind the new American Embassy in Nine Elms, in what is otherwise one of London’s most ghostly new developments, is Robin Gill’s unfailingly enjoyable Irish-American restaurant Darby’s, with a winning line in oysters and live jazz — and next door, under the same management, there’s now Bar Brasso.

Styling itself as an all-day ‘cicchetti and tapas bar’, it draws inspiration from Venice’s bacari and San Sebastian’s stand-up joints: you will eat exceedingly well here whatever time you visit, with porcini arancini, bolognese on toast and olive oil-drizzled chocolate mousse.

But what about the wines? Uniformly excellent, with supremely quaffable house red, white and orange on tap, as well as a strong selection of vermouths.

Noble Rot Mayfair

Each of the three Noble Rots is well worth your time (and the almost inevitable sore head). The Lamb’s Conduit Street original has buckets of Dickensian charm, while Soho revives the rakish spirit of The Gay Hussar, the restaurant it once housed. If you’re looking for somewhere with a little less through traffic, though, choose the Mayfair branch, which is well hidden in Shepherd Market’s warren of streets.

The restaurant section books up quickly, but both the upstairs and downstairs bars welcome walk-ins, with much of the main menu on offer alongside an unrivalled selection of sips and pours (several unusual sparkling wines, full bodied French whites and a Greek rose were among the standouts when we last visited).

Our advice? Recover from a trying bout of Christmas shopping with a festive glass of red and one of the legendary Noble Rot bread baskets all to yourself.

The Remedy

Another ideal refuge from the mayhem of Oxford Circus: flee due north and you’ll find this long-established spot hidden away just below Great Portland Street. The Remedy has all the best bits of an old-school wine bar – seats you can sink into, chalet-esque cosiness and an unapologetically Gallic bias – along with a refreshingly modern list, with highlights including some of the criminally underrated wines from the Savoie region.

The menu is appropriately rib-sticking: dumplings, a fancy cassoulet, cheeses from La Fromagerie.

Bar Flor

This place is five minutes brisk walk from Victoria station, but from the moment you step inside you’ll feel like you’re thousands of miles away — in a fashionable quarter of Barcelona, specifically, nibbling on gildas with a glass of chilled fino to hand.

Tucked away above Wildflowers in Newson’s Yard on Pimlico Road, Bar Flor follows in its restaurant sibling’s cool modern European footsteps, with small plates and cocktails alongside a thoughtfully put together wine list.

As the name suggests, fortified wines are a speciality (flor is the film of yeast which forms on the surface of sherries), but the regular list is also full of gems from small Spanish producers. Food-wise, don’t miss Wildflowers’ famous ‘holiday potatoes’, here reimagined as a riff on patatas bravas.

Gambit Bar

Here, for once, is a hidden gem that’s genuinely hidden. Gambit Bar takes a bit of finding – it’s under The Newman, Fitzrovia’s latest hotel opening – but your efforts will be handsomely repaid.

The supremely comfortable subterranean bar feels more like New York than London, with properly swish Dorothy Parker-era Manhattan decor and a 1970s soul soundtrack courtesy of the resident DJs.

The wine list globe-trots without being overwhelmingly dense; toasty Rathfinny Classic Cuvee and a deliciously bright dry Riesling are among the by-the-glass standouts.

Make a pitstop here before a Scandi-accented dinner upstairs at Brasserie Angelica, or make a night of it down here with oysters, devilled eggs and caviar blinis.

As marketing ruses go, the Michelin Guide is surely up there with the greats. ‘It started, all those years ago, as a way to flog tyres,’ is how Tom Parker Bowles puts it. It sounds blunt, but it’s not wrong. Michelin was founded as a rubber manufacturer in 1889 by two brothers, André and Édouard Michelin. Two years later, after helping a stranded cyclist with a puncture, they decided tyres needed reinventing. Why were bicycle tyres glued to the rims? Fiddly repairs required frustrated hours. The answer was to make tyres detachable, fixed in minutes.

This turned out to be the easy part. In the mid 1890s, Michelin started fitting its tyres to motor cars, but selling them was proving a challenge. There were fewer than 3,000 cars pottering about France at the time and drivers were unconvinced that touring the country in this way was practical. To promote the idea, in 1899, the brothers wrote what would become the 1900 Guide Michelin, 400 pages listing petrol stations, garages for repairs and instructions for replacing a tyre. Local landmarks were overlooked, but rooms to rest and a few places to eat were included. Some 35,000 copies were printed that year, free of charge to drivers. The little red book was born.

Ambitious, the brothers expanded — to Belgium in 1904, to Britain in 1911 (where the little red book was, in fact, blue) — but, in 1920, André found copies of their books being used in a garage to prop up a workbench. Declaring ‘Man only truly respects what he pays for!’, he relaunched the guide at seven francs a go. Advertising was removed, hotels were included, restaurants were afforded more attention. He then hired anonymous inspectors to investigate pitstops worthy of a motorist’s stop and, in 1926, the truly special places received Michelin’s first-ever stars. The hierarchy of two and three stars was not introduced until 1931, and its terms were defined five years later. One star? A very good restaurant in its own category (and worth a stop). Two? Excellent cooking, worth a detour. Three? Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey. In all the years since, the guide has never deviated from these demarcations.

Officially, that is: Michelin itself is on record claiming to judge what’s on the plate and nothing more — yet old editions of the guide declare that, for three stars, fine wines and faultless service are a must. Retired inspectors say consistency is all; some chefs are sure decor matters. However, Michelin stays tight-lipped. ‘I certainly don’t know the methodology of what they do and how they do it,’ admits John Williams, executive chef of the London Ritz, where he holds two stars. No one seems to.

The mystery around Michelin helps fuel its power. It’s thought there are about 140 inspectors, all of whom dine out for as many as 275 meals a year, sticking to a specific region: the job is demanding enough without constant global travel. Their role is to appear just as any other customer, although they are rarely young; usually, a decade or so of hospitality experience and a proven palate are a must. Meals are judged on five criteria: quality of ingredients; mastery of culinary techniques; harmony of flavours; personality and emotion conveyed by the chef in the food; and consistency across both the menu and different visits. The inspectors decide stars unanimously and collaboratively, reaching decisions at meetings with the international director of the Michelin Guides, since 2018 Gwendal Poullennec, alongside the ‘local’ editor. If consensus is unreachable, more visits are taken until it can be. These are often annual, sometimes less frequent than that and sometimes more, if the guide is considering promotion or demotion.

In truth, the Michelin brothers’ bid to flog more tyres didn’t take off until long after they were gone. The guide’s influence began to take hold in the 1950s, growing through the 1960s and 1970s as the protégées of French master Fernand Point, who held three stars from 1933 until his death in 1955, began to measure themselves against its pages. Point himself charged higher prices than his competitors nearby, justifying it with his Michelin recognition. Paul Bocuse, with his toque and tricolour neckerchief, became the world’s archetypal chef — such an indelible image that he inspired the ghostly Auguste Gusteau in Pixar’s Ratatouille — and although his reputation was bolstered by his three stars, his excellence in turn affirmed the guide as an arbiter of good taste. ‘Michelin is the only guide that counts,’ Bocuse declared — and it became so. Its power truly started showing when the Troisgros brothers, Jean and Pierre — nouvelle cuisine pioneers with an eponymous restaurant — became sufficiently famous from it that tourists would set out to the little-known commune Roanne in search of their salmon and sorrel.

In Britain, the fun really began in 1974. Some 63 years after the guide first appeared here, it returned in acknowledgement of a country that was finally beginning to get its culinary act together. That year, Michelin handed out its first UK stars, 25 of them. This was deemed significant enough that the front cover of the Daily Telegraph was dedicated to the news: a sketch of Michelin mascot Bibendum rowing across the channel to Dover’s white cliffs. The guide, then, leaned both towards classical French (Le Gavroche, The Waterside Inn), upmarket British fare (Richard Shepherd at the Capital Hotel, the Connaught restaurant, Simpson’s-in-the-Strand), but also went further than might be expected, granting Chinatown’s Lee Ho Fook a star, making it the first Chinese restaurant in Britain to have one. This was impressive for a publication that has long been criticised for being behind the times. ‘They’ve taken their time realising that it’s not only French and Japanese that are the pinnacle of haute cuisine,’ laments Tom. ‘They’re pretty slow, aren’t they? I mean, they’re French.’

Over the next 20 years, the bad behaviour began, as star-chasing chefs exacted standards that fed the rumour mill and made head-lines. Pierre Koffmann’s kitchen at Chelsea’s La Tante Claire — starred from 1978–98, with three for its last five years — was whispered about for its intensity: Pierre relentlessly demanded perfection. He was said to send dishes back again and again until he deemed them passable, leaving chefs shaking wrecks. Nico Ladenis, reportedly the first self-taught chef to win three stars in Britain, was so committed to standards that it wasn’t chefs alone of whom he’d demand excellence: customers at Chez Nico were barred if they wanted prawn cocktail, well-done steak or lamb anything but pink.

Gordon Ramsay has long had his singular approach to kitchen discipline well documented on television, but perhaps more telling was his reaction to losing two stars in one fell swoop at his New York restaurant, The London. ‘It was like losing a girlfriend,’ he said. The unrelenting pressure of knowing the inspector could call at any moment might be why several chefs have handed back their stars and why, in 2012, the late Skye Gyngell left Petersham Nurseries in London’s Richmond a year after winning one, calling it a curse. ‘If I ever have another restaurant, I pray we don’t get a star,’ she wrote at the time.

However, there have, for some years, been questions over whether the guide’s power is what it once was. Its taste-making monopoly, certainly, is no longer unassailable. ‘I do think public perception has changed,’ observes Michel Roux Jnr, who oversaw the legendary two-starred Le Gavroche in Mayfair until it closed in 2024. ‘You can find where to eat now through social media, through different platforms, television…’ For John, a Michelin star — or two — remains a badge of honour. ‘I would like to think it still means as much to chefs, certainly for those striving for such things,’ he reflects, ‘but I’m much too old to say I’m pursuing three. You cook to the highest standards you can for your guests, but that’s a philosophy for The Ritz.’

This feature originally appeared in the March 11, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'Dessert without cheese is like a beauty with only one eye,’ declared lawyer, writer and serious eater Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Although his sentiments may err somewhat on the side of the insensitive (the past is a foreign country and all that), he does have a point. A life without cheese would be very glum indeed.

In fact, I’d happily skip pudding altogether and replace it with Welsh rarebit, burnished, bubbling and fresh from the grill. Now, don’t get me wrong. Plain cheese on toast is a very fine thing, blessedly simple, yet noble in its purity. Rarebit, however, is an altogether more exalted affair — the pinnacle, the apex, the triumphant apogee of this particular form.

I once heard of someone so enamoured by the offering at one of the grander St James’s clubs that he consumed eight in a row. Chapeau, my friend, chapeau. Such is the power of the rarebit, undoubtedly the sine qua non of savouries, those small, saltily piquant bites that, in the words of cookery writer Ambrose Heath, ‘often make an admirable ending to a meal, like some unexpected witticism or amusing epigram at the close of a pleasant conversation. It has the last word, as it were, before we turn to the frivolities of dessert’.

As to the great ‘rarebit’ versus ‘rabbit’ debate that has raged over the past three centuries, there’s little doubt that the latter is the original term, first recorded back in 1725. ‘Rarebit’ has to wait another 60 years before making its debut. As to why, however, things become a little less certain. Some see it as a derogatory dig towards supposed Welsh parsimony. Just as the Scotch woodcock, another great savoury, contains no trace of the doe-eyed gamebird, so the bunny plays no role in the rabbit.

That argument is swiftly destroyed by a quick glance through Hannah Glass’s 1745 classic, The Art of Cookery Made Plain And Easy — alongside the Welsh version, she has recipes for one Scotch and two English. Rarebit may have gradually superseded its leporine antecedent, but not everyone was happy with the change. ‘Welsh rabbit is amusing and right,’ harrumphed famed lexicographer H. W. Fowler. ‘Welsh rarebit is stupid and wrong.’

Whatever you want to call it (and I like both names), all proper rarebits start with a roux — but don’t let it get too brown. You want a gentle khaki rather than rich mahogany. An egg yolk adds extra richness, but it’s not as if the dish lacks lavishness. I tend to do without. As to the cheese, you need something hard, sharp and British. Cheddar is the most popular, preferably Keen’s, Montgomery’s or Quicke’s. Snowdonia Black Bomber is equally splendid, as is Mrs Kirkham’s Tasty or Mature Lancashire. Caerphilly is a touch too mild and you should save the Alpine classics for raclette and fondue.

When it comes to the beer, I prefer something dark and malty, a stout or porter, to cosset and flatter the cheese, as well as adding a sonorous bass note worthy of a Welsh baritone. A decent bitter also works, adding a gently nutty tang to proceedings. Lager and IPAs have no place here.

There’s more than a touch of the devilled about a proper rarebit, with a snort of Colman’s mustard powder, a fat pinch of cayenne pepper and lashings of Worcestershire sauce, both in the cheese mix and splashed lustily across the finished dish. One more piece of advice, from Fergus Henderson of St John fame, whose classic recipe you’ll find below. ‘When it comes to eating, irrigation channels are essential: make a gentle criss-cross pattern on your hot rarebit with a knife, creating the perfect flood plain for the Worcestershire sauce.’ Having sold more than half a million of these blessed beauties since opening in 1994, he knows of what he speaks.

Recipe: Welsh rarebit

The Welsh rarebit from St John, Smithfield, London EC1, is a thing of savoury legend and the restaurant sells an average of 45 per day. It’s probably my favourite of them all, although the version of White’s club, albeit smaller, comes very close. Serve with a crisp, well-dressed green salad. ‘Welsh Rarebit is a noble version of cheesy toast,’ says Fergus Henderson. ‘Everyone loves cheesy toast!’

