Gerald's finest, baked fresh every morning. The loaves are made with a blend of stoneground white and wholemeal flour from Shipton Mill in Gloucestershire, cold-proofed for 14 hours, and baked in our deck oven. The cultured butter is churned in-house and salted with Cornish sea salt.
Hartley Farm courgettes, sliced thin and dressed with a lemon oil we make by steeping zest in cold-pressed rapeseed oil for 48 hours. The ricotta comes from a small dairy in Somerset. It is a summer dish and it only works when the courgettes are this good, so we run it while we can.
Day-boat mackerel from Seabrook Fisheries, grilled over charcoal and served with a cucumber that has been lightly salted and pressed for two hours to draw out the water. The dill cream is made with creme fraiche and fresh dill from the garden out back. Simple, but the mackerel has to be this fresh for it to work.
Herdwick lamb shoulder from a farm in the Lake District, roasted low and slow for six hours until it falls apart. Served with white beans cooked in the lamb stock and a salsa verde made with parsley, capers, and anchovy. This one has been on and off the menu since 2021 and people get upset when it disappears.
Every Monday (our day off, as it happens) Dominic sits down with whatever notes he has made during the previous week and starts thinking about the next menu. He checks in with Hartley Farm, calls Seabrook Fisheries, and looks at what is coming into season. By Tuesday morning, the new menu is drafted. By Tuesday evening, it is on the tables. We have done this every week since we opened in March 2019.
Read more →Petra gets asked about natural wine almost every service. People have heard the term, they know it is something to do with fewer chemicals, and they are curious but slightly wary. Some of them have had a bad experience with a bottle that tasted like vinegar or cider gone wrong. Petra's answer is always the same: natural wine is not a guarantee of quality, it is a philosophy. And like any philosophy, it produces brilliant results in the right hands and disappointing ones in the wrong hands.
Read more →Gerald is a sourdough starter. He lives in a ceramic crock on the second shelf of the prep kitchen, he gets fed twice a day on a mixture of stoneground white and wholemeal flour from Shipton Mill, and he has been going continuously since we opened in March 2019. He has survived a kitchen renovation, two power cuts, and one incident in 2021 that we do not talk about. He is, by any measure, thriving.
Read more →We print new menus every week. If the courgettes from Hartley Farm are spectacular, they go on. If the heritage tomatoes are not quite there yet, they wait. You will never eat the same meal twice here.
Our sommelier Petra sources natural and low-intervention wines from small producers in Georgia, Slovenia, and the Jura. Some of them taste like nothing you have had before. That is the point.
Our sourdough starter, named Gerald, has been going since we opened in 2019. Every loaf gets a 14-hour cold proof before it hits the deck oven. We go through about 30 loaves on a busy Saturday.
Not tolerated. Welcome. We keep a small chalkboard menu for younger guests and the high chairs are actually comfortable. Crayons on the table are standard.
"Mara Ellison grew up in a small town in Northumberland where her grandmother ran a bed and breakfast and cooked everything from scratch. She studied hospitality management in Newcastle, then spent two years waitressing in Edinburgh before working her way up to general manager at The Larder Table in Bristol's Clifton neighbourhood, a role she held for four years. She left in 2017 to plan Juniper Harvest Bay, which she opened with head chef Dominic Farr in March 2019. Outside the restaurant, she grows tomatoes on her kitchen windowsill with mixed results, reads a lot of food history, and is slowly working through every natural wine region in Europe one bottle at a time."