Hand and Flowers: Tom Kerridge and the rise of the Gastropub by Bruce Palling

Food is only mentioned en passant, and hardly taken seriously: “there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels, cheese, pickles and… six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch – for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll – for about three shillings”.

Interestingly, there is no mention of either dinner or wine being necessary to attain pub perfection – something that wouldn’t work today although, somewhat bizarrely, one of Melbourne's more stylish restaurateurs named a pub dining room Moon Under Water.

For Orwell, the Pub represented some sort of idealised version of ordinary English life, where families congregated in a rear garden while the menfolk drank warm beer while catching up on the local gossip. Nowadays, traditional pubs, with their television in the bar, a miniature sized pool table and a slot machine, are an endangered species and shrinking in numbers by around 26 every week, according to CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale).

A number of reasons are put forward for this – the ban on smoking in public, the frowning on heavy drinking at lunch time and perhaps most importantly, the growth of cheap beer sales at supermarkets which mean pubs cannot compete on price. No one mentions the poor quality of the food in most pubs as a factor in their decline because only a very ignorant person would ever imagine that anybody would go to a typical pub to eat well. The usual fare tends to be salt-saturated potato crisps, peanuts and pork scratchings, a peculiarly British version of deep-fried pork skin. The entire purpose of these virtually inedible comestibles is to enhance the thirst of the customer so they will drink more beer.

A new approach to “pub grub” started in London in 1991, when a declining ordinary pub called the Eagle in Farringdon, was dramatically revived by serving decent contemporary food, and became what was arguably Britain’s first gastropub.

These early trailblazers did not reinvent British cuisine – they tended to serve European staples, such as Bacalhau Com Batatas (Salt Cod with Potatoes and Peppers), Fettuccini with ricotta, peas and pancetta or Vitello Tonnato (Veal with Tuna sauce). There are still gastropubs that serve similar dishes, or even strange versions of Thai food in order to win new customers.

Picture Postcard

However, there has been a swing back to authentic British dishes and no one personifies this trend better than Tom Kerridge, a giant of a man, who two years ago, was the first (and only) pub chef to win two Michelin stars at the Hand & Flowers in Marlow, a wealthy picture postcard village midway between London and Oxford.

Apart from this accolade, last year he was voted the Number One chef in Britain at the National Restaurant Awards, easing out Brett Graham of the Ledbury in Notting Hill, who had held the top spot for three years and also holds two Michelin stars. Ironically, the Ledbury is a former pub, but with no traces remaining of the bar or slot machines. Kerridge’s cookbook, which of course is tied into a BBC TV series, is called Tom Kerridge’s Proper Pub Food and was a Christmas best seller.

With his booming chuckle, large girth and bald head, he looks like a Hollywood version of Friar Tuck, Robin Hood’s close companion in medieval myth. Just turned 40, Tom Kerridge has brilliantly exploited his recent culinary fame to become a spokesperson for “proper food”, which means honest dishes, which have not been messed around with or bastardized by foreign additions.

This image is not really accurate though. He is a serious chef with a substantial background in haute cuisine. Rather than being a British nationalist or iconoclast when it comes to cuisine, he readily admits that he is a Francophile at heart.

“I never went to France as a child, so I have no fond eating memories, but since being a chef, I have been there many, many times. I have a huge love of French cookery, especially in Paris and northern France. It appeals to me enormously, especially the use of dairy, stocks and sauces, the richness of flavours, the slow cooking, braising. For me it is a wonderful way of cooking that I completely buy into. The methods and style of cooking we have here are very French-based. I am much more influenced by French cooking than any other.”

Does that include British cooking?

“Well, I would say that the British way of cooking now is very French. The lightness of touch you find in Japanese cooking doesn’t suit the way that we are in this country. We are a Northern European country that is very cold. We are very good at growing turnips, potatoes, and carrots doing stews and that sort of thing. We call it a stew in this country, the French call it a braise. It is the same thing with just a French accent to describe it.”

Kerridge has no memories of madeleines in Combray or a great culinary past to re-invent. He was born on a poor housing estate in Gloucester, an unglamorous place on the edge of the Cotswolds. He had had an early but brief career as a child actor but discovered the joys of restaurants through the sense of camaraderie in the kitchen. “When I went into a kitchen for the first time, it was just brilliant – the best place to be ever. I worked in kitchens not necessarily because I liked the food, but I liked the environment to work in – it was never food driven – not wow, I want to eat in those places – I just wanted to be in the kitchen. If my mother ever had any money, we would go into a Beefeater or a Berni Inn (cheap chain restaurants) - those were my earliest restaurant memories in Gloucester.”

