Last friday we had our May Feast Night, our monthly celebration of everything that Sara, High Grange and I stand for. I thought I’d write a little bit about how I come up with the menu.

First, not only have we never done the same menu for any of our Feast Nights, we’ve never even done the same dish on any of our menus. To be honest one of the reasons for that is that I never write anything down and I never follow recipes so I can’t remember what I’m doing from one week to the next but there's also an element of boredom. I look at some restaurant menus that never change and whilst I understand the financial and staffing reasons for doing so, I always think that the chefs must be so BORED.

So I’ll sit down - usually on the Monday or Tuesday of a feast week and tap in ‘FEAST MENU’ in the ‘notes’ app of my phone. This is my favourite hour of any week, always. And it starts with a blank note and then something will pop into my head - it might be an ingredient - a cut of meat, a vegetable or a fish. Or perhaps a country that I’ve spent time in - Croatia maybe or Thailand and a dish that I once had there. And slowly from a jumble of thoughts and a quick review of our veggie patch, a few calls to my suppliers, and perhaps a google of ‘SEASONAL FRUIT/VEG JUNE UK’ or ‘WHAT FISH IS SUSTAINABLE IN DEVON RIGHT NOW’, and a menu starts to appear. Well not a menu - half a dish maybe. But that’s the start - the catalyst from which things start falling into place. A tasting menu has to excite. It has to POP off the page, intrigue. It has to SOUND delicious- words and writing are important. As above, I’ve never cooked any of the dishes that I serve before - I’ve never ‘practiced’ a dish in my life, but if I write it down and think ‘Oooh yeah- I wanna eat that’, then I know it will just work.

The best advice that I give to young chefs is to only ever cook what you want to eat. And eat. A lot. Start building up a mental library of dishes and flavour combinations. Eat everything, everywhere.

That’s why on most of our feast menus you will fine stunning Lyme bay fish or ex dairy beef or organic pork but you might also notice a laksa soup with it.. or a katsu curry sauce… or fish sauce caramel or… or…. or…. See this is what happens - I go down a menu cul de sac….

So now I’ve given you an insight into how my stupid brain works, then I urge you to book one of the few remaining feast tickets that we have available for the rest of the summer…

May’s Feast Menu:

HG medlar and lemon hooch

Harry’s pork belly burnt ends with HG quince and scotch bonnet hot sauce

Burnt beetroot, feta, olives

Hot-smoked Devon eel, Braeburn and horseradish tart

English asparagus, almonds, HG cured ham

Lemon sole, crab, seaweed

Roast chicken best bits, peas, wild garlic

Haye Farm lamb, dhanzak sauce, saffron rice

Ruby grapefruit, star anise, bay custard, pink peppercorn