Ingredients

Serves at least 4, depending on the dimensions of your toast

A knob of butter


1tbspn plain flour


1tspn English mustard powder


½tspn cayenne pepper


A very long splash of Worcestershire sauce, and a bottle to serve


200ml Guinness


450g mature strong
Cheddar, grated


4 pieces of good white bread

Method

Melt the butter in a pan, stir in the flour and let this cook together until it smells biscuity, but is not browning. Add the mustard powder and cayenne pepper, stir in the Worcestershire sauce and the Guinness, then gently melt in the cheese.

When it’s all of one consistency, remove from the heat, pour out into a shallow container and allow to set. It will keep happily in the fridge for a couple of weeks in this state.

Take each piece of bread and toast on both sides. Allow to cool just a little, then cover one side with the rarebit mixture to about 1cm (½in) thick—if you find that it doesn’t spread with ease, press it on with your fingers. Put on a baking sheet and place under the grill until golden and bubbling, grilling to just beyond your comfort threshold to allow the flour to cook out.

A bull, a pelican and a badger walk into a bar. It sounds like the start to a bad joke rather than the premise of a multi-million-pound business. Yet for Phil Winser, James Gummer and Olivier van Themsche, the men behind one of Britain’s fastest-growing hospitality brands, those three totemic creatures are synonymous with a new kind of pub that looks to reinvigorate British traditions via good food, good looks and good times.

Public House Group (PHG) is a consortium of ventures that includes five pubs and a restaurant. Since taking over Notting Hill’s The Pelican in 2022 — a former backstreet boozer on All Saints Road — the group has cemented its imprint on London’s plummiest neighbourhoods. In tow came The Hero, in Maida Vale; The Fat Badger, in Ladbroke Grove; and The Hart, in Marylebone. Downstairs from The Fat Badger is the brand’s critically acclaimed restaurant, Canteen. The group’s country outfit — The Bull in Charlbury, Oxfordshire — opened to much fanfare in 2023: Giles Coren declared it ‘the best pie and pint of [his] life’. More gastropubs are coming soon: The Coach, in Clerkenwell, is due to open in spring and another, CeCe's in Holland Park, was announced only last week (taking over the site of Casa Cruz). PHG’s meteoric rise comes at an ironically perilous time for Britain’s pubs — more than 200 were forced to shut down in the first half of 2025 due to a hike in business rates. Now, a tighter cap on the drink driving allowance means rural hostelries are feeling the pinch even more.

PHG’s London pubs follow a tried-and-tested formula. They occupy not one, not two, but three or four floors in a building. This vertical elevation mirrors their metaphorical ascent, the different levels allowing them to diversify their offering within a single site. There’ll usually be one or two private dining rooms, a bar spinning vinyl records or hosting a band on certain week nights and, of course, the good old pub on the ground floor. (Menus vary from floor to floor, catering to different tastes, but consistently excellent.) Getting a table at The Fat Badger on Thursday is nigh impossible — it turns into a honky tonk from around 9.30pm — yet all PHG pubs are always consistently, enviably busy: even a Tuesday night at The Bull sees dining tables about 50% occupied (the singer-songwriter Jack Savoretti is there the night I drop by). Mr Gummer insists, however, that ‘we always hold space for walk-ins’: the idea being to keep the true locals, who don’t typically book ahead, loyal to the business.

On the face of it, the key to PHG’s success is money. (Mr Gummer attended Eton College; Mr Winser went to Marlborough.) Their pubs look, and feel, flush with cash — Mr van Themsche, who founded a successful e-commerce company in the past, looks after business affairs — as do many of their patrons living along the London-to-Chipping Norton corridor. Good aesthetics are vital to their popularity: PHG pubs are designed to emulate the feel of a country house. ‘We all share this love of stripping back and getting rid of anything that isn’t necessary,’ Mr Winser explains: think stripped wood, plastered walls and specials written out on chalkboards. The nifty à la carte menu fits on a single side of A5 paper, usually printed in Garamond. Lighting is dim and flattering: these are spots that look as good in pictures as they do in real life. All the knives are by Katto and the Windsor chairs at The Bull are the fruit of a collaboration with renowned restorer Mark Groethe.

‘Our rule,’ says Mr Gummer of picking which manufacturers to partner with, ‘was that we’d only work with people we’d want to have a pint with.’ His pubs are popular date spots and their private rooms comically oversubscribed; Jo Ellison, editor of FT How To Spend It, threw her 50th birthday party at The Hero in 2025. Yet dig beneath the surface and a more nuanced picture begins to appear (plus, I daresay, a more noble one, too). PHG’s founders are adamant that their pubs are still pubs, serving British fare and pouring real pints, even if the house cider is Showerings (a desirable label from Somerset). They are not members’ clubs, despite their aura of exclusivity and penchant for a party. ‘We are like a members’ club without the membership fee,’ says Mr van Themsche. Mr Gummer name-checks The Eagle and St John as two of PHG’s primary reference points — establishments whose distinction lies not in their clients, but in their culinary point of view. He confirms the only criteria for membership is familiarity. ‘You build your membership by living nearby,’ he says, ‘getting to know the bartenders and the people who are in here all the time.’ A rumour has been circulating about PHG acquiring a Mayfair townhouse to turn into a vrai-de-vrai members’ club, which I was told would operate over eight floors. Mr van Themsche waves this away. ‘That’s two more floors than the last time I heard someone say that!’

Elitism aside, the PHG boys have found themselves in the right place at the right time. With more pubs shuttering and coming up for sale, they have plenty of opportunity before them to expand. Yet they are not vultures — and their pubs are popular precisely because they do not feel like a shoehorn. They are, of course, exceptionally polished (a friend once likened The Bull to Marie Antoinette’s cottage at Versailles), yet their atmosphere feels unforced and welcoming. Across the road from The Bull is a pub that might be its antithesis — The Rose & Crown, an unpretentious boozer serving ales and snacks behind the counter. Mr Gummer was there the other day and talks about it reverently. ‘It’s really tough for those pubs at the minute,’ he says. Food, by contrast, has long been one of PHG’s calling cards: the group is a favourite employer of bright young chefs.

Besides good looks, PHG owes much of its success to choice locations. ‘You’ve got to understand an area before you start a business in it,’ Mr Gummer says. ‘When you do, you become a part of it.’ None of their sites has been selected randomly: The Pelican was Mr Gummer’s local when he first moved to London and worked in a restaurant down the road, The Hero was near where his wife grew up and The Fat Badger was Mr Winser’s local when he first lived in Notting Hill some 20 years ago, before moving to New York. His restaurant there, closed in 2020, was called The Fat Radish in homage. The Hart, for its part, is a stone’s throw from Chiltern Firehouse, where Mr Winser’s sister used to work.

Their most personal acquisition, however, was The Bull, where Messrs Winser and Gummer grew up and drank their first pints together. Mr van Themsche would join the triad later, after he forged a friendship with Mr Winser when the two were living in the Big Apple. Mr Winser worked there for over a decade and describes his experience as ‘burning’. Working as a team, the PHG founders play to each other’s strengths: Mr van Themsche looks after the money, Mr Gummer the food and Mr Winser the interiors, although their dominions intersect more often than meets the eye.

More importantly, their vision is collective: PHG aims to reinvigorate Britain’s agricultural heritage through pubs and thereby champion two institutions for the price of one: the farm and the boozer. Returning from New York during the pandemic, Mr Winser mused about buying a farm in Somerset, where he planned to develop ‘an agriculture and hospitality programme’. In the end, he says, it was a dream he ended up ‘reverse engineering’. ‘It was going to take a while to get the hospitality side of things off the ground, building cabins and farmhouses and the sort.’ As for the agricultural side, ‘the guy who was trying to sell me the farm didn’t sugarcoat things in the slightest: I was going to be responsible for 400 head of cattle, trout production, honey, lots of chickens…’

The scale could have overwhelmed a less seasoned restaurateur, but, upon hearing such a list, Mr Winser decided to get creative. ‘I thought to myself: if I could sell the farm’s produce directly to restaurants rather than via a middleman, we could share that margin and turn this thing instantly profitable.’ He never ended up buying the farm, but he’s now achieved what he set out to do in reverse: pubs first, farms second. ‘We’ve become accustomed to a system where you can call a supplier and request something, anything, for the next day,’ Mr Winser continues, ‘but there’s no quality control at play there’. It’s also more expensive.

So that I might admire PHG’s distribution system first hand, Mr Winser and his colleagues invite me to conduct my interview in the Cotswolds. We meet at The Bull, which has stood in the same spot since the early 1500s (the founders refer to themselves not as the building’s owners, but its ‘custodians’) and from whence J. D. Vance was allegedly turned away this summer after his team asked the pub to empty for him and his entourage. The boys take me for a spin in one of the many Defenders that line the car park at the rear of the building — which, I’m later told, was nearly turned into a house. We drive out a couple of miles to visit the allotment where the group grows most of their vegetables and the founders show me the third and most important reason for their success.

Row upon row of herbs and vegetables shine in the crisp January sun. Mr Gummer gestures to an adjacent plot of land, recently acquired, in a manner reminiscent of The Lion King. It smells earthy and abundant: precisely the ‘reverse engineering’ Mr Winser was talking about. After working with local suppliers for years (Whittington Lodge Farm, Paddock Farm, The Kitchen Garden People), the boys realised they could do this themselves. They hired farmers from Cornwall who had recently sold their land and are now pioneering a direct-to-publican model in this rarefied patch of the Cotswolds.

We make a deliberate stop at FarmED, a non-profit education centre on Honeydale Farm that extols an environmentally conscious approach to agriculture and where vegetables are grown seasonally. Mr Winser is cautious not to use any buzzwords, which he dismisses as a ‘New York restaurant habit’ he’s proud to have disinherited (‘words like local or sustainability… we’ve tried to move away from that’). Yet ‘seasonality’ applies quite clearly here. ‘Take tomatoes, which can vary incredibly in variety,’ Mr Winser says. ‘We really shouldn’t be eating them in times of the year when they haven’t been picked fresh off the vine.’

By focusing purely on quality ingredients, PHG hopes to reinvigorate the patch of the countryside its founders are so fond of — and which their parents remember as a thriving community before the railway services connecting Charlbury to London became more frequent and rural churn began. Now, as more and more city folk decamp to Charlbury to escape the Big Smoke at the weekend (The Bull, as does nearby Soho Farmhouse, benefits from this phenomenon), PHG wants to ensure the reversal of fortune does not leave out the very farming folk that made the Cotswolds rich and famous in the first place. The goal is to get gastropubs working together with farms in order to improve both their stock, relying on that week’s bounty and adapting the menu accordingly. Good news, too, for the highly experienced chefs Mr Gummer makes a point of hiring: this kind of variety makes their job more interesting, allowing them some freedom and creativity to redevelop the menu and put their stamp on it.

In bridging the gap between the land and the kitchen, PHG is expanding into outdoor events. High on the agenda for 2026 is The Bushcamp, ‘a nomadic English safari experience’ for shoots, summer parties or more intimate gatherings, according to its website (minimum spend: £6,000). PHG organised a press day for The Bushcamp last November where journalists were able to hear from the founders over roast lamb and muntjac tea — an underrated hangover cure. ‘It’s great that you’re doing this,’ I tell the boys. ‘Was the business logic behind it to give shoot food a little zhuzh?’ Mr van Themsche laughs. ‘The truth,’ says Mr Winser, ‘is that so many people come to stay in hotels around here and ignore just how beautiful the countryside around them really is. We wanted to come up with something that takes people further afield and beyond the immediate perimeter they too often stay in—in Nature, in the wilderness.’

Click here for more information on The Bushcamp and to book.

This feature originally appeared in the March 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Afternoon tea was conceived, first and foremost, as a respite: taking pause of post-lunch activities to line one’s stomach again as dinner kept being pushed back. Urbanisation in the 19th century jettisoned the rules of rural life, lived in tune with sunrise and sunset, and London-bound aristos found they could eat dinner at 9pm unencumbered. (How Spanish.)

In recent years, it’s had a facelift, thanks, in part, to the introduction of National Afternoon Tea Week (which normally falls in August). High-end hotels appeared to heed the renaissance: last year, at The Rosewood, executive pastry chef Mark Perkins launched an Art Afternoon Tea, a spin on the classic offering with Japanese teas and cakes inspired by the artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Country Life, as ever, was ahead of the curve, having launched its very own tea column in January 2024. If afternoon tea is often dismissed as belonging to the ladies who lunch, consider this: Maison François, the famed St James’s restaurant headed by chef Matthew Ryle, has started serving one between 2.30pm and 5.30pm. Who needs a power lunch?

aristos found they could eat dinner at 9pm unencumbered. (How Spanish.)

In recent years, it’s had a facelift, thanks, in part, to the introduction of National Afternoon Tea Week (which normally falls in August). High-end hotels appeared to heed the renaissance: last year, at The Rosewood, executive pastry chef Mark Perkins launched an Art Afternoon Tea, a spin on the classic offering with Japanese teas and cakes inspired by the artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Country Life, as ever, was ahead of the curve, having launched its very own tea column in January 2024. If afternoon tea is often dismissed as belonging to the ladies who lunch, consider this: Maison François, the famed St James’s restaurant headed by chef Matthew Ryle, has started serving one between 2.30pm and 5.30pm. Who needs a power lunch?

Tea at Jean-Georges at The Connaught

You'd be hard pushed to find a more elegant spot to while away the afternoon than The Connaught, where afternoon tea is served daily between 2.30pm and 6.30pm overlooking Mount Street.

