Six weeks of tomatoes

A tomato in February has travelled further than most of our guests and tastes of the journey. We do not put it on the menu, and every year somebody asks why.

The answer is that a tomato is only a tomato for about six weeks. For those six weeks it goes into everything, barely dressed, because anything you do to it is a subtraction. For the other forty-six we cook something else.

This is less romantic than it sounds. It means the menu is written around what one farm has decided is ready, and it means telling people no. It also means that when the tomatoes arrive, they are worth the wait.