The new kitchen gardens: meet the UK chefs and restaurants growing their own
From rooftops in the middle of cities to the grounds of top-class restaurants, chefs are taking back control of their ingredients
By Tony Naylor
The Guardian
20 Aug 2023
Excerpt:
“It’s like a ballet,” says Lou Nicholls, Hampton Manor’s head gardener, referring to how just before dinner Grace & Savour’s chefs fan out across her walled garden to pick edible flowers with tweezers. “You have to do it very delicately,” she says.
Appointed in March, Nicholls is now talking every day “to people who cook with plants I grow”. She is enjoying growing the “most tasty” varieties of vegetables she can find and, as those sakura tomatoes or high-quality F1 varieties of yellow French beans come into season, teaching Grace & Savour’s chefs how best to harvest them.
Not everyone knows to snip herbs with scissors (to prevent damage to the plant), to tear rather than cut the leaves off beetroot (stops “bleeding”, keeps them moist) or that if you harvest a lettuce’s lower leaves, not the head, it can be repeatedly cropped. It helps that Grace & Savour’s chef-director, David Taylor, takes a similar approach, knowing the optimum time to pick salad leaves (morning, when it’s cooler) or ripe soft fruit (sunny afternoons, when the flesh is at its softest and sweetest). “It makes a big difference,” he insists.
The walled garden – a half-acre nook within a 45-acre estate – can only provide a ballpark 10-15% of Taylor’s fresh summer produce. But this ability to pick produce as little as 30 minutes before service, presenting it at absolute peak freshness, is fundamental to dishes such his grazing plate of seasonal fruits, sprayed with cherry blossom syrup; a snack of greens, flowers and goat’s curd; or a dish of sweetcorn, girolles and thyme in a miso chicken butter emulsion.
