The project
As culinary trends go, low food miles – reducing the distance between farm and plate – is surfing the same wave as counter seating and sharing plates. When two chefs who earned their whites on the London and New York restaurant scenes respectively, Tom Adams and April Bloomfield, upped sticks for deepest darkest Cornwall to launch a farm-to-plate project, it got tongues wagging and mouths drooling.
‘I was spending half of my week in Cornwall at a friend’s farm working on the supply chain for my restaurant in London when the idea came about,’ says Adams, co-founder of London BBQ restaurant Pitt
Cue. ‘I began to feel a disconnect between the work happening on the farm and the dishes being served in the restaurant. That triggered a thought process about how I could do something that better reflected where the food came from. I felt that we could get higher-quality produce if we were right on the farm’s doorstep.’
The result is Coombeshead Farm, a veritable Garden of Eden of gastronomy where everything served in the 14-cover restaurant has been grown or reared on site. If it’s too far to go for dinner, make a weekend of it and stay overnight in the five-bed guesthouse, then enjoy an earlymorning stomp around the farm’s 66 acres of countryside.
Adams isn’t the only one to swap his whites for waders in the name of revolutionising the British food scene. When former River Cottage chef
James Whetlor wanted to get closer to his ingredients, he swapped London for Devon to become a goat meat supplier. After discovering it was common practice to kill male goats shortly after birth because they don’t produce milk, Whetlor made it his mission to put goat meat on the British menu.
What started as a PR exercise – FYI, goat meat is lower in fat and cholesterol than beef, lamb and pork – has evolved into his company, Cabrito, supplying goat meat to Michelin-starred restaurants such as The Ledbury. We suspect he might have had something to do with the fact that goat is currently one of the UK’S biggest food trends. It’s so popular, it has even earned its own page in the calendar. Yep, Goatober is a thing. We kid you not.