a short menu
and a small room
Nine or ten dishes at a time. Everything on the list gets cooked often enough that we get good at it before it leaves.
The kitchen is built around a wood oven and a grill, and almost nothing gets cooked anywhere else. That decides a lot for us: the menu stays short because there are only so many things one fire can do well in a night.
Three suppliers write most of the menu. We just decide what to do with what turns up.
Ebbor Farm
Hogget, mutton and vegetables. Hannah Pearce drives the van down herself on Wednesdays, which is why the menu turns over on a Wednesday and not a Monday.
Marden & Son
Day-boat fish. Whatever the small boats land goes on a list at six in the morning and we write the fish course off that list, so the plaice is sometimes brill and sometimes gurnard.
Whitecross Dairy
Cheddar, sheep's curd and the cultured butter. Three cheeses on the board at a time, cut to order rather than sat out all night.
eight of us, most nights
Elin Hartnell
Nine years in Bath, the last four running the stoves at a restaurant off Pulteney Bridge. Writes the menu on the last Sunday of the month, usually on the back of a delivery note.
Tom Greenslade
Buys the wine list — mostly English, French and a run of Somerset cider. Takes every booking himself, which is why he knows what you ordered last time.
Nadia Okonkwo
Runs the fire and makes the puddings, which is an odd pairing until you have eaten the damson tart. Bakes the sourdough every afternoon before service.
We took the lease in 2019 on a room that had been a wine bar and before that a fishmonger. It seats 34, with 12 more at the counter, and the kitchen is open to all of them. Nobody here has to shout across a wall.
from the kitchen
I spent nine years in Bath, most of it in a kitchen with a much longer menu than this one. What I took from it was mainly a list of things I did not want to do again: printing a menu for a whole season, buying fish on a Tuesday for a Friday, holding twenty dishes that nobody in the kitchen ever gets to cook twice in a week.
So this menu is nine or ten dishes and it is rewritten every month. The list gets written on the last Sunday, after the Ebbor Farm order and a call to Brixham, and it goes up on the wall on the first. Sometimes it changes mid-month anyway, because the boats did not go out or the tomatoes finished a fortnight early.
The counter seats are the best ones and we keep them back for people who did not plan ahead. That is deliberate. A restaurant that is entirely bookings is a restaurant you can only eat in a month from now, and this is meant to be somewhere you can walk into on a Thursday.
— Elin Hartnell, head chef