‘I was so much happier outside London’: how top chefs found heaven in the West Country
In Somerset, it has been a prolific summer for courgettes. I know this because they feature in at least three of the 10 dishes on the menu at the Old Pharmacy in Bruton. “We’re inundated,” says its chef patron, Merlin Labron-Johnson. I can’t decide between the tromboncino scapece – coins of a thin, curling, pastel-green courgette native to Italy, fried in garlicky olive oil then quick-pickled in vinegar, served cold as an antipasto – and a bigger dish of grilled chunks of yellow courgette with preserved lemon, courgette cream, nasturtiums and salty, lemony almonds. I order both.
The Old Pharmacy’s blackboard menu is a snapshot of what is good and in season not just in the area, but at Labron-Johnson’s nearby farm, where he grows almost all of the fresh produce that this and Osip, his small, high-end restaurant next door, put to work in their kitchens. “We grow every vegetable, herb and fruit that it’s possible to grow in the UK,” he says, not least all those courgettes. “And we don’t need to look much further than Somerset for everything else – we have Westcombe for cheese, Bruton Organic Dairy for meat, and in winter we go to a local hunter for game.” The scapece arrives crowned with basil leaves and swimming in a golden pool of peppery olive oil; I order bread to mop it up, which arrives with a blob of freshly churned, salted butter. I’m in Somerset; it would be rude not to.
Excellent produce – and growing it himself – is just one strand of the allure that brought Labron-Johnson to Bruton. He grew up in the south-west of England but had spent most of his cooking career in London; he earned his first Michelin star at 24 at Portland in Marylebone, and opened three restaurants in four years to huge critical acclaim. But he
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