The set-up is supremely chic, with exquisitely dainty classic finger sandwiches and seasonal patisserie, but there's a real sense of fun here, too: we particularly appreciated the chocolate-topped biscuit in the shape of the hotel's sighthound mascot.

The star of the globetrotting selection of teas is The Connaught's own rich Assam-style blend, grown on the Tregothnan Estate in Cornwall; non-drinkers can also order flutes of deliciously toasty alcohol-free Hojicha Sparkling Tea.

If you're visiting at the weekend, you'll be able to enjoy a recital from the hotel's resident harpist. Emma Hughes

Afternoon tea starts at The Connaught starts from £85 per person, or from £95 with a glass of Billecart-Salmon Brut Réserve NV.

Seventy Five at Liberty

Afternoon tea at Liberty’s flagship restaurant, Seventy Five, is served: an interlude amid an afternoon of fabric-, clothes- and candle-shopping (the Cire Trudon aisle is the best of any department store).

The moment you slump into the (William Morris-upholstered) banquettes, tucked away somewhere on the second floor — I had to ask staff to redirect me there after missing it, twice — you enter a mindset of repose. You pop down your shopping bags, your glasses and that tired old head of yours as the throbbing baseline of people on the shop floor and in the world beyond (read: Soho) fades, almost miraculously, in a matter of seconds.

You are greeted and attended upon and all in all feel like a King. A Coronation chicken ‘sandwich’ is served with Earl Grey-flavoured raisins, on brioche bread (in the manner of a lobster roll) and the savoury course rounded off with a hot smoked Chalkstream trout encased in a delicate filo tart, and topped with trout roe.

The scones — plain and buttermilk — come fresh from the oven and served with a deliciously light clotted cream (jam always comes second).

Then comes the sweet course, which is a true explosion of taste: almost too much. Bring your kids, who have a higher tolerance for this sort of thing. Will Hosie

Afternoon tea at Seventy Five starts from £50 per person.

The Secrets & Spies Afternoon Tea at Raffles London at the OWO

Such is the elegance and the intricacies of the interiors of Raffles at the Old War Office (OWO) that it takes quite a lot to discourage you from getting lost in the ceiling. For the best part of 120 years, this building was the workplace for some of the most famous names in Britain, such as T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), Ian Fleming, and Sir Winston Churchill. Imagine the secrets that have been whispered in these halls.

Spycraft is all about distraction and deceit, and while the afternoon tea at Raffles OWO is distracting (and surely it must be, considering the interiors), it is no lie to say it is as delicious as it is playful. Sandwiches are stuffed and served with precision, and the scones sag under the weight of jam and cream. The tea menu itself is a delight and a welcome break from the over-consumed muck that is English Breakfast. Presentation occurs with all the decorum you would expect from a ritual as traditional as this.

But every performance needs its showstopper. Here, it is the sweets, which lean heavily on the espionage associated with the OWO. The legacies of Odette Sansom, Christine Granville, Virginia Goillot and Vera Atkins — female spies of distinction — have been preserved in sugar, fruit, chocolate and sponge, while the Time to Spy cake, shaped like a pocket watch, can make time stand still.

Who knew that afternoon tea could be so much fun? Well, the secret is out now. James Fisher

The Secrets & Spies Afternoon Tea at Raffles London at the OWO starts at £85 per person, and is served daily, 12pm–5pm.

Tea at The Ritz

Afternoon tea at The Ritz epitomises the unhurried, relaxed ritual — yet most definitely refines it. Served in the Palm Court since 1906, the setting — all gilt, mirrors and crown mouldings — transports you back to another time. A strict dress code still applies: no trainers, no sportswear, and gentlemen in jackets and ties. The waiters, in tailcoats, dance through the space; cups are topped up before you notice they’re empty, plates whisked away unnoticed. My Mum summarised it best: ‘They really know what they’re doing’.

There are more than 20 teas to choose from and six types of sandwich, each filling perfectly paired with a different bread (the ham was my favourite). There’s also a cake trolley with two daily specials (the kitchen bakes 30 Victoria sponge cakes every day), alongside warm scones and patisserie: blueberry cheesecake; banoffee parcels of joy; raspberry mousse in white chocolate. It’s playful, delicate, and delicious and all served to the soundtrack of live piano music. Flo Allen

Tea at The Ritz starts from £81 for adults and £59 for children, and it’s served five times a day (11.30am, 1.30pm, 3.30pm, 5.30pm and 7.30pm). Booking is essential.

Petersham Nurseries

Afternoon tea at Petersham Nurseries is a very green affair — firstly, because last year the restaurant was awarded a Michelin Green star for the fifth year running, and secondly because it’s served in their Garden Room, a greenhouse festooned with hanging plants.

Their seasonal Vegan Afternoon Tea is a triumph, with palpable attention to detail in every bite. Highlights include the tofu cream on sourdough, so flavoursome it’ll make you forget every boring tofu experience you’ve ever had, and the zucchini and feta tartlet — fresh and light with a beautifully browned pastry.

The standout, however, has to be the sweets: strawberry mousse cake, a warming apricot frangipane tartlet, a truly sensational meringue (made with chickpea water), and raspberry cheesecake with a coconut base. The scones are cloud-like and the tea list extensive. Try the Rosebud — the flowers are grown just metres away in the kitchen garden. Caitlin Barr

The vegan afternoon tea at Petersham Nurseries starts from £60 per person or £70 with Prosecco or a delightfully tart plum Bellini.

Fortnum & Mason

As someone with a gluten intolerance, the words ‘afternoon tea’ are usually a cause for sorrow: tiers of exquisitely crafted miniature cakes and painstakingly uniform sandwiches reminding me of the things I can no longer enjoy. But at Fortnum & Mason, not so. The eau de nil bastion of all things deliciously British provides for all.

Alongside their standard afternoon tea, they also provide an entirely savoury option — think wild mushroom profiteroles — a vegetarian offering, and one made without gluten. Served with a glass of bubbles and a tea of your choice from the extensive menu (I opted for black tea with fig) my meal was excellent.

Of the sandwiches, the smoked trout with cream cheese was a favourite (I had to have seconds). This was followed by a scone and a selection of delicious patisseries (the blackcurrant mousse was delicious) and macaroons to finish. Each bite was a delight and I’d definitely visit again. Lotte Brundle

The gluten-free afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason starts from £84 per person.

The Adria

Afternoon teas at London hotels can sometimes make you feel like you’re in a highly-glorified canteen: a giant space with dozens of other people sitting at tables around you, all eating the same thing. Tea at The Adria is pretty much the complete opposite: it feels more like popping into a friend’s house. On our visit the dining room was set up with just three tables, and Domink Feller’s team were so relaxed and chatty that our party — two adults, two children — were instantly at home within minutes of getting here following our 90-second stroll from the Natural History Museum.

Better than home, actually, unless you also have ten varieties of Newby tea set out in containers to see, smell and touch before choosing which one you’d like to sample first, from the usual Earl Grey and Silver Needle to more exotic choices like Apple Strudel ‘and Strawberry & Mango (both delicious).

Finger- and open-sandwiches, similarly, offered a mix. There were regular options — smoked salmon with caviar — but also some more unusual options, including a sublime smoked chicken with sage mayonnaise, and a more, ahem, ‘challenging’ mushroom and chestnut on harissa bread. (The hotel is also justly renowned for its outstanding gluten-free afternoon tea, something far too few places take seriously.)

The younger ones (on our table and one of the others) were delighted by teddy bear-shaped jam sandwiches, accompanied by a real teddy to take home. And everybody was delighted by the scones which were, quite simply, the best I’ve ever had at an afternoon tea. Toby Keel

Afternoon tea at The Adria starts from £55 per person, £65 including a glass of Champagne, or £62 with a glass of sparkling Saicho tea.

The Kensington

The Kensington is the queen of themed afternoon teas, typically inspired by whatever blockbuster exhibition is on at the V&A Museum. At the moment, they’re serving up a lavishly decadent version, best suited to diners with a bold sweet tooth, in honour of Marie Antoinette Style.

Treats that subtly nod to the last French queen include strawberry génoise sponges with vanilla Chantilly, blackberry and lemon tartlets, pastel-perfect macarons oozing chocolate ganache, and a rather elegant Le Brise de la Dauphine lemon shortbread.

To help counter the sugar rush, there are sophisticated sandwiches such as pastrami with horseradish cream, French chicken tarragon, and a bright pink brioche roll filled with avocado purée, and sun-dried tomatoes and feta. Buttery plain and fruit scones are served, of course, alongside clotted cream and jam — reassuringly simple after the flamboyant flavours of the patisserie selection.

The tea menu is impressive — more exotic than traditional — and while the upgraded option of Charles Heidsieck Champagne is tempting, I recommend the surprisingly good Queen’s Coupe cocktail. The gin fizz-based concoction, served in a coupe, is finished with raspberry dust (a word or warning, don’t get it on your fingers because it’s a bit sticky).

This afternoon tea is as theatrical as its namesake’s passion for drama. Each morsel is jam-packed with flavour, but it’s the presentation and design that take centre stage. The lemon shortbread, for example, features a painstakingly intricate piped design of a ball gown. Stripy pink and white chocolate panels, edible flowers and billowing mousse make this afternoon tea a real feast for the eyes… and perhaps a visit to the dentist afterwards. Emma Earnshaw.

Afternoon tea at the Kensington starts from £59 per person, £73 with Champagne or The Queen’s Coupe.

Thomas Straker — shorn pink hair, blue apron — is chopping the heads off of sea breams while I watch him from his mobile, which has been angled on a prep table and occasionally slides flat so that the view becomes spotlights and vents.

It’s before the lunch service and he’s in the kitchen at Acre (one of his three places on Golborne Road in Notting Hill) making stock, folding focaccia dough, and butterflying fish while my questions pipe through his earbuds. We’re meant to talk about his in-the-works restaurant in New York, which is opening sometime this spring. But his neon hair is also new and I ask him about it.

‘Ah, well,’ he says. ‘It was because of dry January. I got to the 10^th, or maybe it was the 5^th, and I’m not drinking, you know, and I’ve got this medium length, mousy brown hair. It’s very boring. And then suddenly, lightbulb moment, I got out of the shower and saw a pair of clippers that I’d used to shave the dog six months ago.’ He gestures at his head. ‘So I gave myself a number one buzz cut. My wife Davina was standing there, going “What the f**k have you done?” and I was like, “You know how we can make it even better? Let’s go neon pink.”’ He laughs. ‘There are times I’ve regretted it.’

Eighteen years ago, after attending Ballymaloe Cookery School in Cork, Ireland, Thomas was making £13,500 a year as a commis chef at The Dorchester. He lived in a rented attic bedroom in Battersea that he shared with a friend, and paid for it with cash in hand. From The Dorchester, he climbed the ranks through positions at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal and Elystan Street, both Michelin-starred, but it was his knack for social media that earned him enough of a personal following (2.7 million followers on Instagram and 2.5 million on TikTok, at the time of writing) to launch his first, perennially-packed restaurant, Straker’s, in 2022.

Straker’s won over po-faced critics with crowd-pleasing flatbreads and saucy langoustines, and the reviews staunched a certain amount of industry sulking that Thomas was, and probably still is, best known for his snappy videos involving different types of butter. (Thomas himself does not appear to mind the association — in 2023, he started an organic butter business called All Things Butter with a co-founder, Toby Hopkinson. This past January, they expanded to cottage cheese). Acre, where I’m watching Thomas at his prep station, opened in 2025.

‘I’m prepping another fish,’ he holds up two connected fillets of sea bream, bones removed. ‘You open up the grill and put those skin side down, get them nice and crispy, add a little garlic and olive oil and fish stock. Have it with a green salad or fries, it’s lovely for lunch.’ He will be here for the lunch service, working alongside head chef James Freeman, and for dinner too. Yesterday, he got home at around 11pm, then woke up at 5am to go to the gym (‘I’m really righteous right now’), before a session in the sauna and ice bath he recently installed in his garden. He cooked breakfast for his children — aged seven, four, and one — made some packed lunches, and arrived today at 8am. ‘It’s a long day, and obviously five or six hours of sleep isn’t maximum efficiency, but I’ve done a lot worse,’ he says. ‘With three restaurants there are a lot of people to be there for, at work and at home. I’m doing my best.’

Thomas was born in Washington, DC, to British parents, and his American citizenship is one of the reasons he started looking for premises in the USA. He cooked for a sold-out Straker’s pop-up in New York in 2024, full of customers who were crazy about his unfussy, butter-rich, give-the-people-what-they-want style of food, and that also got him thinking. ‘I love the vibe of New York, and I’ve never lived abroad,’ Thomas says. ‘I mean, I could sit comfortably on the Golborne Road for the rest of my life and keep doing the same thing, but I want to keep learning, I suppose.’ Last year, he found a location in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood, in the space that formerly belonged to Lucky Strike, a restaurant owned by the British chef Keith McNally, until it closed in 2020.

The upcoming New York restaurant, Straker’s NYC, is a larger space and a bigger financial risk than anything he has done before. ‘I built Straker’s [in London] for maybe half a million quid, and New York will be maybe four or five times that,’ he says. At the time of our interview, the interior of the restaurant is being outfitted, the grills are being installed in the kitchen, and a head chef hasn’t been named yet. Thomas is still figuring out his own travel logistics. But the guiding principles of the new restaurant will be consistent with his businesses in London. ‘We’ll lean very heavily into seasonality, we won’t compromise on products, and we’ll cook predominantly over charcoal and in wood-burning ovens,’ he says. Most importantly, he reiterates, his aim is to make sure that people enjoy themselves.