His first job was at Calcot Manor, a large country hotel in the Cotswolds, catering to the affluent inhabitants and the wealthy tourists eager to enjoy the beauty of the countryside – and less than seven kilometres from Highgrove, the country retreat of the Prince of Wales.

His Damascene moment was in his early twenties when he ate for the first time as what he calls a “proper restaurant” – Marco-Pierre White’s three-star Michelin at the Hyde Park Hotel in London. “It just blew me away - that was a major influence in my life.”

 So what about the dishes in his restaurant? The atmosphere in the dining rooms is still that of a pub in an affluent region around London. There are also four bedrooms where you can stay, each with the name of a famous breed of cattle – Angus, Charolais, Dexter and Limousin. This must also be the only pub on the planet that offers Babor collagen booster facials or hot stone massages. However, nothing is incongruous about the appearance of the place.

No nonsense tables

The ceilings may be low and the bar may serve a variety of hand-crafted beers, but there is no mistaking the serious intent of the dining room – over-large sturdy wooden tables with no linen table cloths. The guests do not appear to be especially food-obsessed, though there is a satisfying number of over-large clients, some with a table napkin stuffed into their collar, like one imagines serious trenchermen in the past must have done.

Because the pricing of the dishes is exceedingly moderate (the most expensive dish on the menu is only £36 – for fillet of Lancashire beef with Hand & Flowers chips and Béarnaise sauce), some of the regular guests could easily be office workers dropping by to celebrate a colleague’s birthday.

 The only culinary touch that hearkens back to the pub origins of the establishment is the serving of fried white bait in a paper cone made from old newspapers, along with a helping of Marie Rose sauce on a wooden platter, which every guest receives free of charge. 

Other starters includes a Scotch egg, which in its traditional guise, is a hard-boiled hen’s egg surrounded by heavy overcooked sausage meat in a bread crumbed fried sphere.

Instead of this antediluvian redundancy, Tom Kerridge serves a lightly constructed orb of salt cod with a perfectly runny quail’s egg at its core, moored in a piquant red pepper sauce with a slice of Chorizo balancing on the top.  

Most of the other offerings have British roots, such as Lovage Soup with Bramley Apples, Smoked Eel and Ham and Cheese Tortellini or Crispy Pig’s Head with Rhubarb, Pancetta and Chickweed. They are all the sort of dishes where even if you were blindfolded, it would easy to identify each and every ingredient.

The main courses continue in the same vein of robust and bold flavours with a certain simplicity. I had a venison dish which had been partially immersed in a sous-vide machine before being coloured slightly in a frying pan which was accompanied by delicious French fries which had been triple cooked along with the buttered tops of a Brussel sprout plant. This was slightly crunchy and bitter and required a certain amount of effort to break down, which only added to a sense of authenticity in the whole experience.

 Another dish looked like a large onion with a handle but was in fact a piece of lamb with sweetbreads and salsa verde inside surrounded by pastry with a curved bone attached.

 The bold flavours and straightforwardness of the dishes is the secret to its success. It stems from a tradition to recreate simple but distinctive British cuisine with an emphasis on flavour, which was begun in the late Eighties by Stephen Bull, a former advertising executive anxious to escape from the tedium of his career. (Interestingly, his former boss was Peter Mayle, who later fled to France and wrote the escapist classic - A Year in Provence).

Although Bull is relatively unknown today, he opened several influential London restaurants before leaving at the turn of the century for the Welsh borders, where he opened a first-rate gastropub called the Lough Pool Inn.

Tom Kerridge worked for several years with Bull, alongside an Irish chef called Richard Corrigan, who now specialises in hearty Anglo-Irish game and cuisine. Kerridge then worked with Gary Rhodes, who similarly celebrated British cuisine and recipes, such as faggots (minced pork liver and heart wrapped in bacon), braised oxtails and bread and butter pudding. Two other chefs belong to this traditional British school of cuisine – Mark Hix and Fergus Henderson of St Johns– although they never worked together.

Kerridge decided by 2005 that he wanted to open his own place and he found the Hand & Flowers, an ailing pub with a weekly turnover of only £500.

 “It was just a pub, which is the environment I personally feel comfortable in. I thought that if it doesn’t work we can always just serve beer. It was flat dead – it was nothing – a dormant pub with no regulars. My plan was to offer great food using slightly different cuts of meat and no canapés or pre-desserts or anything of that kind that people identify with fine dining – we wanted to take all that away.”

Is he comfortable with the notion of being a gastropub?

