Eating farm-to-table at Osip in Somerset
In Somerset, Osip readies for its second bloom
In late November 2019, Merlin Labron-Johnson opened his dream restaurant. Osip, housed in a former ironmongery on the ground floor of a boutique hotel in Somerset, is a “tiny” farm-totable establishment — it seats just 30 — though Labron-Johnson’s ambition for his new venture was anything but. The 29-year-old chef was already a veteran of the London restaurant scene, having launched Portland and Clipstone and earned a Michelin star for his troubles, all by the age of 24. At last, he had managed to escape the city to do things his way: building direct relationships with the people growing his vegetables and rearing his animals, and creating dishes for which, as he puts it, “there’s a story”.
Word quickly spread about an excellent new restaurant in Bruton — a tiny, picturesque town that already attracts an inordinate number of beanie-wearing out-of-towners, thanks largely to the Hauser & Wirth Gallery which opened there in 2014 — where you could sit down to a set menu that might include, as it did when I went in January (and yes, I was wearing my beanie), quail egg mimosa and pumpkin financiers; potato and smoked eel; a “Tourte de gibier” (game pie) and hazelnut praline eclairs. Like the chef who created them, the dishes were unshowy and carefully considered, but they meant serious business. It was clear — even through the cosy fug of ice cider at the end of dinner — that Osip was something special.
For Labron-Johnson, who has a dark brown beard and a calm, low-key manner, this was a highly personal venture. “Osip” is his own middle name, chosen by his father as a nod to exiled Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (it rhymes with “gossip”, in case you were wondering). The restaurant was to be like “a country inn, where you’d come and stop and be fed,” and get “that feeling of being welcomed into someone’s home” which, partly thanks to the fact it nestles under a very nice hotel, you can and do. Even Osip’s vegetable-centric menu, which Labron-Johnson describes as “Somerset ingredients cooked with traditional French and English techniques”, is an apt distillation of his experiences in food so far.
Growing up in the village of Buckfastleigh in South Devon, in what he describes as a “very poor household”, his parents avoided meat and fish, “not because we were vegetarian, but because they would rather have good quality vegetables than bad quality meat.” Their house was surrounded by fields owned by Riverford Farms, of home-delivered veg-box fame: “So it was kale and Swiss chard and beetroots and carrots for most of the year. It did give me an understanding of what grows when, and when it’s at its best,” he says (though he admits, “I don’t remember being that excited about
constantly having to eat brassicas”).
After leaving school, he worked in restaurants in Devon for two years, including for the chef Michael Caines, before upping sticks at 18 to spend five years cooking in restaurants in Switzerland, France and Belgium, including a stint at the esteemed (and now closed) In de Wulf. He was eventually lured to London at the age of 23 by restaurateur Will Lander, co-owner of The Quality Chop House, to open Portland on Great Portland Street in 2015.
“I thought, ‘OK, I’ll do that for a bit,’” says Labron-Johnson. “But in the first year of opening it was quite a big hit. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.” All true, though less of the “quite”: Giles Coren in The Times described Portland as “a perfect restaurant”. Nine months later he had a Michelin star and was opening an equally popular sister restaurant, Clipstone.
Yet something didn’t sit right. “After a couple of years of cooking in London, I realised it just wasn’t really me. It felt sort of compromised. In London, things are very different: you need to pay incredibly high rents, your restaurant needs to be full all the time, you need to appeal to a much broader audience. But you’re also disconnected from where your food’s coming from. I was very proud of what we did, but it stopped inspiring me. Also if you grew up in the countryside you can enjoy London as much as you want but there’s definitely a point where you’re like, ‘I need to get out of here!’ And I did feel that more and more.”
Initially he looked in Sussex and Kent, with a view to accommodating London day trippers, but in July last year he was tipped off about the site in Bruton. As soon as he visited he “kind of fell in love with the town and also the building”. With the help of interior designers Frank & Faber and some fortuitously talented locals — the bouquets of dried herbs that hang along the walls are made by a floral design company, Lunaria, that just happens to be next door, while Labron-Johnson has, as perhaps all of us should, a “local guy who carves wooden spoons for me” — Osip was born and, briefly, shone bright..
Then came You Know What.
I first spoke to Labron-Johnson in March. “I mean, everything’s shit, obviously,” he laughed, “but my spirits are OK.” Having been open for only four months, a testing period for a new restaurant even at the best of times, Osip would be closing imminently; for how long he, like the rest of the hospitality industry felled by Covid-19, didn’t know. “I’ll spend a lot of time thinking about the restaurant and how we can get better,” he said.
When we spoke again it was late July, and unsurprisingly, the intervening months had been hard. He’d had to let a couple of staff members go and repurpose the restaurant entirely. First, Osip sold boxes of produce; then it became a weekly pop-up shop; eventually, it became a takeaway. It was, he says “so out of our comfort zone, having to navigate things like e-commerce and packaging and delivery logistics”, let alone having to do it from “a kitchen the size of a cupboard”.
But there were upsides, too: Labron-Johnson was given two plots of land to grow his own fruit and vegetables, and found himself with time to forage for wild ingredients, something he hadn’t been able to do since his time cooking in Europe. And now, finally, with new protocols in place — 16 guests at a time, two nightly sittings, payment in advance — Osip was becoming a restaurant again. The new dishes would include crudités of “everything from the garden on one plate”, a courgette and gooseberry soup with a yellow courgette and ricotta tart (“I think everybody who grows courgettes for the first time underestimates quite how many courgettes you get from one plant”) and a dessert of strawberries and foraged meadowsweet.
The restaurant was already booked solid for two weeks and Labron-Johnson was feeling quietly optimistic. “I don’t know if the positives outweigh the negatives, but it’s not all negative,” he said, of his lockdown experience. “I’ve reinvested quite a lot into the opening, with confidence that the new Osip is a better Osip.” Given that, as Giles Coren will tell you, LabronJohnson already knows how to make a perfect restaurant, that is no mean feat.
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1 High Street, Bruton, Somerset; osiprestaurant.com