Recently, Thomas hosted his dad’s 70^th birthday in a private dining room next to Straker’s. The menu included flatbread with mussels, Dover sole, rib of beef, and salads. After dinner, dancing got going in the basement club downstairs. The music was thumping, and the guests made enough of a ruckus that someone from the council came to shut the party down. ‘All they could see on the CCTV was a bunch of grey heads bobbing around,’ he says, grinning. ‘But it was fun, you know. It was really fun.’ The private space where the party was held, The Dining Room, is new — Thomas is about to host his own birthday there in a couple of weeks — and the plan is for guests to eat and dance and agitate the council on a regular basis. The venture isn’t remotely as ambitious as the New York opening, but the commitment to a good time feels familiar.

He is chopping celery for chicken broth, carrying it to an off-screen pot. He narrates while adding thyme, rosemary, and garlic, sounding like an easy-going heir to Ina Garten. I ask what he would order off the menu today, and he says the crab tagliolini. ‘It’s just a winner, people really enjoy it, and I think as a chef, sometimes, you’ve got to swallow your pride and cook things that people like.’ He sets his knife down and bites into an unpeeled carrot. ‘When I was younger, I was constantly trying to do things that I thought would make me look more technically gifted, rather than concentrating on what people want to eat, and how they’re going to feel when they leave the restaurant. That’s where I am now, and where I’ve been for a few years.’

The chef moves on to rolling out dark chocolate with salted Marcona almonds, which will become a little chocolate bar, meant to be eaten alongside an espresso. ‘I don’t think anyone has ever left a restaurant going, “God I wish I’d eaten more purée,”’ he says. He turns to James, who is prepping crab to his right. ‘James, have you ever finished a dinner out and said, “I wish there had been more foam on my plate?”’ James’s reply is inaudible, and Thomas looks back down at the phone to translate. ‘He says no. But people probably have said, “I wish I had another slice of beef, that was amazing.” It’s just about serving real food that people want to eat.’

'England,’ wrote Voltaire, ‘has 42 religions, but only two sauces’. We may dispute the great philosopher’s figures, but it is certain that, if our nation did have only a pair of sauces, one of them would be brown.

Brown sauce is the most British of condiments and the English East Midlands can claim to be its epicentre. In Bottesford, Leicestershire, a company founded by David Hoe may have (we speak advisedly, because the origin of brown sauce is the subject of fiercer debate than the Kennedy assassination) produced Britain’s first commercial brown sauce sometime in the mid 19th century.

Hoe’s sauce was advertised as being patronised by ‘the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Rutland and members of the Melton Hunt’. It is possible the recipe drew inspiration from a traditional condiment thickened with elderberries and sometimes called Pontack Sauce. The godmother of English food writing, Florence White, notes that this elderberry-based sauce was often associated with Melton Mowbray — and, in particular, with Sir Charles Sedley, a keen hunting man whose country seat was a few miles away in Rutland.

Hoe’s claim to being the progenitor of brown sauce is disputed in Nottinghamshire. In New Basford, Frederick Garton began making his Banquet Sauce in the 1880s. His recipe was a product of Empire, blending tomatoes, tamarind, molasses, dates, soy sauce and spices with malt vinegar. On discovering it was being served in the restaurant at the Palace of Westminster, Garton rebranded his product as Houses of Parliament Sauce, trademarking the name in 1895. That, at least, is the official story. Condiment conspiracy theorists posit a counter-narrative in which an inveterate gambler named Harry ‘HP’ Palmer sold his recipe for Famous Epsom Sauce to Garton to pay off his debts.

Whatever the truth, in 1903, Garton was in hock himself and offloaded his sauce and trademark to the Midland Vinegar Company of Birmingham. With a stable home at last, HP Sauce was set to conquer the world; its global status celebrated by the description on the bottle label, written in both English and French (the legend ‘La Sauce HP est un Melange du Haute Qualite’ would remain until 1984).

It is possible that Brands of Piccadilly had marketed its A.1. Sauce (the name is alleged to have been given to it by George IV) even before Hoe and Garton and Crosse & Black-well of Soho unleashed a sea of piquant condiments in the 1840s that included Sir Robert Peel’s Sauce, the first — but, as we shall see, not the last — sauce to be endorsed by a British Prime Minister. Later additions to the brown-sauce firmament included Hammonds Chop Sauce, Daddies Favourite Sauce (originally Daddie’s; the baffling apostrophe was dropped at about the time that National Service ceased) and OK Sauce (an underwhelming name that suggests the firm might also have released a Par-for-the-Course Pickle).

Despite scepticism among our European friends, brown sauce is hugely popular in other parts of the world. Most OK Sauce is exported to South-East Asia, whereas A.1. enjoys great popularity in Taiwan and the US (where it was advertised, fittingly, by the singer Meat Loaf). In Japan, tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlets) comes accompanied by a thick, fruity brown sauce developed in the 1940s. Although recipes incorporate distinctly un-British ingredients such as mirin, the resemblance to our own brown sauce is uncanny — a little touch of the English chippy in the neon Tokyo night.

In Britain, brown sauce became ubiquitous during rationing, giving a welcome boost of what the Japanese would call umami to bland wartime food, or ‘helping out the odds and ends and putting everyone in a good humour’, as Daddies adverts claimed. In 1940, John Betjeman captured the national mood when he wrote of giving ‘the HP Sauce another shake’ in his poem Lake District.

Sales were given a further lift in the 1960s when Mary Wilson, wife of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, told journalists that her husband’s only vice was ‘drowning everything in HP Sauce’ (the media started calling brown sauce ‘Wilson’s gravy’).

Today, sales of HP Sauce comprise a whopping 28 million bottles per year. It might be a national success story, except that, in 2006, owners Heinz announced it was moving production to mainland Europe. In a tacit tribute to his predecessors at No 10 Downing Street, then Prime Minister Tony Blair supported a ‘Save our Sauce’ campaign.

Alas, it failed: this great staple of our island’s cuisine, which once billed itself as ‘The Official Sauce of Great Britain’, is now made by the Dutch. Please feel free to put aside your bacon sarnie and boo.

Pubs have always been so much more than mere places to drink. They’re woven tightly into the fabric of Britain’s story, forming a backdrop to — and quite often playing a pivotal role in — historic events, both for good and for ill. For every Seven Stars in Bristol, whose landlord was instrumental in the abolition of slavery, there is an Eclipse Inn in Winchester, Hampshire, where Lady Alice Lisle was beheaded in 1685 for harbouring fugitives (and is said to have haunted ever since).

Where did it all begin? When the Romans invaded in AD43, they brought tabernae —roadside shops that sold fortifying drinks and food to soldiers — to these shores, but Britons swiftly swapped their wine for ale, paving the way for us to frequent what were known as alehouses, taverns and coaching inns. In 1552, an Act of Parliament decreed that all landlords of alcohol-dispensing premises needed a licence and, in 1577, Elizabeth I’s Privy Council commissioned a survey revealing that there was roughly one drinking establishment for every 200 people in England and Wales. These were a home from home for people of all ages and occupations: ale and beer were safer to drink than much water at the time and were generally much less potent than they are today (unlike gin, which tended to be stronger).

By the 1700s, the catch-all term ‘public house’ was in use as a way to differentiate such hostelries from private houses that were not looking for custom. By Georgian times, it was in such common use that most people simply shortened it to the ‘pub’. By the early 1800s, the stagecoach routes crisscrossing the country were bringing more (and a greater variety of) people than ever through the doors: many establishments introduced various bars and stables for different classes of guest and their horses, a system that was adopted by the railways.

Ironically, the status of the pub as neutral ground also made it a stage for various explosive encounters, such as the Bill o’Jacks Murders of 1832 at the Moor Cock Inn in Saddleworth, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in which the landlord and his son were beaten to death. The pub soon drew crowds that wanted to see the bloodstains.

Today, your local is much more likely to serve craft beers and have Farrow & Ball on the walls than witness anything so dramatic, but even the most innocuous-looking locals can have surprisingly rich histories — here are a few of the most interesting, all well worth a visit.

The epicurean epicentre: The Bell Inn at Stilton, Cambridgeshire

Daniel Defoe — author of Robinson Crusoe — was a regular at The Bell Inn at Stilton and, in 1724, described the village in his Tour through the villages of England & Wales as a place ‘famous for cheese, which is call’d our English Parmesan’. That fame had been built by The Bell’s charismatic manager and later landlord, Cooper Thornhill. When he took charge of the premises in 1705, Thornhill turned The Bell Inn into the best food stop in the Midlands, which was a lucrative position when you’re placed on the main thoroughfare for carriages travelling north from London.

As demand grew for the blue cheeses made 30 miles north of Stilton, he went into partnership with a well-respected cheesemaker from Wymondham in Leicestershire, Frances Pawlett. It’s believed that she created a co-operative, recruiting other neighbouring cheesemakers to make cheese to her recipe that would then be sold from The Bell. Stilton cheese retained its status from then on, but with the advent of rail travel the Great North Road (now the A1) became less influential. After Stilton gained a bypass in 1958, The Bell Inn actually closed for a period, but was refurbished in 2024 and is now an excellent stop off for a hearty dinner.

A scientist’s sanctum: The Eagle, Cambridgeshire

The Eagle has been slaking the thirst of Cambridge scholars since the 17th century, but it wasn’t until February 28, 1953, that it earned its blue plaque. It was the lunch spot of choice for Francis Crick and James Watson when they worked in the nearby Cavendish Laboratory, which specialised in experimental physics. When they realised they’d made a discovery — DNA’s double helix structure — that would change science forever, Crick burst into their local and exclaimed that they’d ‘discovered the secret of life’.

Since its original plaque went up, fellow Cambridge scientist Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to the discovery has been acknowledged and an updated plaque now credits all three of the scientists — which will save the people who were regularly adding her name to the first iteration a fortune in Sharpies. Current owners Greene King will happily pour you a pint of Eagle’s DNA in liquid tribute. Sup it at a table in the RAF Bar, where the ceiling is covered in names, squadron numbers and doodles made by Allied airmen — using wax crayons, petrol lighters and even lipstick — during the Second World War.

A bard’s bolthole: The Globe Inn, Dumfries and Galloway

Down a stone-paved alley in the centre of Dumfries, two bronze plaques immediately reveal what makes The Globe Inn a place of Scottish pilgrimage: it was Rabbie Burns’s favourite haunt (or ‘howff’, as he’d have put it).

The Scottish poet moved his family to Dumfriesshire in 1788 and was a regular at The Globe until his death in 1796. His habit of enjoying affairs with women in service was further enabled here; the landlady’s niece, Anna Park, was employed as a barmaid in the inn and was the inspiration for Burns’s much-loved song The Gowden Locks of Anna. Park gave birth to his illegitimate daughter, but it’s thought she died after childbirth, as the baby — Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Burns — was taken in and raised by Burns’s wife, Jean Armour.

The pub does not wear its Burns links lightly: today, you can still see the window panes into which the poet etched his verse using a diamond stylus and learn about the gloriously Scottish dishes he was served by the landlady, Mrs Hyslop; sheep’s heid was a particular favourite. The restaurant is well regarded today and celebrates the finest Scottish ingredients.

The riverside refuge: Town of Ramsgate, London

George ‘Hanging Judge’ Jeffreys had a notorious legal career: presiding over the Bloody Assizes of 1685, during which participants in the failed Monmouth Rebellion against James II were punished, he was known for making dark jokes ahead of his sentencings and seemingly chose execution at any opportunity.

When the King fled the country following the Glorious Revolution in 1688, Jeffreys attempted to follow, hiding in a pub in Wapping now known as The Town of Ramsgate to wait for the boat to Hamburg. To avoid suspicion, he dressed as a sailor, but despite his commitment to the disguise — he even shaved off his eyebrows — a surviving victim of his harsh judgement recognised him. He was captured and imprisoned.

These days, the pub is a classic locals’ drinking hole, with Young’s London Original on the hand-pull pump and pie and mash at the top of the food menu. Its name was adopted due to its position next to Wapping Old Stairs, a River Thames mooring that 19th-century fishermen from Ramsgate used to avoid the river taxes that had been imposed up near Billingsgate Market. The stairs were also the spot where sailors would meet their sweethearts upon their return to London.

Let battle commence: The Bells of Peover, Cheshire

At less than 200 years old, The Bells of Peover is practically a whippersnapper by pub standards, but it’s certainly packed a lot into its two centuries. Originally named the Warren de Tabley in tribute to a local lord of the manor, the current name is also a nod to well-respected locals (and not the church close at hand). The Bells were members of a local brewing family who ran the place for 55 years, until Alma Bell retired from the business following a chain of family tragedies.

Peover’s real moment in the spotlight, however, came during the Second World War. US Gen George S. Patton used Peover Hall outside Knutsford as his headquarters and, when Dwight D. Eisenhower (future US President, then commander of the Allied forces) joined him for secret strategy meetings, they lunched at The Bells of Peover. The unassuming upstairs room at this country pub became the office in which the D-Day plans were finalised.

Current landlord Phil Smith still flies both a Union Flag and the Stars and Stripes in front of the pub in commemoration, as well as displaying maps of the Normandy beaches and even Patton’s diary from 1944, left open at the pages for June 5 and 6, of course.

In food terms, fermenting is as close to true alchemy as we get; the transformation of base ingredients into weird, wonderful and delicious forms that are, thanks to friendly bacteria working away at microscopic levels to convert sugars and starches into acids, alcohols and gases, literally alive. It’s ubiquitous, responsible for everything from beige staples such as bread and beer to cheese, yoghurt, vinegar, kombucha and kefir (of which more shortly). It’s a global phenomenon, too: take the Horn of Africa’s sour injera pancakes, kvass in Eastern Europe (a fizzy drink traditionally made with stale rye bread), soy sauce in China, the Filipino shrimp sauce of bagoong, kimchi in Korea, miso in Japan… the list goes on and on.