“For me a gastropub - well people can call them whatever they like - it’s just a pub that serves food. All pubs should be places you go to socialise, eat, drink and generally have fun. More and more emphasis is now pushed onto the food. Well, there are 15 pubs with Michelin stars and there are more and more other places doing food in that comfortable environment. The numbers are building and that drive for good food is moving onwards in pubs. As a pub industry, we have to look at ourselves – more and more people are offering great food but it doesn’t have to always end up with Michelin stars - it just has to be understood. It is a hugely positive and great space to be in right now.”

Although Kerridge has found huge favour amongst the public, some devotees of the Michelin star system question whether pub food can ever really justify two Michelin Stars if it is compared say, to The Ledbury or to Michel Roux’s Le Gavroche in London. For me, this is the wrong question. Just as you should not downgrade a rating on a Japanese restaurant because it is not European haute cuisine, pub food should be rated within its own context and few would disagree that the Hand & Flowers is probably creating the best pub cuisine in Britain. As a marketing device by Michelin, it was also a stroke of genius as it showed that in a sense the British Michelin Guide has “gone native” and celebrates the virtues of the oldest British source for meals eaten in public.

Kerridge is happy to promote the virtues of British terroir, but he is not a narrow-minded chauvinist when it comes to produce used in the kitchen. “The produce in this country is great and people appreciate coming here and experiencing it cooked in a decent manner. Probably 95% of the produce is British, but every so often we will use some beautiful French chickens. That is not a conscious decision but merely that we try to find the best we can and sometimes that happens to be in Rungis (The wholesale market in Paris). However, root vegetables and game are always British. We get our beef from two different butchers – one in Lancashire and the other in Wiltshire, but I am not specific about the animal or breed – it is more to do with the relationship I have with the butcher – they are the experts and I will rely on them.”

A lot of the positive feedback for the Hand & Flowers is because it is seen as a homegrown British product with little to do with other countries culinary traditions. Kerridge himself says, “We are quite happy doing what we know best without looking over our shoulder and copying what is going on in the rest of the world.”

 Perhaps because of this, he gets a large number of overseas clients, including French, eager to see what the fuss is all about, rather in the same way that Britons going to France would be curious to try what might be thought of as the best bistro in Paris or bouchon in Lyon.

However, Kerridge is less optimistic that the gastropub concept could be exported to another country: “I don’t know – it always worries me because it could become a bit themey. Certain chefs can pull off doing different concepts – Jason Atherton has been very successful with Esquina, his Spanish tapas bar in Singapore, for instance.”

Would be consider opening something that was not pub-related?

“Definitely - I could see myself opening a fish and chips shop, a bar or delicatessen in the Marlow region. However I wouldn’t go as far as opening a restaurant in Claridge’s (like his friend Simon Rogan is about to do in the spring). I live a few miles away from here and it is a fantastic place - I could never move from here. We have talked about and looked at London, - I am not ruling it out in terms of growth in the future, but we are not looking there. The people who work here are very special to me – they love my pub as much as I do, which is very important for me. If we opened in London, it would just be a themed place, not with the heart we have here, which is very special.”

Some other Gastropubs in England

 Harwood Arms (www.harwoodarms.com)

Fulham London

A collaboration between Brett Graham of  The Ledbury, a brewer and  a rural chef, this probably serves the most elegant game dishes of any gastropub in Britain.

The Sportsman (www.thesportsmanseasalter.co.uk)

Seasalter Kent

The international foodies favourite. Now in its fifteenth year, the Sportsman was inspired by the idea of providing haute cuisine at pub prices. Immensely creative and even includes tasting menus.

Eagle  (+44 20 7837 1353 – no website)

Farringdon London

The original one – defiantly unsmart, still with a pub atmosphere laced with a large streak of bohemianism. Food still preponderantly Mediterranean but now seems slightly dated.

Anchor & Hope (+44 20 7928 9898 – no website)

Waterloo London

Located between the Young and Old Vic theatres, this no-booking place has inspired numerous offshoots, including the Magdalen Arms in Oxford and several others around London. The cuisine is more reminiscent of Fergus Henderson’s iconic St Johns, with its basic British dishes.

Kingham Plough (www.thekinghamplough.co.uk)

Kingham, Cotswolds

This beautiful pub in the middle of exquisite countryside probably angers traditionalist pubgoers for being too bourgeois. Chef Emily Watkins trained at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck, but there is nothing molecular about the simple but stylish Modern British menu.

Pot Kiln (www.potkiln.org)

Just west of Reading off the M4, this uses game from nearby Vicar’s Game, the best game dealer in southern England. Partly owned by Mike Robinson, who is also co-owner of the Harwood Arms