MEET THE MAKERS

A menu like this comes together through a lot of small decisions, most of which nobody will ever see on a plate.

Take the tofu. Sarah and the team spent time finding a maker worth building a real relationship with, and found Neil McLennan and Clean Bean Tofu, who has been making tofu by hand in London since he came back from years of living in China unable to find anything here that matched what he'd eaten there. He still does it the slow way — organic soya beans, and nothing else worth mentioning, because the process is the ingredient.

The same thinking runs through the rest of the pantry. The pulses and grains come from Hodmedod's, a small Suffolk company that spent years proving Britain could grow its own — they sold the country's first British-grown chickpeas, and a lentil crop people told them the climate made impossible. Their fermented fava bean umami paste, built the way a miso is but from beans grown here rather than shipped in, has become one of the more interesting things in the kitchen this winter.

The bread is Seven Seeded's — a Watford bakery that builds every loaf from four ingredients and a 48-hour ferment, nothing more. The olive oil and much of the Mediterranean side of the menu comes from Belazu, a company that started in 1991 when two friends brought ten buckets of olives home from a market in Provence; the oil itself now comes from a family of olive growers in Catalonia they've worked with for the better part of thirty years.

Some of the new dishes work with Symplicity — plant-based products built through traditional fermentation, from a company founded by chef Neil Rankin. And a good deal of what fills the wider pantry comes through Infinity Foods, a workers' co-operative in Brighton that's been doing exactly this, patiently, since 1971.

We can't wait for you to visit and see the effort and care put into each of our dishes; from being lovingly created by independent businesses, through to final touches on the plate.