Ever since the emergence of agrarian Neolithic communities, fermenting has been an essential form of preservation for humankind through cold, dark winters and periods of scarcity. In his book The Science of Fermentation, Robin Sherriff even notes that the early ingestion of fermented fruit may have kickstarted the brain development of modern humans — a happy salve for the cider drinkers among us. Regardless of any historic impact on our brainpower, many fermented foods and drinks are rich in probiotics, living organisms with a host of putative benefits for our digestion. For some reason, Britain never really developed the panoply of fermented foods seen elsewhere: the chef, writer and fermentation enthusiast Thom Eagle puts this, in part, down to our country’s kitchen-bound and generational fear of salt and bacteria. Mercifully, a host of independent, UK-based producers are now bucking the trend, creating delectable products teeming with a life of their own.

The Crafty Pickle Co sauerkraut, Crick, Monmouthshire

Self-confessed ‘science geeks, tree huggers and food nerds’ Madi Myers and Arthur Serini met when studying nutrition in the mid 2010s. They’d always been interested in fermentation’s role in gut health, but became truly fascinated by the wonder of controlled rot on a 2017 camping tour of the Scottish Highlands, sans fridge. ‘We had several jars of sauerkraut [fermented shredded cabbage] and kimchi [a spicy mix of fermented vegetables] in the boot of Madi’s car,’ explains Arthur. ‘They kept really well out of the fridge and it got us thinking about the role that fermented foods play in our food system.’ After peeling away for a couple of years, they rejoined forces in Aberdeen, spotting a gap in the market and starting The Crafty Pickle Co in 2019, creating tiny batches of ’kraut in glass fermentation vessels.

After moving back to Madi’s native Wales in 2021, they started sourcing surplus root vegetables from smallholders around Crick, Crickhowell and Monmouthshire and set to work upscaling the business. To Arthur’s mind, a perfect sauerkraut should be thinly sliced, crunchy and long-fermented (to reflect its Eastern European origins, when huge batches would be aged over winter) and sour and tangy on the palate. Their signature Crafty Kraut encapsulates this: a 21-day-aged mix of cabbage, carrots, caraway, garlic and sea salt, of which they make about 20,000 jars a year (and which pips, but only just, the equally toothsome, jalapeño-spiked Mexicana Kraut).

Delicious as it is, the overall idea of preservation as an ethical boon, as well as its importance in the history of gastro evolution, remains key to the Crafty Kraut ethos. ‘In the past 100 or so years, fermentation has kind of fallen away a little bit,’ says Madi. ‘We want to be part of the revolution to bring it back.’

Old Tree Brewery kombucha, Lewes, East Sussex

The seed for Old Tree was planted with a chance encounter on a train, when founders Tom Daniell and Nick Godshaw, on their way back from an anti-fracking event, bonded over ‘life, the environment and wanting to work with Nature — and what you can make from Nature,’ explains managing director, Tai Ray-Jones. They tried out a forest-gardening project and a café, but, spurred by the botanical drinks they’d been concocting, refocused their efforts on quaffable probiotics in 2018.

‘Kombucha [a fermented tea] ticked all the boxes,’ notes Tai. ‘It’s low in alcohol and sugar — and, once you get the base, you can add all sorts of things to it: fruits, leaves, flowers, herbs.’ For the foundation of their recipe, they plumped for a blend of sencha and Assam teas, to which bacterial cultures are added in the form of a gelatinous disc called a ‘scoby’. The fermentation process takes a couple of weeks, after which they mix in natural, hydrostilled flavourings.

Of all their perennial variations, Oaklore is the simplest, unflavoured, but still ‘slightly apple-y’. Ancient Futures is made with Boadicea hops, ‘for something more beery’. Forager’s Garden, meanwhile, factors a palate of lemon balm and lavender. They also knock up seasonal brews: mugwort, rosehips, linden blossom or mint, say — ‘we use whatever’s in season that we can get our hands on’ — all foraged or sourced from local growers, for tiny batches.

Crucially, many commercial kombuchas are heavily filtered, with CO2 and probiotics added later; little more than bijou hipster pop. Not so at Old Tree Brewery, Tai explains. ‘We let the microbes do the work and we let them stay in the drink. With our kombucha, you get all the life.’

Ostlers cloudy apple cider vinegar, Goodleigh, Devon

At its core, apple cider vinegar is simply cider gone bad; infiltrated by airborne bacteria that transform the booze into piquant, fruity acids. It is a nightmare for commercial cider-makers — but magic for folks such as the Ostlers. Founded by Peter Hartnoll as a cider mill in 1987, Ostlers began creating the sharp stuff after he started supping an off batch of cider as a Roman-era remedy for his arthritis. It miraculously improved; convinced of its healing properties, Peter began selling the vinegar as a dedicated product.

It was a straightforward shift, laughs his daughter, Becci Paterson, as ‘even his cider tasted like vinegar’. Almost 30 years later, with Peter retired and Becci at the helm, Ostlers is the South-West’s pre-eminent producer of cloudy apple cider vinegar.

To make the vinegar, Becci takes cider-apple varieties such as Michelin, Dabinett and Brown’s, fermenting their juice in tanks of up to 6,000 litres in size. Over a few years, a weblike culture of natural yeast and bacteria called a ‘mother’ develops, which transforms the sweet liquid into vinegar. ‘When it’s wrong, it’s right,’ she says of the process. This culture (‘like a massive alien afterbirth that gets everywhere and clogs up our pumps’) is kept in the bottle; something considered unsightly to the health-store demographic that had apple cider vinegar ringfenced when Ostlers started marketing theirs properly, about 16 years ago— but now commonplace given its abundance of healthy bacteria and enzymes.

As happenstance goes, Ostlers’ segue from a workaday cider mill to a sustainable, organic, off-grid business of award-winning repute was, confirms Becci, ‘a very good — but an accidental — move. We make really amazing vinegar, but we make a slightly sharp cider!’

Susana & Daughters kefir, Midhurst, West Sussex

Susana Perez was a teenager when she discovered the wondrous properties of kefir, a probiotic milk drink loaded with protein and vitamin B12, which originated in the Caucasus mountains between Russia and Georgia. A judo champion in her native Spain, she was given it as an unlikely strengthening hack by the grandmother of a colleague. ‘I was never ill and really strong,’ she says. ‘To me, it was a magical thing. I was going to competitions and winning.’ Now, Susana is the force behind Susana & Daughters, the kefir brand that she makes with milk from a herd at Cowdray Park.

Decades after discovering kefir and following a more recent eureka moment when she was trekking the Camino de Santiago trail, she decided to start making it herself. After learning the ropes on an organic farm near Barcelona in Spain, she approached the West Sussex estate to see if they’d let her set up shop alongside their free-range cows. Operating at a small scale was paramount. ‘I didn’t want to be on some industrial estate,’ she says. ‘I wanted to be next to the cows.’

She met the estate CEO, Jonathan Russell, who relayed her idea to the Viscount and Viscountess Cowdray. They adored it. Good milk equals good kefir and Cowdray’s, she stresses, is excellent. She started in 2018 proper, in an 18th-century stone estate building, converted into a ‘kitchen for kefir’. She produced her first commercial batch in February 2019 and is now making 500 bottles a week, always sold in glass (she’s also vehemently averse to plastic waste). Mrs Perez adds nothing to her full-fat milk but kefir culture grains, which convert lactose into lactic acid. The milk is pasteurised to destroy bacteria, but it’s not put through a homogeniser, which would destroy fats and protein structures and remove the nutrients. The result? A creamy, complex, effervescent drink with — given the distance from cow to kitchen — negligible food miles. ‘It’s like the king of yoghurt,’ she concludes, ‘with billions of gut-friendly bacteria.’

Best of the rest

• Blesys Sherp hot sauce, Cornwall A small-scale operation in the Cornish village of Millbrook, Blesys Sherp — the local adjective for ‘spicy’— was started by three friends seeking to apply to chillies the same nerdish appreciation they do to specialty coffee. Their signature ‘house’ sauce melds habaneros and mango to piping effect.
• Tempeh Meades, Bristol Tempeh is a nutty-tasting pressed cake of cooked and fermented soy beans, often used like tofu. Tempeh Meades was founded in 2019 by Ben Meades, who learned about commercial tempeh production in West Java before moving to Bristol to start making his delicious take on the vegan staple.
• Bombom gochujang, London South Korean chef Seji Hong began creating condiments after running a supper club from her flat in Wimbledon. Her gochujang — a fermented chilli paste — is tweaked from the traditional Korean style, incorporating plum syrup for sweetness and garlic for a faintly more European flavour profile.

This feature originally appeared in the February 25, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

If there is such a thing as a rock-and-roll baker, then it is surely Richard Hart. For the past two decades, he’s travelled the globe, won industry plaudits galore and set up a string of award-winning bakeries around the world — but with his tattoos, stubble and fondness for swearing, he comes across more like an East End geezer than Britain’s most lauded baker. He’s attracted his share of controversy, too — he recently offended half of Mexico by asserting it doesn’t ‘have much of a bread culture’ — which makes his latest project, a British-themed bakery at one of London’s landmark hotels, Claridge’s, all the more surprising.

‘It's funny, because I've never actually been a baker in England,’ he says, rubbing a hand through his beard. ‘I lived in the [US] for eleven years, Copenhagen for six, now I'm in Mexico. But I've wanted to come back to the UK since I left. It's just taken a long time to come to fruition.’

Richard has certainly had a peripatetic career. Having fallen in love with sourdough in the mid 2000s in California while working at Ubuntu and Della Fattoria, he later became head baker at San Francisco’s renowned Tartine, where he stayed for seven years. In 2018, he set up Hart Bageri in Copenhagen with the experimental Danish chef René Redzepi, and since 2022, he’s been based in Mexico City, where he runs Green Rhino with his partner, tea maestro Henrietta Lovell. As if that wasn’t enough, his most recent book, Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Making, won the baking category for the James Beard Book Award in 2025.

His latest project is tucked away on Brook’s Mews, a backstreet behind Claridge’s, hitherto favoured by celebrities making incognito entrances and exits to the hotel. The idea for the bakery has been in the works for years, Richard explains. Several years ago, one of his chefs made him a giant Double Decker — his favourite chocolate bar — as a birthday surprise. This got him thinking about all the sweet treats he loved as a child, and how they have almost entirely fallen out of fashion with today’s bakers, who seem to be obsessed with fancy French patisseries and San Francisco-style sourdough.

‘To be honest, I wish more British bakers would look at what we used to have,’ he says. ‘We all loved Mr. Kipling's as a kid. I remember going to my grandparents for hot toast with butter and marmalade. To look at those things from the past and give them a new life is really exciting for me. Those food memories are a wonderful thing, you know. They’re like magic.’

An ever-so-British bakery seems a natural fit for Claridge’s, and browsing the shelves induces an instant hit of childhood nostalgia. Alongside the granary loaves, country bloomers and Marmite cheese straws are tea-room treats straight from a village fête: jammy dodgers, iced fingers, Bakewell tarts, lardy cakes, fruit turnovers, walnut whips. Of course, this being a Richard Hart bakery, everything is baked to perfection, prepared with the kind of reverence and attention to detail a French boulanger would devote to their baguettes, eclairs, madeleines and macarons. But it hasn’t been without challenges.

‘The thing is, French pastries all look amazing, but English baked goods typically don’t,’ Richard says, ever the provocateur. ‘A Belgian bun is actually pretty ugly, you know? Making it look nice is a real challenge.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘I've also got an issue with scones. In my opinion, a scone has to be baked and then eaten. It's perfect in that moment. A scone that sits too long is just sad. That’s why we don’t sell them.’

Richard insisted from the start that the design of the bakery should be open-plan to allow customers to watch the bakers at work and smell the aromas: toasted malt, browning sugar, the yeasty richness of fresh-baked bread. Since opening its doors in January 2026, it’s proved predictably popular, especially with non-British customers — for many of whom it’s their first taste of a jammy dodger or malted milk loaf. Does he think its success has been helped by the global popularity of The Great British Bake Off? ‘Of course,’ he laughs. ‘Paul Hollywood visited one of my bakeries a few years ago, and my mum still basically feels like it was the highlight of my career.’

The difference with his takes on these quintessentially British bakes, Richard says, is that whereas traditional recipes typically used fast-acting instant yeast, he employs different methods of fermentation to make them more digestible. Most crucial of all is the flour: Richard buys all his from the same Italian supplier he’s been working with for years, Molino Paulo Mariani, a family-run mill in Le Marche, a few miles from the Adriatic coast.

‘The first time I visited, I’d never seen anything so beautiful,’ he says. ‘Each piece of wheat had different root systems, different root structures. There were butterflies and bugs flying around. It felt like I’d died and gone to baker's heaven. I'm sure there’s some amazing wheat grown in Britain, but I haven't even looked because I love the people I work with. If you're a baker and you're buying wheat, you need to go and figure out where it’s coming from.’

While there are currently no plans to expand the bakery to other locations, as ever with Richard Hart, the cogs are already whirring. ‘There’s so many places we could go with it,’ he says. ‘I mean, imagine it being like an old, comfy lounge, like your nan’s front room. How good would that be?’

For now, however, he’s happy just to get his head down and bake.

