Our story
Fifty years of dinner in a building never meant for it. One grill, two rooms.
It started as a room with six tables and one very good grill
Bread
The bread oven was built into the north wall in 1974 and has not been rebuilt since. Everything baked here still goes in at the same hour of the afternoon, and the last loaves come out as the doors open.
Cellar
The cellar started with nine bottles bought from a grower who came through the town with a van. It now holds about four hundred, almost all of them from people we have met.
The second room
We opened the cellar bar in the nineties because the dining room kept running out of chairs. It has no reservations, fourteen stools, and a short list of things to eat standing up.
The gardens
Two market gardens on the ridge grow to our list and keep whatever we do not take. It is the reason the card is short and the reason it changes every week.
About
Everybody who grows or brews for us lives within sixty miles
Nine growers, one brewery, two cider makers and a miller on the river
The kitchen
A small brigade who all cook the same way
Seven in the kitchen, four on the floor, and a cellar that one of them runs on her nights off.
At the grill
One fire, lit at three, banked down at eleven. Everything that leaves the grill has been over ash from the same load of oak.
In the cellar
Bottles are bought two cases at a time, drunk until they run out, then replaced with something else. Nothing sits for the sake of a list.
The rooms
the kitchen
Grown, aged and fired within sixty miles
Picked
Two deliveries a day from the ridge gardens.
Aged
Beef and mutton hang four weeks in the cold room.
Fired
One oven, one grill, one cook since 1974.
