Our food - boiled down

When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,' said Piglet at last, 'what's the first thing you say to yourself?' 'What's for breakfast?' said Pooh. 'What do you say, Piglet?' 'I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?' said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. 'It's the same thing,' he said.
- A.A. Milne.

Right from the start, our approach to the food we serve in our pubs has been to try to do simple things extremely well.

This means that when we serve ham, eggs and chips, the ham should be bought from a piggery we know, that we cook it in our own kitchens and carve it by hand, that the eggs should be free-range and hopefully corn-fed, and the chips locally grown, hand cut and fresh. If we can cook up a chutney to go with it, all the better.

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
- Orson Welles

When we say we prefer to buy things locally wherever possible, we really do mean it. As a company, we don’t have centralised buying for any food, wine or beer. Each pub writes its own menus, then goes out and talks to the local potato growers, game keepers, fishermen and bakers, sources the best products available and negotiates a fair price.

For instance, Graham at Pen-y-Bryn has found a local farmer who can supply him with proper Welsh salt-marsh lamb, the real thing. He has another lady growing all his salad leaves organically, and yet another farmer planting his fields with Maris Piper potatoes for next season’s hand-cut chips. Until recently, a local fisherman would phone up from his boat on his way into the jetty, tell him what he had caught, then run the catch up the hill for that day’s menu. Much better than having a “Woodwards Frozen Foods” lorry arrive at your door once a week.

In Wales especially, we have an incredible choice of hand-made cheeses the equal of any in the world, and various cheese-enthusiasts who trawl the highways and by-ways let us know where we can find interesting things. We find almost no need to cross the Channel.

“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
- G.K. Chesterton

This is one of the absolute joys of running a pub – you want to take real pride in the food you serve, to form friendships and do business with people in the local community, and to deal with individuals on a day-to-day basis rather than ticking a box in a food catalogue. And frequently, not only do we buy from the local farmers and food producers, but their sons and daughters work behind our bars and serve our customers as well.

By doing simple things extremely well, we also mean not messing around with our food. There is a natural drive in people to try to improve things and bring them on, but we need to keep a wary eye out for how this works out. In the pubs, we could put gold taps in our loos, lay up the tables with fine white linen, dress our staff in black and white uniforms, and call everyone ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ – but would it make us better pubs?

What I say is that, if a man really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.
- A.A. Milne.

The same applies to our food. We could form classic shepherd’s pie into a volcano and top it off with chipotle chilli lava and curls of shaved parmesan, or sculpt dishes into elaborately drizzled and dusted towers, which then fall over, but what’s the point?

Tower of Babel, symbolising Humanity in Rebellion against God	Tower of Pork, Porcini and Parsnip, symbolising much the same thing - an affront to common sense

The same is true of our menu descriptions. How’s about this, from the menu in a Los Angeles ‘Restaurant to the Stars’: “Freshly-Harpooned Tuna Sashimi with Shaved Fennel, Lacquered with Herb Oils, Lounging in a Pool of Scented Tapinade”. Blimey. It’s not what you want from your local. “Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding” can’t really be improved on, both as a dish or as a description of a dish.

Food is not about impressing people. It's about making them feel comfortable.
- Ina Garten

Lots of people these days find that genuine quality can be found in their local farmer’s markets, local butchers, bakers and cheese shops (click this link to find local farmer’s markets near you). The other thing is, of course, that it really helps our local farmers and producers who are having a tough time of it, the quality is second to none, and the carbon footprint can be dramatically lowered.

Errrr…no. And definitely
not with milk

We have an incredible larder in the British Isles: our beef and lamb, our cheese, eggs and ice-creams, our sea-food, our vegetables – we are blessed, and it is a real joy to buy directly from the farm gate. And as the years go by, the quality just gets better and better.

So our approach to food is simple – each of our pubs buys from the best local producers they can find, and in our cooking and presentation we keep things fresh and unpretentious.