‘Being a baker teaches you humility,’ he says. ‘Today, my bread could be great; tomorrow it could be terrible. Bread has life. It needs nurturing, love, attention. There's a mystery to it which makes it exciting. Something happened in the universe that day to make it work, but it’s impossible to replicate. And like everyone, sometimes I screw it up. Twenty years later, I've literally got my head stuck in a mix every day, you know, still trying to make that perfect loaf.’

'I’d rather have them three sheets to the wind on occasion than have a mutiny on my hands,’ opined Capt Jack Aubrey to the ship’s surgeon, Dr Stephen Maturin, when he complained about the crew’s drunkenness.

Based on the novels of Patrick O’Brian, the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World may be a work of fiction, but the historical seafaring attitude towards drink is not.

Yet how the Royal Navy has declined since the heroic times of the Napoleonic Wars. In a bit of jobsworth ’elf and safetyism, it was announced at the end of January that sailors on board ships would be expected to stick to the Government’s recommended limit of 14 units. That’s about six pints. A week!

What’s more, ships must have two dry days each week and sailors will not be allowed more than three units a day — about a pint and a half. It’s tragic to see a great institution brought down by the clipboard-wielding classes, but the rot actually set in 56 years ago when the daily rum ration (about an eighth of a pint) was discontinued — a tradition that had kept Britain safe for hundreds of years.

At 11am on July 31, 1970 — a day that became known as Black Tot Day — sailors received their final daily issue of Admiralty blend Pusser’s Rum. This dark day was not only a bitter blow to sailors — men who had relied on this nautical nectar to boost morale and ease the pain of unforgiving labour — but it also saw the end of a complex system of purchasing and blending that had evolved over hundreds of years. Navy rum was a rum like no other.

In the early days of the Royal Navy, however, the spirit of choice was brandy. This changed when the Spanish ceded Jamaica to England in 1670. This large Caribbean island produced masses of sugar cane worked by African slaves. The by-product, molasses, was distilled into rum. By 1731, the daily tot had been institutionalised, a tradition that would last 239 years.

To ensure the Navy wasn’t being cheated, the purser would mix the rum with gunpowder and put a flame to it. If the rum caught fire it was the right strength, dubbed ‘proof’ (a modern 57% abv). Too weak and it wouldn’t light, too strong and it would explode. Proof rum was watered down slightly for the obvious safety reasons. With rum this strong, it was a problem keeping the men soberish until, in 1740, Admiral Edward Vernon introduced a kind of proto-Mojito. This consisted of one part rum to four parts water with brown sugar and lime juice. Vernon was known as ‘Old Grog’ because of the cloak he wore made of a water-proof fabric called grogram, from which where we get the word ‘grog’.

The lime juice in Old Grogram’s cocktail helped prevent scurvy, which was part of the reason why the Royal Navy was such an effective fighting force — its sailors were much healthier than their Spanish or French rivals. Until 1850, sailors would get rum in the morning and evening, but the latter tot ended in 1850. On special occasions extra rations would be issued with the cry: ‘Splice the main-brace!’

Not everyone approved, however. Throughout the 19th century, temperance campaigners tried to ban the rum ration, but the Royal Navy held firm. Oceans of rum were required to defend the British Empire. By the end of the Second World War, there were about 800,000 sailors serving and amazingly, one company, ED&F Man, supplied all the Royal Navy’s needs from 1784 to 1970. Rum from all over the Caribbean would land at the aptly named Rum Quay at West India Dock in London E14. From there it would go to the vast naval victualling yard at Deptford in Kent, where it would be aged for two years in a 250,000-gallon vatting system before it was sweetened with caramel and sent out on ships.

The blend would change over time. According to Mark Pietrek and Alexandre Gabriel’s book Exploring 300 Years of Royal Navy Rum and its Techniques, initially, Barbados dominated, followed by Jamaica, which was in turn superseded by Guyana. Gabriel’s company Planteray makes a replica called Mister Fogg Navy Rum after a late employee of ED&F Man. It’s blended from Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana and Jamaica rum and aged in the Caribbean and, heretically, France. I’m not sure Capt Aubrey would approve.

Although life at sea would have been hard and dangerous, a tot of rum would have made life a little sweeter. After Black Tot Day, sailors were assured that they would be allowed three beers a day instead. Now even this moderate allowance has been removed. Who’d want to run away to a life at sea these days?

Henry Jeffreys is the author of ‘Empire of Booze’ (Allen & Unwin, £12.99)

Ah, Burgundy. Once a Dukedom so rich, so powerful, so splendidly magnifique, that it was every bit the equal of the kingdom of France. Not only did they rule their eponymous lands, but Franche-Comté, Holland and much of Belgium, too. It was the Burgundians who captured Joan of Arc before selling her to the English and her fiery fate, whereas Burgundy’s rulers, known as The Grand Dukes of the West, were more prestigious than the French kings. In fact, had you asked your run-of-the-mill medieval seer, he might have confidently predicted France becoming a part of Burgundy, rather than the other way around. Oh, well, c’est la vie and all that. They’ll just have to make do with some of the world’s greatest wines (bonjour, Montrachet Grand Cru, salut Domaine de la Romanée-Conti DRC) and those buxom snails that feast upon their leaves, plucked, simmered, baked and bathed in bubbling garlic butter.

There’s the majestic poulet de Bresse, perhaps the world’s most glamourous chicken, simply roasted or turned into coq au vin, and jambon persillé, a glittering, set aspic study in parsley and pig. Époisses is one of my favourite cheeses, stinking yet elegant—and Dijon mustard is the only true equal to English. ‘If the attempt were made to sum up the dominant characteristic of Burgundian cooking in a single word,’ wrote Waverley Root in The Food of France, ‘perhaps that word might be “substantial”’. For this is true cuisine bourgeoise, unashamedly robust, with the square jaw, easy swagger and firm handshake of a well-to-do négociant. Hearty, but never basic, ‘his dishes demand lusty, full-blooded sauces’. And there is no dish more lusty and full blooded than boeuf à la Bourguignonne, originally made with another great beast of Burgundy, the Charolais cow. ‘

This is a favourite among those carefully composed, slowly cooked dishes, which are the domain of French housewives and owner-cooks of modest restaurants rather than of professional chefs,’ explains Elizabeth David, before going on to say that ‘such dishes do not, of course, have a rigid formula’. But, at the risk of disagreeing with the saintly ED, this does, for boeuf Bourguignon (as it’s more commonly known) always involves red wine, onions, mushroom and cured pork, just like any other dish bearing that regional name.

As to the wine, this is not the place for a £5,000 bottle of 2006 La Tâche. Or even, for that matter, a civilised £25 bottle of Bourgogne rouge. Although it certainly needs to be decent (no mean cooking wine here), I’d suggest keeping the good stuff for drinking with your dinner and instead go for a Côtes du Rhône, beefy Languedoc, Shiraz or Cabernet Sauvignon. ‘Boeuf bourguignon needs something with plenty of body,’ advises my friend, wine writer Henry Jeffreys. ‘And make sure it isn’t sweet, as some cheaper reds can be sugary.’

When it comes to the cut of beef, you need something that has done a little hard toil, such as cheek, shin or chuck, so, after a low and slow spell in the oven, it breaks down and becomes beguilingly soft. You want big chunks of meat, too, the size of a baby’s fist. This is Burgundian after all. Brown in small batches, so you get that all important crust. If you have time, cook, allow to cool and put in the fridge overnight. Not only will you be able to scrape off any excess fat (not too much, however), but the flavour also improves. Traditionalists will argue that it must be served with boiled potatoes. What do they know? Mash is the only option and authenticity be damned.

This recipe is from Keith Floyd’s excellent Floyd on France. ‘This splendid stew has been raped and pillaged by pub and wine bar cooks the length and breadth of this fair land of ours —they add peppers and other unmentionable ingredients to what must be a simple, slow-cooked dish with no deviation from this recipe.’ Well, quite. He uses quite a lot of booze (no surprises there), so I’ve adapted it a little. A calf’s foot, easily available from the butcher, adds a wonderful glossy viscosity to the sauce and one more layer of flavour. When it comes to the cut of beef, you need something that has done a little hard toil

Ingredients

Serves six.

• 1.5kg well-hung beef chuck, shin, or cheek, cut in large bite-size chunks, and dipped in seasoned plain white flour
• 5 onions, roughly chopped
• 5 carrots, roughly chopped
• 5 shallots, roughly chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped
• 6 sprigs thyme
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 bottle punchy red wine (see above)
• 6 thick slices streaky bacon or pancetta, cubed
• 1 large glass brandy
• 250ml good beef stock
• 1 small calf’s foot (optional, but preferable!)
• Walnut-sized lump of butter
• Glug of olive oil
• 250g mushrooms, finely chopped
• 200g baby onions, peeled, or small shallots, peeled
• Salt and pepper
• 1 handful parsley, roughly chopped

Method

Marinate the beef, onions, carrots, shallots, garlic and herbs in the wine overnight. Remove the meat and reserve the marinade.

In a large, heavy- bottomed saucepan, fry the bacon in a little olive oil, and then add the meat and brown. Add the brandy and flame.

Barely cover with the reserved marinade, which you have sieved, discarding the vegetables, plus the stock. Add the calf’s foot (if using).

Cover and simmer on a low flame for three hours (or put the pot, with lid on, into an oven heated to 140˚C, for about 3–3½ hours, until meat is soft). Top up with the marinade if it seems to be drying out.

Half an hour from the end of cooking, fry the mushrooms in a little butter and oil, and add to the meat. Then toss in the baby onions (or shallots) to the same pan, and brown.

When the onions (or shallots) are tender, add the salt and pepper and add to the meat. Season to taste. Serve very hot and finish with the parsley.

This feature originally appeared in the January 11, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

If you read my reviews in Country Life, you’ll know that my list of restaurant ‘icks’ — turn-offs guaranteed to set me against a place — is fairly extensive. (Yes, my diamond shoes are pinching.) Any attempt at humour in the lavatories is one, being asked how the food is when I’ve only just taken a bite of something is another.

Until recently, I counted chefs’ tables, where you sit either at or near the pass where the plates come out and are given a running commentary on the proceedings, among them. They’re an introvert’s nightmare that interfere with the real business of dining out, viz demolishing the bread basket.

On one memorably mortifying occasion, the chef of a very serious east London restaurant brought out a belching vat of kimchi, which he then plonked down in front of us to illustrate a lecture on fermentation. At that point, we were still waiting for the wine list.

The whole rigmarole has always reminded me of watching a burlesque show, in that nobody in the room is actually having as much fun as they’re pretending to. However, recently the (chefs’) tables have been turned: denizens of the new breed feel more like a lock-in than a fayn dayning beauty pageant.

The Goring, SW1, home to one of the capital’s most reassuringly traditional dining rooms, has opened up its subterranean kitchen to guests with a counter that seats up to six. Over plentiful glasses of Champagne, we unobtrusively watched Graham Squire and his brigade working their magic before going back upstairs to eat: a genuinely exciting peek behind the curtain that made us even more appreciative of the meal that followed.

Another favourite, Ravinder Bhogal’s jewel-box-like Jikoni in Marylebone, W1, has an eight-seater table by the pass that feels as if you’re dining in the kitchen of a very stylish, generous and relaxed friend: you happily tuck into prawn toast Scotch eggs with banana ketchup and chalkstream trout and bulgar wheat tartare surrounded by labelled tupperware boxes of spices.

In the cellar of what was a Soho boozer in the 18th century, meanwhile, low-lit 12-seater Evelyn’s Table, W1, is going from strength to strength: you’re inches away from the kitchen and the cooking is mightily impressive, but the whole experience somehow remains unfussy, let-your-hair-down fun.

Now, where did that bread basket go?


Uh oh. Trouble in the Home Counties. The Haslemere branch of Waitrose is temporarily closed for refurbishment, not expected to open again until early March, and it’s causing immense distress in the area. No Waitrose? But how can anyone eat? Where else can locals buy Nocellara olives and Isle of Wight tomatoes? True, they can still get online deliveries, but it’s not quite as joyful as an actual trip to Waitrose, is it?

Go to a Waitrose and you can meander up and down the aisles at will, filling your trolley with posh tuna, cavolo nero and those nice shortbread biscuits. You know, all the essentials. Order online and you risk getting the bruised avocados and broken Burford eggs. Of course there are other supermarkets available, but one hardly wants to be seen shopping in them. Still, for the time being, Haslemere locals may have to look elsewhere, so here’s our guide to the other options:

• Sainsbury’s Perfectly decent but everyone knows it's a step or two down from Waitrose. Remember to take your Waitrose bags for life, so everyone else there knows this is only a temporary situation and you’re a cut above them
• Tesco The Polish builders seem to love it. Has a very well-stocked world food section, apparently
• Marks and Spencer We don’t eat ready meals as a rule. Nasty processed stuff, is it any wonder that this country has an obesity crisis? But the M&S ones are different, they’re not really ready meals. Delicious chicken curry. Almost as good as the one we had in Jaipur last year
• Aldi Don’t tell anyone, but we bought all of Poppy’s wedding champagne from Aldi. We simply instructed the waiters to hold their napkins over the label while pouring so the guests could tell. It’s awfully convincing. You’d never know it wasn’t Taittinger
• Lidl Useful for bits and bobs from Europe. German meats, Italian salamis, halfway decent burrata, that sort of thing. And their croissants aren’t bad. It’s not quite the same as being on the continent, but jolly close. Useful at Christmas-time too, for cake and panettone
• Morrisons Didn’t we drive past one up north once, on the way to Scotland?
• Co-op Frightfully tangy salt and vinegar crisps, and handy for the papers on the weekend, but the Co-op doesn’t sell much else you could possibly serve at a dinner party, and you’d be a bit embarrassed to be caught shopping in one
• Iceland Ha ha, trick question. This isn’t a supermarket, it’s the one Donald Trump wants to invade.
• Costco Oh yes, we send the cook there sometimes. Useful for shoot lunches, and loo roll
• Asda Don’t be silly

As happens in rural English villages, there were rumours going around.

