There are nine things on the menu, and there are nine things on the vegetarian one. That has been true every week since we opened, and it is the promise we are asked about most often by people ringing to book for a table where one person does not eat meat.
It sounds like a small thing. It is mostly a question of when the writing happens.
Written at the same time, not afterwards
Most kitchens write the menu and then, at the end, work out what the vegetarian will be. You can taste the order it was done in. That is where the risotto comes from, and the goat’s cheese tart, and the plate of roasted vegetables that is really a garnish with ambitions.
We write both columns on Wednesday morning, at the same table, before the boards go up. The celeriac dish gets the same argument as the hake, and if we cannot make it good enough by Wednesday lunchtime it comes off and something else goes on, exactly as it would for the short rib.
The fire does not care
The other half of it is that we have one way of cooking, and vegetables take to it as well as anything else does. A whole celeriac goes in the embers for three hours and comes out tasting of smoke and butter. Onions cooked down in the mouth of the oven overnight are the base of half of what we do. Leeks charred hard on the outside are better than leeks treated politely.
If your only heat is a gas ring and a pan, a vegetable dish is genuinely harder to make interesting. With a wood oven it is simply another thing to cook well, and the equipment does most of the arguing for you.
What is on it this week
The celeriac, hazelnut and sage is the one people come back for, and it has survived four attempts to replace it. Beyond that it moves with the market: chicory, pear and blue cheese while the chicory is good; a whole onion, cooked twice, with bread and the fat from the pan; something with beans in October when the last of them arrive.
The bread and the butter are ours, the oatcakes with the cheese are ours, and the five-course menu at forty-eight pounds runs without meat or fish for anyone who asks when they book.
What we ask of you
Tell us when you book, not on the night. That is the whole of it. It is not because we cannot improvise; it is because we buy small and cook it the same week, and a table of six with three vegetarians on a Saturday is a different shopping list.
The same goes for allergies, and for the things people are embarrassed to mention. Nobody in this kitchen thinks less of a guest for not eating something. We would much rather know on Tuesday than find out at half past eight.
The part we are less proud of
For our first two years the vegetarian menu was shorter, and we told ourselves it was about ingredients. It was about attention. We changed it after a regular pointed out, politely, that she had eaten here eleven times and had been offered the same dish nine times.
She was right, and the menu has been the same length ever since.
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