The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Saturday
The Michelin chef who got busy in the kitchen garden
Isolation gave Michelin-starred chef Merlin Labron-Johnson the chance to get to know his vegetables. By Caroline Donald ‘I’ve taught myself to run an e-commerce shop and a takeaway, and we do a pop-up shop’
These days, there’s many a country restaurant and pub proclaiming a “fork-to-table” philosophy, serving organic vegetables from the establishment’s own kitchen garden. Few, though, are the chefs doing the actual growing stuff themselves, and rare as hen’s teeth are chefs with a Michelin-starred restaurant under their belt who would start such a garden from scratch, spending long days heaving tons of horse manure over a garden wall.
Merlin Labron-Johnson, late of London’s Portland restaurant (which gained a Michelin star in 2015, nine months after opening), Clipstone and The Conduit, had not intended to be quite so hands-on this spring. Having grown up near Totnes in Devon, the modest, quietly spoken 29-year-old had achieved one ambition, though.
“I had a lovely time in London, but after a couple of years I wanted to be back in the countryside. All I wanted to do is have a very simple restaurant where we grow our own vegetables and maybe eventually have some pigs and chickens.” So he decamped to Bruton in Somerset – something of a foodie hub – and opened Osip, a tiny restaurant in the town’s former ironmongery, last November.
Along with Number One, the 12-bedroom boutique hotel it is nestled within, Osip got rave reviews, and he was working flat out in the kitchen. There was neither the time, nor the money to start his dream veg plot – even though David Mlinaric, interior designer to the grandest of the grand, and his wife Martha, offered him the use of the kitchen garden on their idyllic Spargrove estate nearby. An allotment for herbs and edible flowers at Durslade, owned by Hauser & Wirth gallery and a short walk from the restaurant, would have to do.
And then came lockdown. But out of adversity comes opportunity: “I’ve taught myself the fine art of running an e-commerce shop and a takeaway, and we do a pop-up shop every Saturday. We had to do that for survival,” says Labron-Johnson. He has also taken the term “gardening leave” literally and, over the last few months, taught himself to raise his favourite varieties of vegetables. “I was starting to grow in my allotment and I thought: ‘I am crazy if I don’t get this garden going now, I will regret it for the rest of the year.’” So he plunged into the Mlinarics’ kitchen garden.
We meet at Spargrove on a sunny afternoon late in June. The first thing I notice, once through the narrow gate, is the long double row of mature artichokes that occupies a whole bed along the top of the third-of-an-acre sloping garden (see above).
“David and Martha have been growing artichokes since they have lived here,” says Labron-Johnson. “They were given them by a friend in Italy and usually they are producing never-ending artichokes.” Frustratingly, “this year they are having squirrel problems; they have finally figured out that artichokes are quite tasty.”
On the slope below, where once there was only grass, are three new beds (each 18m x 3m), home to rows of young veg that have appeared over a matter of weeks – Labron-Johnson took a gamble on when the restaurant would be able to reopen and has planned for his crops to come into abundance by late summer. It has been hard work, especially as he doesn’t drive and has to cycle over the hill from home in Bruton. “I can’t actually believe how much we have done in this time.”
Enjoying the heat of the wall are outdoor tomatoes, such as ‘Black Russian’ and ‘Gardeners’ Delight’; in the beds are purple sugar snap peas; red orach for salads; courgettes, including yellow (‘Gold Rush’) and green (‘Romane’), spring onions; beetroot ‘Chioggia’ and ‘Cylindra’; salads (especially spicy Oriental varieties), cucumbers (“I probably have about 50” – he makes pickled gherkins out of some) and edible flowers such as calendula: “It is a good companion plant and you can put the young leaves in salads, too”.
There are also carrots, parsnips, leeks, onions, radishes and chard. Among the broad and runner beans are dwarf and climbing French beans, including ‘Fortex’, sent by his grandmother from France. “She says they have no string and are completely tender and you get so many from each plant.”
The door into the garden is too narrow for vehicular access – hence he and his brother Ruben shovelling the eight tons of muck over the wall by hand – and he spent four days bringing in six tons of food-waste compost with a wheelbarrow. “It was mad.”
They did, however, manage to squeeze through a mini digger to create the beds. The third bed, recently made, is like a delicious earthy cake: over a layer of the upturned turfs from the first two beds went a layer of cardboard to suppress weeds, then that was dug in and manure added, liberally topped with straw. With scaffolding boards laid around the edges to make it raised, it is now home to ‘Crown Prince’, ‘Musquee de Provence’ and ‘Red Kuri’ squashes.
When Osip reopens its doors on July 30, what Labron-Johnson can’t magic up from the Spargrove kitchen garden will come from local suppliers or be brought in by neighbours and friends. As customers sit down to eat in the 16-20-cover Covid-compliant space, he won’t be giving out menus (unless requested). Diners will be told about the local produce into which they are about to sink their forks and asked to “put their faith in the kitchen, knowing that we will cook from the heart. The idea is that our guests will really understand that we are cooking with whatever we are given that day.”
Labron-Johnson still intends to run
the garden himself, as an antidote to hot days in the kitchen – “It is very good for my mental health,” he laughs.
All is looking productive now, but what about winter and that tricky “hungry gap” at the beginning of the year? “It is the test of a true talented chef. It is hard to make a restaurant-standard, ‘fine-dining’ dish with something as humble as Swiss chard or kale in the colder months. You need to be creative. You really do.’
The proof, as they say, will be on the plate.
Osip and Number One Bruton both plan to reopen on July 30 (osiprestaurant. com; numberonebruton.com).