The red-brick site on the corner had been a restaurant at one point and it had been a chip shop where my wife had worked as a teenager, but now — according to many — it was going to become a Portuguese wine bar. The sheer ridiculousness of the idea meant the rumour spread fast.

Little Walsingham is a village full of farmers all year round, shooting parties during the season and pilgrims in the fairer months. The idea that a bar selling vinho verde would make it through even one winter was about as likely as the Madonna herself reappearing by the old water pump.

It was late October 2023 when VinedMe opened, which seemed quite mad. Sure, you might sell a couple of glasses to punters on hot summer evenings, but who’s going to go to a new wine bar in north Norfolk in November, when most locals are sitting by their woodburners waiting bitterly for spring?

It took about six months for people to realise that what had seemed unlikely was going better than well. Marta, who is from a cork-growing family in Portugal, and Kevin, a wine-trade veteran, were giving it all they had and it was paying off. From Thursdays through to the weekend, turning up after 7pm was to risk not getting a table.

Within their first year, everyone from young farmers to foresters, land agents to priests, all decided that this wine bar was for them and it had all the buzz and eclecticism of an old-fashioned village pub. I’ve heard people ask Marta and Kevin why north Norfolk and why Walsingham? They say that they like the coast and that they felt that if they created something special, it would come good. Last year, they opened a second site, in Thornham, 15 miles to the west.

Clearly, they have worked hard, but from the outside looking in, the secrets to their success have been making good wine feel accessible, letting people feel they can comfortably wander in after they’ve been out shooting deer or driving a tractor and collaborating with local food businesses. Most weekends, there’s a Norfolk fishmonger selling oysters, Alex, the local pizza guy, firing up his oven or Mrs Temple the cheesemaker talking about her ‘Binham Blue’ and regenerative dairy farming.

Marta and Kevin could have picked any number of English villages and Walsingham feels immensely lucky. In three years, VinedMe has become a cornerstone of an ancient place. A small village can be made by the addition of a thriving friendly business and, equally, it can be quietly devastated by losing one. A village pub or a shop is more than a place for a pint or to buy milk — they’re often the beating heart of a community. In cities and towns, places come and go without much notice, but in villages, closure is keenly felt.

Whether they are the owners or part of the team, the key to shops and pubs that work is good people. In villages, folk who are community spirited and hardworking can really make a place; it only takes a dozen or so to transform village life. I’m struck by that whenever I drive past VinedMe and see Marta, out at the front, drinking her coffee in the faint Norfolk sun.

Village life is changing. How many still have a butcher? How many have lost a primary school in the past decade and how many a pub? Clearly, it’s incumbent on all of us across rural England to support these places. The more that we put into our villages, the more we get back.

It’s easy, during winter, to sit by the fire and not go out, but every pint — or glass of vinho verde — at your local is an investment in your village. Use it or lose it.

Agromenes has a new hero. He remains anonymous, but he calls himself the Food Waste Inspector. He has been busy outing some big supermarkets — M&S, Waitrose and Lidl — for throwing away food that is perfectly good to eat. His bin pictures show sliced meat, whole chickens, potatoes and wine — all good to sell, but chucked in the refuse bins. After his story hit social media, one store’s response was to lock their bins so our hero could no longer look inside. Now, these major outlets have serious investigations under way and the big names concerned have set about recovering their reputation for fighting food waste and doing what they can to distribute surplus products to the needy. That is a worthy determination.

The UK wastes more food than any other country in Europe, enough to feed 30 million people in a nation where more than eight million go short and in a world where 733 million face hunger. Much of that wastage comes from our own homes where, on average, a family throws away £470 worth of food a year, 70% of which is edible. In addition to what is wasted at home, retail outlets discard 270,000 tons of food annually. This is where the inspector comes in. His revelations highlight the very worst kind of wastage: food that is well before its sell-by date and yet is chucked in the bin. However, this is only the tip of Britain’s enormous pile of waste.

Only 7% of total food surplus from manufacture or retailing is redistributed to the needy; 93% of the surplus food that we grow, pack and distribute is destroyed, and that represents 25 million tons of greenhouse-gas emissions — more than the emissions caused by all the big HGV lorries on the road put together. This can’t go on. It’s not only that it is scandalous to waste so much when there are so many people with so little, it is simply that we are going to be increasingly pressed to grow the food that we need. The loss of agricultural land to building, the continued reduction in the fertility of the soil, the damaging effects of climate change and a growing population — all make it more challenging to meet our domestic targets in a world where the same pressures globally make food imports increasingly difficult and expensive.

Yet the reduction of wastage is simply not central to national policies. The parallel with energy is useful. We are rightly shifting from fossil fuels to renewables, but the best immediate change would be to waste less electricity, gas and oil. Yet energy saving is way down the agenda of all political parties. As a society, we seem inured to waste, which means we don’t take the measures that could make the necessary difference. It’s not only that the supermarkets should make sure that the Food Waste Inspector will never again find good food thrown away in their bins. It is that all of them should take more responsibility for their waste and, indeed, their customers’ waste.

We’ve got rid of BOGOFs — Buy One Get One Free — but we haven’t stopped the deals that make buying three packets so much cheaper than single purchases. They encourage us to buy more than we need and make waste much more likely. It also isn’t made easy enough to buy small quantities of fresh food, such as two carrots or a single little gem lettuce. Selling more by encouraging waste is simply not acceptable. Of course, in the end, it’s about individual choices, but retailers have a responsibility to make it easier and cheaper to do the right thing.

This feature originally appeared in the January 28, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Out and out this is the tastiest cauliflower cheese I’ve had the pleasure of eating. In fact, it could be one of my favourite recipes in the book (this recipe first appeared in Gill's 'Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower: How to Cook with Vegetables and Other Plants' recipe book). I add dried ceps (sometimes they’re called porcini), a wild fungus and part of the Boletus family of mushrooms. They have a magical, savoury depth and add a completely new swathe of flavour to this timeless classic.

Ingredients

Serves four to six.

• 25g dried cep mushrooms
• 150ml hot water
• 1 large cauliflower, cut into bite-size florets, trimmings retained
• 850ml whole milk
• 1 handful of flat-leaf parsley, leaves picked and chopped, stalked retained
• 2 bay leaves
• 100g unsalted butter
• 1 onion, halved and thinly sliced
• 2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
• 50g plain flour
• 125g mature Cheddar cheese
• A handful of fresh, coarse white breadcrumbs
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method

Place the ceps in a small bowl and pour over the hot water. Leave to soak while you deal with other matters.

Place the cauliflower trimmings, including the stem and leaves, in a pan and pour over the milk. Add the parsley stalks and bay leaves. Place the pan on a medium heat, bring up to the simmer and immediately turn off the heat. Let the milk infuse for a while.

Place another large pan on a medium heat. Add 25g of the butter and, when it’s melted and bubbling away, add the onion and garlic and season lightly with salt and pepper. Gently fry, stirring regularly for 10–15 minutes, until the onions are nice and caramelised.

Meanwhile, drain the ceps, reserving the soaking liquid.

When the onions are ready, add the cauliflower florets along with the rehydrated ceps. Stir to combine, turn up the heat a little and fry for 6–8 minutes, until the cauliflower has softened. (Make sure you stir everything regularly so it cooks evenly.) Add the chopped parsley leaves and season well with salt and pepper. Heat the oven to 200°C/180°C fan/400°F/gas mark 6.

Melt the remaining butter in another large pan over a medium heat. When it’s melted and bubbling, stir in the flour. Reduce the heat to medium–low and cook gently for a minute or so, then pour half the infused milk through a sieve into the pan. Use a whisk to mix the sauce vigorously, then sieve in the remaining milk, along with the mushroom soaking liquid (don’t add the very last few drops, though, as the dregs can be gritty) and whisk again.

Add all but a handful of the cheese to the sauce and stir it in well to melt. Taste, and season with salt and plenty of black pepper.

Pour the sauce over the cauliflower and give it a good mix. Spoon out the mixture into a large ovenproof dish or roasting tin and give it a shake to level it out. Scatter over the breadcrumbs and the remaining cheese and bake for 12–15 minutes, or until the sauce is bubbling away and the breadcrumbs are golden, crisp and crunchy.

This recipe originally appeared in 'Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower — how to cook with vegetables and other plants'. You can follow Gill Meller on Instagram, here

Much as I love haggis and the famous Burns poem, I have often wondered why this part of the meal receives all the glory. This is an attempt to redress the balance. Today’s farm folk may have cool drinks in the fridge in their air-conditioned tractor cabs to slake their thirst, but we would make do with hopping into the neep park and cutting a refreshing slice off a big swede with a pocketknife. Our children still talk fondly of ‘Granny’s neeps’, when my mother would put the swedes on to boil perhaps a little earlier than necessary. The result was a steaming bowl of soup-like red sweetness — delicious.

The swede, until relatively recently a significant winter fodder crop in the north-east of Scotland, was extremely labour intensive pre-1970s. As a youngster, I dreaded the ‘neep barra’ being put onto a tractor in the spring. This basic implement would lay out masses of seeds along the drills in the field and I knew that in a few weeks we would have to knock out 990,000 of every million plants as they were singled, 7in–8in apart, in the ‘first hyow’. Every able-bodied person on the farm would arm themselves with a hoe and, taking adjacent drills, walk up and down, drill by drill, for days on end. Us younger boys soon fell behind and had to choose between working the long drills by ourselves or moving over to where the drills shortened into the corners of the field.

The ‘second hyow’ was to knock out weeds between the now established plants. The invention of the precision seeder, which placed one seed the exact distance apart from its neighbours, plus a pre-emergence herbicide called Ramrod, meant I could hang up my hoe, but those summer chores meant that the hard labour to harvest the crop through the winter never seemed so bad in comparison.

When I first started winter-root harvesting, everything was done by hand. The roots were ‘pu’ed’, or pulled, by hand, using a tapner, a long, thin billhook. We would grab the swede with the hook at the end, pull it from the ground and hold the stalk with our other hand. Then, three swipes with the tapner: two to clean off the tap root and any soil, the third to cut off the stalk. This third blow was delivered with the swede in mid-air free fall; our tapners were into the next swede before the last hit the ground. We eventually bought a machine that would do the lifting and putting into rows for us, and finally, joy of joys, a harvester that lifted them and put them straight into the trailer. This meant that my brother and I, on two tractors, could fill the shed in half a morning, instead of in two to three days.

It wasn’t only sitting in a warm, dry tractor cab that made the job so satisfying. Harvested crops sound different. Even high-yielding grain only ‘swishes’ into a trailer; potatoes must be handled gently and so ‘tipple’ in. Turnips and swedes, however, ‘rumble’ and ‘tumble’ like a loud, proud bass drummer in a canyon, so you know a crop as satisfying as the sound is coming in.

This feature originally appeared in the January 21, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

I’ve never been much of a skier, despite more than four decades spent in pursuit of Alpine excellence. Ski school was endured, rather than enjoyed, and thankfully came to an end after one particular exchange, on the chairlift, between my mother and the French ski guide. ‘Aimezvous les chevaux?’ she asked, attempting polite conversation. ‘Oui,’ he replied with a grin. ‘Avec les frites.’ So that was the end of that.

Although I can still muddle my way down most slopes (especially if emboldened by a glass or three of schnapps), my style could be charitably described as ‘l’homme dans la WC’. Sure, there’s something exhilarating about that first run of the day, when the snow is soft and untouched, the slopes empty and the sky a brilliant shade of azure. But, these days, skiing is basically the easiest way to get from one Alpine restaurant to another. That, I have at last realised, is the point of two skis.

Nothing makes me happier than Alpine food. Not a new James Lee Burke, nor an old Rob Reiner (RIP), nor even my first tacos al pastor upon arriving in Mexico City. Last year, in Verbier, Switzerland, I ate raclette every single day, often twice, the lusciously lovely, politely pongy cheese melted to order and draped over boiled baby potatoes, accompanied by a fistful of pert cornichons. I even lugged half a wheel of the stuff back home, which I dispatched in a matter of weeks. True, my digestion wasn’t overjoyed, but, at my age, you get your kicks wherever you can.

If I wasn’t eating raclette, it was fondue. Lots and lots of fondue. I’m as happy dunking my stale bread into bubbling pots during the dog days of summer as I am holed up in some pine-scented chalet, in the midst of a blizzard, a snowmobile’s ride from town. This is a dish too fine to save for winter alone. Asterix in Switzerland was always my favourite of all the books, simply for featuring a cheese-soaked orgy of a fondue. ‘Bring on the cauldron of melted cheese!’ cries the fat Roman governor. My thoughts exactly.

Then there’s tartiflette, which is, like raclette and fondue, exalted and exuberant stodge. Really, you can’t go wrong by smothering waxy potatoes and smoked pork in a dairy deluge of cream and reblochon cheese. An onion and a good glug of white wine offer a fleeting respite from the lactic overload. But this is not a first-date dish, as it does tend to lurk in the tummy for days to come. Hey ho. Such is the price of pure pleasure.

Although this particular combination of potatoes, cheese and onion must have long been an Alpine staple (péla is a dish as old as the hills), it took the marketing nous of the Le Syndicat Interprofessionnel du Reblochon, some time in the early 1980s, to create tartiflette as a way to flog more cheese. Named after a local variety of Savoyard waxy potato, the tartifle, it became an instant Haute-Savoie classic.

