'You can be a great chef, but until you understand where your ingredients come from you don’t know the whole package': Diving for scallops in Jersey

There is no noise except the rush of exhaled bubbles and the loud hiss of breath, the deep water near the sea bed muting and magnifying the sound. Contrast that with loud voices bouncing metallically off stainless-steel surfaces, the dull thud of a knife on a chopping board, the jarring clatter of a saucepan meeting a hob and the explosive hiss of oil as cold, raw ingredients hit a searingly hot pan.

These two opposing worlds — one serenely and coolly underwater and one within the heat and clamour of a professional kitchen — blend in one man, Andrew Baird, executive head chef at Longueville Manor Hotel and Restaurant, which has three AA rosettes.

Most chefs worth their proverbial salt understand intimately how to curate, coax and compose ingredients to create a formidable dish, but Baird, who has worked at Michelin-keyholder Longueville for four frenetic decades, takes this several steps further and occasionally dives for the scallops that he serves up in the restaurant at supper time.

‘If there’s one area where I feel totally in tune with my ingredients, it’s with a scallop,’ says Baird quietly, the antithesis of many booming television chefs and a man more in harmony with the natural world than most. ‘I can be at the market and look at one and know immediately whether it’s fresh or has been defrosted.’

Three decades ago, this father of two — who is married to Eilish, a lawyer — began to collect these delicately sweet cylindrical shellfish nestled in fan-shaped shells himself. His partner in dive was Bob Titterington, a virtuoso at finding the best Pecten maximus Nature has to offer on the sea bed.

Today, a blindingly sunlit Tuesday in June, Baird has arranged to take me to the reefs and islets that make up Les Écréhous, six miles from the shoreline. We will rendezvous with Titterington and his nephew, Toby Woolley, plus Toby’s friend Harry Jones, on their rigid inflatable Humber, The Black Knight, before they backflip into the relatively shallow waters that encourage scallop growth in search of encased booty resting on the seabed.

Sitting on a bench seat on one of a trio of rigid inflatable boats (RIBs) run by Jersey Seafaris and with a font of local knowledge, co-director and skipper Dan Luce, at the helm, my cheeks are suddenly tugged taut, hair instantly untamed, sunhat sent skittering across the deck as he applies the throttle and Seafari Phoenix races effortlessly across the silken, still waters.

As we slow to a near halt and hear the piercing chee chee chee of oyster-catchers, an unexpected (for me anyway) smattering of houses that now function as holiday homes or fishermen’s refuges, comes into view. Luce reveals that one Philippe Pinel lived on this archipelago, initially on Maîtress Ile and then on Blanque Ile, for nearly half a century from the mid 1800s. What isolation, what fear when wild seas rose and all but engulfed his remote outpost.

Even before Pinel became a resident, this area was a magnet for oyster fishermen, but unregulated dredging devastated the beds and today’s key captures are lobster, crab and scallops, the latter often collected by hand. We pull alongside The Black Knight, the Seafari Phoenix bobbing in unison with her.

‘We dive four days a week and you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth. In the winter when it’s blowing, it’s not quite so wonderful. It’s also time-consuming and labour- intensive. They’re 14-hour days,’ shouts 64-year-old Titterington across the boat divide.

He began diving aged 13, in part to escape his land-locked allergies. He points out the nets and lift bags in which the flat-lidded, curved-bottomed scallops will be collected, the bags inflated underwater and sent to the surface when ready, the scallops being counted on the boat and placed into bins, sometimes graded and shelled, then delivered fresh that evening to restaurants.

There is a size restriction. Every shell collected must be no less than 105mm at its widest point. ‘Stocks are very good due to this warming, but the biggest threat is the predatory octopus that is now in the deeper waters of Guernsey,’ explains Titterington, adding that chef Baird has capitalised on the current boom time for scallops.

‘Andrew understands all about the tides and the weather and he used to do a lot of scallop diving himself so he gets the notion of the sustainability of picking by hand. Since we’ve been diving here, stocks have gone up in this area.’

Conversation over, Titterington slips beneath the sea’s surface and vanishes into the deep blue; Seafari Phoenix is throttled into life and we return rapidly to St Catherine’s Bay, unable to make ourselves heard over the roar of the wind and the engine, except that I catch Baird saying: ‘It’s not just a scallop to me any more. I know the blood, sweat and tears that goes into capturing every one.’

Back to the relative serenity of St Saviour and the luxury oasis that is Longueville Manor, Baird, nestled into a sofa, explains that, as a teenager, a stint of part-time work in a Cantonese restaurant close to the Sheffield home that he shared with his four siblings and divorced mother, a nurse and accomplished cake-maker, brought him into contact with never-before-encountered ingredients, igniting a life-long passion for food.

A touch of the rebel in him didn’t want to follow his father into cheffing — he was the head chef on The Master Cutler train service from Sheffield to London St Pancras — but the pull was too powerful and eschewing an almost equally strong desire to be a silversmith, he headed to catering college, where the new head of department was Kevin Woodford, later the BBC’s Ready Steady Cook frontman.

‘Within a couple of weeks I was enjoying college and starting to shine. I’d be making a consommé or a stock and whereas other people weren’t getting it, I was thriving.’ At 18 he found himself at The Ritz, where he honed his craft via ‘larger than life’ head chef Michael Quinn, at one point cooking for the Queen, and then he followed another culinary wizard, Barry Foster, to Jersey. ‘I’d never even heard of the place and the only way I could find out about it was to visit a travel agent and pick up a brochure.’

He arrived, lived in bedsit land and, aged 23, secured a job at Longueville Manor, also immersing himself in the local environment, learning to scuba dive, joining fishermen on their trawlers, foraging and studying the moon and the tides.

‘I looked at how I could take the ingredients around me and make them work for the hotel. A lot of chefs have come to me from some wonderful places and you send them to the garden to get some chervil and they’ll come back with carrot tops.

'Seeing people stumble made me realise that you can be a great chef, but it doesn’t mean that you understand where your ingredients come from and, until you do, I won’t say you’re fake, but you don’t know the whole package.’

This evening, in Longueville’s restaurant, where the diners murmur in low tones and my table is swathed in pristine white linen, I ponder whether I’ll plump for a starter of ceviche (raw) hand-dived local scallops, served with pickled rhubarb, blood orange and seaweed tuile, or hand-dived local scallops with salad leaves sourced from the hotel’s kitchen garden and drizzled with a smoked aioli dressing.

I choose the latter and discover from Baird after he has emerged from the kitchen in his chef’s whites that these were ‘cleaned and lightly seasoned, then placed in a heavy cast-iron pan with a drizzle of oil and pan fried for 40 seconds before being finished with homemade garlic butter’. However, the handling of the 50,000 scallops consumed here each year is every bit as important as the cooking.

‘We buy them by the bongo [drum load], and, as I like complete control, we open them all by hand. That way, I know how fresh they are.’ Not that Baird is a one-trick scallop pony. Far from it. My main course — griddled local aubergine with marinated cauliflower, garden squash, creamed cashew nut and lentil dahl — makes for a balanced celebration of Jersey produce, each element bringing texture, depth and divine flavour.

Pudding, a caramelised garden lemon tart (the lemons grown in the greenhouse here) with garden rhubarb and hibiscus sorbet, is refreshingly zingy for the perfect finale.

Talking of finales, it will soon be time to leave my chic room at this friendly and fabulous hotel and, as we say goodbye, Baird drops into the conversation that he will be doing a spot of foraging on his way home this evening. That comes as no surprise. In fact, I wouldn’t expect anything else.

Rooms available at Longueville Manor Hotel in October from £160 a night. Click here for more information.

his feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.