Dramatic dining at a grand country estate casts in a big-budget film role
Kathryn Flett
There came a point roughly halfway through my “Garden Experience” at the newly Michelinstarred Interlude – perhaps during the charred pork and scallop with birch sap, or the braaied (Afrikaans for barbecued) monkfish with oak vinegar and suurvy (a succulent native to South Africa; you’ll have spotted the theme) where I started to feel like an extra in a big and glossy, but peculiarly arch movie, albeit one directed with finesse, commitment, energy and a whopping budget.
First things first, however: Leonardslee, a 240-acre Grade I listed garden and Grade II listed house in West Sussex, is owned by the Zimbabwean-British businesswoman Penny Streeter, who rich lists say is worth around £157million, and who made her fortune founding the medical staffing company A24 Group before moving into property and hospitality, including vineyards here and in South Africa.
By the time she bought Leonardslee in 2017, the estate had been neglected for a decade. I regularly spot “For Sale” signs and turn on to overgrown drives in order to peer at sad buildings in need of much love and many millions – so restoring Leonardslee to its former glory is the kind of romantic whim to which I can relate, even if I can never emulate it.
However, while revamping what looks like an upscale wedding venue is one thing, bolting on a restaurant for which the exec chef, half the kitchen staff and most of the front of house have been imported from SA, and which has the capability to land itself a Michelin star within a year of business is, arguably (and quite unnecessarily) another. Yet it appears to have paid off: Jean Delport, just 31, is only the second South African to win a Michelin star.
The restaurant’s USP is two seasonally based, doorstep-foraged tasting menus “committed to providing each and every guest with a place to interact with nature and eat from the land in an unexpected food journey”. The “Garden Experience” is 14 courses for £90, the “Estate Experience” 19 for £120. Wines are sourced predominantly, though not exclusively, from Streeter’s Benguela Cove vineyard.
Our first course was fine dining’s answer to the question “Got any dry roast peanuts?”. It arrived while we were still nursing our pretty floral G&Ts in the bar. Entitled “untraditional crackers, stones and smoked cream”, it consisted of half a dozen mmm-yum chickenskin crackers hung from twigs planted in a flowerpot, with a dippable seedsplattered buttermilk accompaniment.
It set the tone. The evening would be
DINNER FOR TWO suffused with smoky flavours, each course accompanied by a card with a map of where things were sourced on the estate (meaningless if, as we had, you arrive in the dark, without having previously toured the gardens) and a fuller explanation given by the exemplary servers.
Stand-outs included a puffy mouthful of rabbit-encased carroty-dumpling served on a mini lawn, a playfully smoked “cigar” filled with SA’s fermented milk, amasi. I loved the ashsuffused crackling ghost of a chicken’s foot with homemade fire salt, and the melt-in-the-mouth 120-day-aged Sussex cross wagyu beef bite with gorse flowers. Kudos, too, to the oyster cream, Exmoor caviar and nettle combo, and a surf-n-turf charred pork chunklet with a spoonful of scallop served with birch-sap syrup.
You’d expect a lot of mushrooms at the moment. However, they popped up just once – a “risotto” in which rice was replaced by a pile of riced potato atop a smear of venison biltong jam. It was all very seriously playful.
By the time we got to course 12 or 13 – respectively a gorgeous garlicky oxtail and the (optional) cheese platter accompanied by headily floral es
Star Wars
Leonardslee Lakes and Gardens, Brighton Rd, Lower Beeding, West Sussex RH13 6PP: 01403 289490; leonardsleegardens.co.uk/food