Purists will insist on reblochon, with its soft charm and gentle, nutty tang. It’s a magnificent cheese, although the genuine article, made with unpasteurised milk, is hard to get hold of at the moment. LSD has been discovered in French and Italian cattle (lumpy skin disease, not the psychedelic stuff. Although cows on acid…), meaning raw-milk cheese imports have ceased for the time being.

Fortunately, this dish is nothing but adaptable. It works with raclette, fontina, Taleggio, Brie, Camembert and Baron Bigod. Anything, basically, that oozes lasciviously when exposed to heat. And although La Ratte potatoes work very well indeed, any waxy varieties will do. This is not a dish worried about precision, elegance or nuance. Nope, tartiflette is all about beautiful ballast and you wouldn’t want it any other way.

Tartiflette

This comes from Matthew Ryle’s French Classics, one of my favourite books of last year. He’s the executive chef of Maison François in St James’s, London SW1, which is also one of my favourite French restaurants. Serve as a main or a side, with ‘some beautifully dressed lettuce leaves’.

Ingredients

Serves 6

1kg waxy potatoes, ideally La Ratte, scrubbed, but unpeeled


200g pancetta


1 onion, finely sliced


100ml white wine


250g reblochon cheese, chilled


300g crème fraîche


Sea-salt flakes and fresh cracked black pepper

Method

• Preheat the oven to 180˚C fan.

• Put the skin-on potatoes in a saucepan and cover with cold salted water. Bring to the boil and gently simmer until the potatoes are cooked. Pour into a colander and leave to cool slightly. When you’re able to handle them, scrape off the skins using a small knife. Slice into coins 1-2cm thick.

• Meanwhile, cut the pancetta into lardons. Over a medium-high heat, cook the lardons in a large frying pan in their own fat until nicely caramelised. Reduce the temperature and add the sliced onion, then cook gently until the onion is soft. Add the white wine and reduce until it has almost completely disappeared. Check the seasoning and adjust if needed.

• Cut your reblochon wheel — or you can use any of the cheeses listed in the article above — in half, to form two semicircles, and then cut each of these in half again through its equator (make sure the cheese is fridge-cold to help with the cutting).

• Choose an ovenproof pan or serving dish. You want to layer your tartiflette in two stages. Place half the potatoes in the base, cover with half the onion mix, half the crème fraîche and two cheese semicircles. Repeat, finishing with the last two cheese semicircles on top, rind side up.

• Place in the oven for about 20 minutes or until hot, bubbling and nicely coloured on top. Finish with some fresh cracked black pepper and serve immediately.

Simon ‘Si’ King turned 59 the day before we met. He spent his birthday ‘running from pillar to post’, working, among other things, as a panelist at an event celebrating the food of Northumberland and the north-east. He had an ‘excellent’ Thai-style gnocchi with the other panelists for his supper, then went home for two stiff drams of 15-year-old Redbreast whisky, whereupon he went to bed (‘with slightly warmer toes’ than he’d had before).

Much of what I go on to learn about him is epitomised here: his dedication to community generally, and the north-east specifically, a passion for foods from all over a planet that he and Dave Myers covered on their motorbikes for 650,000 miles. He’s caring and open, concerned not by the authenticity of food, but by its integrity. He loves a dram of whisky at the end of a long day.

Si opened his Sunderland pie shop, PROPA!, in 2024, and the business has as much integrity as the pies themselves. Profits are shared with his staff, recipes are developed across the team, and everything that can be is sourced from within 50-miles of the shop.

He cares about the welfare of his staff and the quality of the produce he uses, but this doesn’t come without challenges.

‘In the UK,’ he tells me, ‘when we talk about quality, it comes with a commercial mindset. Our government is very poor at subsidising small growers and artisan producers. There are numerous schemes in Italy and France where Artisan producers are supported in meaningful ways. We don’t have that here — “quality” comes with a certain price tag.’

At PROPA!, though, he has found a way around this. The tight radius in which they source their goods has developed into a micro-economy of hyper-seasonal produce.

‘We’ve got great growers around here. Lads will show up with their surplus, you know, say, 10kg of leeks, and just drop them at our back door.’

‘Then you build the menu around what you’ve got?’ I ask.

‘Exactly.’

When I asked Owen, one of the chefs at PROPA!, he said the same thing. ‘If someone’s got loads of leeks it probably means they’re ready, and if they’re ready, it probably means they’re good.’ It also means that they’re the best price.

For Si, it always goes back to community. He sources from the community, he employs from the community, he gives back to the community. He’s just collaborated with Cask Trade to create Cask & Crust: a bottling of three whiskies (with labels illustrated by Sunderland-based, PROPA!-collaborator, Georgia Woodhall), and pie recipes using each. Profits go straight back to the community — supporting Sunderland and Newcastle food banks.

It’s fun talking to Si King about most things, but it’s very fun talking to him about whisky. He loves the stuff — and that love has almost been lifelong.

‘I remember the joyous, joyous lyricism at dad’s wake,’ he smiles. ‘I was only eight when he died, and we had a house filled with Irishmen with fiddles and bodhráns and all sorts. Whenever someone says whisky, to me, it’s a special occasion. You know, tonight my sons are taking me out for dinner, and the first thing we’ll do is have a stout and a whisky, you know, to toast their dad’s birthday.’

It was 41 years ago, on his 18th birthday, that Si was given his first two bottles of whisky. One was a Glenfarclas, bottled from his father’s death cask, the other was a carrot whisky, made by his Auntie Hilda and Uncle George. ‘Those were two very, very different beasts,’ he laughs. It’s evident that for him, whisky and family are closely tied. Bringing it to his work seems like a natural next step. I had to wait two, torturous days between meeting Si and tasting the pies that he and his team had developed.

The steak and peppercorn pie was delicious, every bit as crisp and comforting as I’d hoped it would be. The chicken, haggis, and whisky-cured bacon pie even more so. I wasn’t going to try the mushroom, blue cheese and whisky gravy (I’d eaten two pies already), but then I did, and suddenly I’d finished that one, too. If you thought perhaps Si wasn’t as dedicated to quality as he claimed, you’d be wrong; totally and utterly wrong. To paraphrase the old adage: the proof was in the pie.

He’s a busy man. There’s more work to do before his sons take him out for his birthday. I only have one more question, and it’s perhaps the most important: ‘Does it need a base to be a pie?’

He doesn’t take a breath. He barely blinks. ‘Absolutely. 100%. Without a base? What’s that? It’s a halfway house.’

‘What about a cottage pie?’

‘Oh, those don’t count. We’re talking about pastry pies, and a pastry pie without a base? That’s just lazy. It’s not a pie, it’s a stew with a lid.’

I laugh, I’d got the definitive answer I wanted, but he continues. ‘We do roughly 3,500 pies a week, and they’re all handmade. Trust me, if we could — if we didn’t have to make 3,500 bases for our 3,500 tops, we’d do it. But then it wouldn’t be a pie.’ This is what Si King’s work is about: great produce, his community and, above all, integrity.

Last year’s apple crop pipped all the records: boughs groaned under the weight of ripe fruit and growers declared it the best season for decades. The abundance was credited to a frost-free spring and a warm summer, but perhaps there was another reason for the bumper harvest: the rise of the curious tradition of wassailing.

Often associated with a form of carol singing, midwinter wassailing is in fact a deeply rooted tradition that involves anointing an apple tree with cider and making a good deal of noise. At its core, it is a ritual to encourage a good apple harvest later in the year. It’s both reverent and uproarious and, in bringing people together outdoors, is just the thing to raise the spirits on a dark January night.

Gatherings to bless apple trees have seen a revival in recent years, surprising even those committed to the tradition, such as Morris man Bill Taylor, who has led a wassailing ceremony in Gloucestershire since the 1990s. ‘It began with a few dozen folk gathering in a farmer’s orchard and now there are up to 200 people wanting to take part,’ he explains. ‘Nobody is invited, it’s all word of mouth.’

Down in Somerset, numbers attending the wassail at Barley Wood Cider in Wrington are capped at 300, but those wanting to attend this ticketed event easily surpass 500, according to Martin Maudsley, a Dorset-based storyteller and author of the book Telling the Seasons. He acts as master of ceremonies for West Country wassails and is now in demand from early January to the first week of February.

The traditional date for apple-tree wassailing is Old Twelfth Night, January 17, although, like all folk customs, it can be adapted by local communities. Certainly, traditions vary from region to region and orchard to orchard, but the key ingredients are cider and audience participation, together with toasted bread. Although the cider will be drunk, its main purpose is to be poured on the roots of a selected apple tree as a libation. The toast is dunked into the cider then placed or hung on the branches of the tree. Some claim this to be the origin of the expression ‘to toast’.

At every ceremony, an Anglo Saxon cry will go up: ‘Waes hael!’ To be answered by: ‘Drink hael!’ Thus ‘wassail’ is an old exhortation to be healthy — as in hale and hearty. ‘The response is an encouragement to drink deep until you feel good, rather than any modern connotations of healthy moderation,’ notes Martin, with a reminder that, in the West Country, dry January is often known as ‘dry-cider January’.

Morris man Bill describes the dramatic start of the wassailing evening near the hamlet of Taynton, which was initiated by the late Eric Freeman, a pioneering conservationist farmer and lover of folk tradition. ‘We’d proceed to the orchard through the dark with flaming torches lighting the way, led by musicians playing fiddle, melodeon and whistles,’ he recalls. ‘There we’d light a hanging lantern made of straw that burns very quickly and brightly, representing the dying out of the old year. That’s the signal to light another 12 fires, representing the months of the year, around the chosen apple tree.’

Light is important and some Dorset ceremonies involve fire running, when participants grab a handful of hay, set fire to it from a burning brazier and run until they have to drop it on the wet ground. Each wassail has a master of ceremonies, sometimes known as the butler, a role that Bill performs wearing a mummer’s tatter coat made of rags. Martin in Dorset adopts a gold frock coat and a top hat wreathed in ivy. A wassail queen, occasionally with a king consort, may be chosen, perhaps with a blind toss of an apple — whoever catches it becomes queen for the night, perhaps being lifted into the branches to make a speech. Processing around the tree three times is also traditional, but this can become too time consuming with large crowds.

Next come the offerings. Although the benefits of feeding a tree with cider may not have been scientifically proven, there is a practicality in leaving nourishment in the branches to attract robins, symbols of seasonal hope and good cheer. The birds in turn will eat harmful pests and help to protect the apple tree.

Then comes the noise. This can start with singing one of the many regional versions of a wassail song. In Sussex, there may be ‘apple howling’, a cathartic release. Rough music, the banging of pots and pans or anything percussive, is also essential and, in some areas, shotguns will be fired into the air and the tree beaten with sticks.

Many say the cacophony is to wake up the tree and encourage it to start work, but Martin believes that is a misappropriation: ‘It should always be about scaring away dark spirits. The tree is dormant, and it is too early in the year for it to be woken up. All cider-apple varieties need a sustained cold, dark period for vernalisation [cold dormancy].’ He ensures that shooting is done at the start of the ceremony, so that the bad spirits are banished before the benefice starts.

The variations, old and new, are the essence of very local traditions. ‘Customs split, change, morph and evolve due to any number of factors such as geographic, economic or practicalities — that is folk!’ observes Lally MacBeth, a Cornwall-based artist, curator and author of The Lost Folk. ‘Wassail’ is itself a flexible term. It can be a noun or a verb. Wassail is the custom, the song, the ceremony and the cup, which is traditionally carved from white maple, with known examples dating back to the 16th century. It can also refer to the custom of going from house to house to sing and ask for ale, in which lie the roots of carol singing, and is the basis of the Gloucestershire Wassail, adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams and frequently sung at Christmas.

‘That version of wassailing is largely a Victorian invention, in an attempt to sanitise the raucous behaviour associated with midwinter customs involving lots of drinking, making merry and dancing,’ believes Lally. ‘The orchard variety, and seasonal customs of this nature, have more ancient roots. It would have been very important in times past to bless the crops to ensure a fruitful coming year and no crop failure.’

Wherever its modern form, wassailing is always a way of appreciating Nature. ‘It is about giving back and saying thank you for providing for us,’ says Bill. Meanwhile, the popularity of wassailing continues to grow. National Trust properties with orchards are adopting the tradition to make a family-friendly afternoon out. This year, ceremonies will be taking place at East Riddlesden Hall in West Yorkshire, Lyveden in Northamptonshire and Buckland Abbey in Devon, among others. ‘We’ve been hosting wassailing events for several years and they’re definitely growing in popularity,’ says Wanda Arden, marketing officer at the Trust’s Morden Hall Park in south London. ‘We’re very much a community hub and it brings people together.’

Wassailing is fast extending to city and town centres, with events held last year at community orchards in Manchester, Port Talbot and London. ‘When you gather in an urban orchard on a cold winter’s night, cider steaming, the element of fun in the air, it’s easy to feel something ancient stir,’ attests Kath Rosen, CEO of The Orchard Project, a national charity that helps communities to create, restore and maintain community orchards. ‘Wassailing in cities reminds us that we’re still part of the land even among tower blocks and traffic and, by reinventing one of our true land-based traditions in urban spaces, we can bring people together through creating new rituals and traditions that reflect and cele-brate the diversity of our communities.’

Martin thinks that the very timing holds a special appeal. ‘Unlike Christmas, wassailing is very much in tune with the seasonal year,’ he observes. ‘People want to do it because it is dark and cold, not in spite of it. They genuinely like a local and inclusive event. But it also feels a bit anarchic, visceral and taboo-breaking — I know of a group that does a naked wassail.’

Waes hael, how-ever you participate this January, and may your apples be plentiful