The poshest pub in Britain
It’s owned by a tycoon’s wife, is stuffed with celebs and chips cost 70p each. JAN MOIR lords it at . . .
DOWN in the lush pastures of Daylesford Organic, where every tomato is heritage and the beetroots are shaved, not pickled, trouble is a-brewing. Carole Bamford, Britain’s pioneering champion of luxury eco-chic and all things organic, has uncovered a problem. Married to the fabulously wealthy JCB magnate Sir Anthony Bamford, who has just been elevated to the House of Lords, Lady B faces a teensy glitch in her bid to live a life untainted by chemicals, synthetics or the merest whiff of bad taste.
Brace yourselves, people: there is no such thing as organic condensed milk.
That’s a bit like saying there is no such thing as an organic deep-fried Mars bar, but one can sympathise with her plight.
In her new Daylesford cook book, A Love For Food, subtitled Recipes And Notes For Eating Well, we learn that Carole loves purple sprouting broccoli, coffee jelly (‘It gives you a lift at the end of a meal’), clam linguine with butter and lots of salads of crunchy chopped vegetables, but only if the vegetables are chopped small.
We also discover that choosing to live organically is not always a free-range picnic, not even for the most evangelical devotee.
For when developing a recipe for chocolate, almond and espresso fudge in line with the Daylesford organic-only edicts, one of Lady Bamford’s cooks was stumped when it came to making it without the condensed milk — surely that’s against the fudge law? So she fudged it with double cream. Phew. Crisis averted. And another step forward for Lady Bamford’s relentless, 36-year organic crusade which encompasses farms, cheeses, a herd of rare breed Gloucester cows, her famous and much-copied farm shops, a bunch of cafes, a spa, bath products, a range of clothes made from natural fibres plus her recipe book — and now a pub.
For Lady B, 67, has spent more than a year and £1 million overseeing the renovation of the former Tollgate pub in the idyllic Cotswold village of Kingham. Now called The Wild Rabbit, the pub is just down the road from the Daylesford epicentre itself and boasts two giant topiary rabbits guarding the front door.
Inside, it is ravishing, with all the stripped back, rustic chic many have come to associate with the farm shop motherships.
There is mellow, exposed brickwork, weathered oak and vases artfully drooping with cowslips and hedgerow berries. Not one but three log fires crackle as customers sip blackberry Bellinis or nurse beers served in the most elegant pint glasses I’ve ever seen.
At one table, a glamorous woman in a bubble skirt is enjoying a date night away from the kids. No wonder she looks familiar; it is Amanda Holden and her husband Chris Hughes.
THE previous evening, former Labour Cabinet minister Tessa J o we l l and her husband David Mills also dined in the handsome restaurant, where Spanish hams hang from the ceiling, bottles of Lady Bamford’s own brand prosecco are on ice and even things as humdrum as chips are given the superstar treatment: hand-cut, cooked until gilded and crisp, served in miniature copper saucepans and costing £4 per portion.
‘That’s about 70p per chip,’ moaned one diner, but no one was listening.
It is all achingly tasteful, from the pots of sage on the bleached wood tables in the garden to the raw linen napkins to the stone- flagged bathrooms, where loo paper is hung from artisan hazel twig holders and even the soap, blended from herbs and flowers, is organic, fragrant and desirable.
Does this make The Wild Rabbit, which opened four days ago, the poshest pub in Britain?
It certainly seems that way, even if some might think Lady Bamford has gone too far in her cream- paint quest for perfection. Sometimes, just sometimes, it might be that little bit too precious.
For example, on the Wild Rabbit menu, ironic italics are used to describe a chilled blackberry and apple ‘crumble’.
Why the italics, I ask one of the passing waiters, all of whom are dressed in amusing checked shirts and jeans, like the cast of a local production of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, with charm. ‘Maybe it’s because it is not really a . . . crumble?’
When I look at Lady B’s beetroot orzo with hazelnuts recipes, she reminds me a little of Gwyneth Paltrow, another clean queen whose 500 thread count bed linen, healthy, organic and multi- mansioned lifestyle means that she conveniently forgets ordinary people do not have the time, the staff or the resources to factor in the sour dough bread making, stock simmering, chutney making and quinoa soaking demands that such an existence entails.
Never mind, the Wild Rabbit is sure to become a popular meeting place for the Chipping Norton set, whose Cotswold homes are dotted around the pub like a ring of not-toodistant compass points.
Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson is out to the west, troubled former newspaper editor — and Lady B’s good friend — Rebekah Brooks and husband Charles live east, Matthew Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch are south at Burford Priory while David Cameron, in whose constituency The Wild Rabbit stands, has a home farthest away, to the south east.
The kind of stealthy, unobtrusive luxury available at the Wild Rabbit is bound to appeal to them all, even if the pub launch is an intriguing development for Lady Bamford.
Although her brands are much admired, not everything she has launched has been a commercial success. Indeed, the latest figures from Companies House show that Daylesford Organics made a £4.3 million loss at the end of 2011.
HOWEVER, the Bamfords plough on regardless, and one gets the idea that money is not the motivating issue here.
An early adopter, Carole Bamford has been passionate about organic farming since 1977. For most, buying organic is a choice made if you can afford it. For the Bamfords, it is a way of life, and one she wants to share.
In 2002, she started the Daylesford Organic farm shop. From sheepskin ponchos to £300 truckles of artisan cheese, some of the things she does are so wildly extravagant, so far removed from the ordinary person’s finances that even the yummy mummy bedrock of her businesses baulked.
Once an air hostess, Carole Bamford is now one of the richest women in the country — one can’t help but feel she has lost touch with family budgets. Critics suggest it is easy for her to launch these money-draining ventures; she is married to a billionaire. But it would be easier to do nothing. Instead, she creates jobs — and fun.
For I can’t help but feel she is on to something with her lovely pub, its first class food, made by her own former chef Adam Caisley, and 12 bedrooms. Costing about £100 a night — not extravagant in these parts — each room is named after a woodland creature — of course it is!
I stayed in Hedgehog, a whirl of natural fabrics and throbbing neutrals. After a night swathed in so much monogrammed organic cotton and raw linen luxury, I know how it feels to be a coddled golden egg. In some respects, Lady Bamford is a Marie Antoinette figure — let them eat organic — but I admire her field-to-folk ethic and her love of good food — even though few of us could afford to dine so well on a daily basis. Once home, in my own not entirely organic environment, I channel the wholesome and totally Cotswoldy Lady B vibe. Things I’ve learned from her book? If you’ve got partridge legs — and I do, but not the way she thinks — freeze them for a pie. Putting a pinch of salt in the water makes boiled eggs easier to peel — but does anyone apart from a multi- millionairess think peeling an egg is hard?
And please note that the Daylesford gang feel really quite happy describing their own chocolate brownies as ‘iconic’.
Things I learned from The Wild Rabbit pub? That the potted rabbit and roast loin of rabbit they serve are actually farmed. So the place should really be called The Farmed Rabbit. Or even The Shaved Beetroot.
Or perhaps The Poshest Pub In England? Yes, most definitely that.