Popping up everywhere
Turning your home into a business is as demanding – or relaxing – as you make it, says Caroline McGhie
This is a bit like casting off into the North Sea, except that you sail over ploughed fields into a land of bubbling skies and wind turbines. Roads unfurl and turn back on themselves between one comatose village and the next. MidNorfolk is the last place you would expect to find a cutting-edge pop-up restaurant, but the hunt is all part of the pleasure. And there it is. You might think it is just another house in another village if you didn’t know that there was something extremely unusual going on inside. Brovey Lair has been feted in The Good Food Guide as “Norfolk’s best restaurant”. It has been Michelin-recommended since 2005, and it specialises in fish. Mike and Tina Pemberton started throwing their house open to salivating customers soon after they moved here from London with their two young sons. Their family kitchen is where they perform what they call “thrilling gastro theatre”. Tina is small and forceful, with long, thick chestnut hair. Her laugh is earthier than freshly pulled Norfolk sugar beet and she is queen of her kitchen. Mike welcomes you, takes your coat, potters about in jeans and trainers, fetches wine glasses and tells you about his time at drama school. He was at Rada just after Albert Finney and Susannah York. Having bought the Seventies house 15 years ago, they gutted it, chucked out the lace curtains and installed a kitchen that would thrill any television cook. It is shaped like a huge comma, glistening with sugared turquoise glass, and is packed with drawers (one for knives, one for teacups and saucers, 24 of everything), and the work surface is curved like a ship’s bar so guests can sit on the stools and sip cocktails while Tina tosses, flips and seasons. The kitchen is actually a large conservatory with room for five tables and huge windows overlooking the two-acre garden. They can seat 24 but often it might just be a couple or two. It isn’t surprising that Brovey Lair (01953 882706; broveylair.com) has come to the notice of programme-makers. Anglia featured them in Posh Dinners, and BBC Two made a pilot called Restaurant in Your Home, though it didn’t become a series. Mike and Tina have now put it on the market because their boys have left home and Tina has itchy feet. Before settling here they travelled, writing guide books on California, Asia, Australia and South America. “This is why I am so interested in fusion food,” says Tina. “The Pacific Rim flavours are what I do.” 1Scolfes, Hailsham, East Sussex, a Grade II-listed village house with four bedrooms and award-winning tea-room/restaurant with bar, £450,000-£500,000, Batcheller Monkhouse (01424 775577; batchellermonkhouse.com). 2Butlers Wine Bar, Arundel, West Sussex, with a three-bedroom maisonette above, £895,000, GlynJones (01903 770095; glyn-jones.com). 3Southdown House, Crossways, Farnham, Surrey, four bedrooms with a shop and showroom on the ground floor, £495,000, Hamptons International (01252 714164; hamptons.co.uk). It has to be said she was ahead of the game with fusion food and with pop-ups, and that the rest of the world has now caught up with her. She puts a bowl of soup before me which turns out to be an exquisite balance of leek, celeriac, cardamom, saffron and Bramley apple, like nothing I have tasted before. Eating out in someone else’s kitchen is big now. London is full of supper clubs, the telly is awash with Come Dine With Me. But it can be stressful for the owners because they have to chat and bicker in front of us (like any old couple would, I suppose). “People these days want their bricks and mortar to work for them,” says Tim Stephens of Humberts (01603 661199; humberts.com), who has valued Brovey Lair at £795,000. “This house has a bit of land and four bedrooms as well as the two guest rooms, which you could let people stay in, and if you want to you can lay on a meal. Buyers might think they want on old rectory but in reality find they want something a lot more manageable like this.” Brovey Lair is in striking distance of the Broads and Norwich, but why did Tina focus on fish, when it’s an hour’s drive from the north Norfolk coast and a fair cast from the Lowestoft fish market? “A fishmonger lives nearby and visits Lowestoft every day, so I get fish which is very fresh,” says Tina. You eat what she cooks; you can’t choose from a menu. Today, she is making lovely aromas with her Japanese teppan – a hotplate big enough to fast-cook a shoal of fillets and king prawns all at once. Otherwise, she has an oven and gas hob like the rest of us. She is serving teppanyaki monkfish with stir-fried oyster mushrooms and asparagus on black rice soba noodles. It is deliciously salty-sweet and explains why people travel so far to eat here. Mike and Tina knocked down an annex and made two large bedroom suites for bed-and-breakfast guests (handy for those who have had a drink). “People come and stay even if they live only a couple of miles away, but they also come from London,” says Tina. To help them relax, there is a swimming pool, sunloungers and everything designed to make you feel as if you’re on holiday. After all the washing up, Mike and Tina find it difficult to get up in the mornings. So they offer brunch, which is a kind of Californian and Mexican feast and involves huevos rancheros – fried eggs, salsa, guacamole and refried beans. “With pop-up, they only cook and have people to stay when they want to,” says Tim. “It is a brilliant way to live.”