review: castle farm cafe
Mark Taylor battles through the wind and rain, and finds a welcome sanctuary at Castle Farm Cafe in Midford
My first impression of Castle Farm wasn’t quite as fragrant as the description on the website, which explains that this barn café is situated on a ‘charming organic farm amongst fresh herbs and sweet-smelling flowers.’ On the wettest, windiest day imaginable, the reality was quite different as I walked from the car park past a field of sodden cattle, the air heavy with the smell of fresh dung. I really should have worn wellies or even waders. Walking past a vegetable plot, I negotiated the brown, muddy puddles until I reached a green corrugated metal barn flanked by a wooden shed selling produce from the farm and a Christmas tree standing proud in a vintage milk churn. The door was shut tight. There wasn’t a soul around. Perhaps the café was closed. After all, I’d seen a message on social media that week about it having to shut one day due to a problem with its water pipes. Such are the hurdles of running a café on a farm. But with the torrential rain hammering down and my stomach rumbling, I was in no mood for turning back now, so I gingerly opened the door to find it was very much open for business and people were already there eating in the warm glow of the converted barn. Pravin and Leah Nayar took over Castle Farm Café in June 2018. Pravin had been working as head chef of the Talbot Inn at Mells and was looking for a change. The couple looked at several places in Bath but after a couple of successful pop-up supper clubs at Castle Farm, they became aware that the people running the café had just left, so they approached the farm’s owners, Mark and Jo Edwards, to see if they would let them take over. They said yes and they were open for business within weeks. Leah says the ethos of the café is to use seasonal, largely organic produce to create “eclectic and tasty menus”. Castle Farm is now open six days a week for breakfast and lunch, as well as Friday curry nights, occasional supper clubs and family-friendly Sunday roasts. The space is also used for cooking classes, creative workshops, private parties and weddings. Pravin is helped in the kitchen by Nigel Everett, who was head chef at the excellent Beckford Arms in Tisbury, and a tight-knit team runs the front-ofhouse side of things. The café is immediately welcoming and surprisingly warm, with plenty of heat coming from the pizza oven in the open kitchen that dominates the room. Mismatched furniture, caged filament bulbs and twinkling fairy lights create a bohemian feel and there are shelves lined with jars of home-made pickles and preserves. The lunch menu is concise, with eight dishes and three sourdough pizzas on offer. The tempting dishes I didn’t get to try on this solo visit included butternut squash, carrot and coconut soup; warm chicken salad, sprouting broccoli, potatoes and pecorino, and a tomato, mushroom, garlic, spinach and goats’ cheese pizza. And prices are perfectly pitched, with everything on the menu under a tenner apart from my south Indian lamb curry with basmati rice and chapati, which was £12. With the freezing rain beating down on the corrugated roof, a warming bowl of curry was exactly what was required and although it wasn’t blow-your-headoff fiery, it was buttery, fragrant, spicy and packed with tender pieces of lamb belly and slices of pink fir potatoes. From a selection of home-made cakes displayed in front of the kitchen, a deep wedge of chocolate and stout cake (£3.50) was intensely chocolatey but also so light and airy that it should have really been tethered to plate. After memorable meals last year at Roth Bar & Grill in Somerset and New yard on the Trelowarren Estate in Cornwall, I’m firmly of the opinion that some of the best food being served in the West Country at the moment is to be found in restaurants surrounded by the land supplying the kitchen. The charming Castle Farm Café is another fine example of this growing trend of relaxed, unpretentious eateries with a strong sense of place and a firm connection to the land and I strongly recommend you visit it, wellies or not.