From fertile kitchen gardens to farm restaurants, Olive is celebrating green-fingered chefs getting close to their produce
Words TONY NAYLOR
The farm-to-fork mantra is revered with good reason. The positives that arise from chefs working in close proximity to their ingredients are manifest in flavour, creativity, freshness and sustainability, and chefs are keen to capitalise on that. Whether growing their own in kitchen gardens, cooking on farms or collaborating closely with market gardens, more and more chefs are not just sourcing locally but seeking greater control of their produce, its cultivation and quality. They work in symbiosis with nature to use seasonal ingredients at their freshly harvested peak. Meet 10 inspirational restaurants that are very much leading the way.
HECKFIELD PLACE, HAMPSHIRE
A stylish synthesis of ancient and modern, Heckfield is a one-time Georgian country house, now luxury hotel, where sustainability is foremost. Led by culinary director Skye Gyngell and executive chef Michael Chapman, its green Michelin star restaurant, Marle, uses produce from Heckfield’s organic farm, which includes Guernsey cows, hens and sheep, Heckfield’s biodynamic market garden and harvest from Skye’s long-term inspiration, Fern Verrow biodynamic farm. Ingredients are showcased with an elegant, Italian-influenced simplicity in, say, a layered crab salad of late-summer vegetables or ricotta and roast squash filled scarpinocc pasta in marjoram butter. Mains from £29; heckfieldplace.com
THE ABBEY INN, BYLAND
Tommy Banks’ latest pub further expands a North Yorkshire ecosystem that, at his Michelin-starred restaurants, The Black Swan and Roots, has seen the chef forge a distinctive form of sustainable British cooking. At his family farm in Oldstead, teams of growers, foragers and chefs are at work cultivating, preserving and fermenting often neglected produce into delicious, waste-minimal ingredients. These underpin the creativity of Tommy’s restaurant teams. The Abbey Inn, for example, a bucolic, 19th-century inn, is serving chipolatas with Japanese knotweed jam (similar to rhubarb, apparently) and beef tartare with fermented peppers, nasturtium and bone marrow. Native and rare-breed meats are increasingly prominent in the farm’s work, as featured in The Abbey’s Dexter beef burger or use of its own Herdwicks in plates of hogget rump with glazed faggot, fermented turnip and pommes anna. Mains from £21; abbeyinnbyland.co.uk
WHERE THE LIGHT GETS IN, STOCKPORT
Chef-owner Sam Buckley wants WTLGI to be a unique expression of sustainable, seasonal British food. No more so than in The
