As college students across the country were eagerly cleaning out their dorm rooms in anticipation of a summer of freedom, I was crossing the Atlantic Ocean for England. My destination was London, but I was not, as many students entering on a BUNAC work visa are, there to engage in a glorified pub crawl or take in the many sights. Instead, this trip to the Big Smoke would be about work, in a way that previous trips had not been so much about education. I had landed an externship at Paternoster Chop House, a restaurant located in the financial heart of the City, under the imposing shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In this iconic location, Chef Peter Weeden has created a menu around traditional British food, highlighting very British ingredients. Although, I had more than a cursory knowledge of those strangely named British dishes (spotted dick, hasty pudding, toad in a hole, dean’s cream, etc.) from my accumulated time spent living abroad, it definitely was not the idea of British cuisine that drew me across the Pond. In fact, it was the restaurant’s ardent dedication to seasonality and locality that piqued my interest, although when I arrived in June, I had no idea just how much of a role locality and seasonality would play in the intervening months. Instead, I arrived at site like most fresh new externs, not quite sure what to expect but hoping for a lot.

In our industry, when we talk about seasonality or locality, that something called terroir, we’re generally keying into a current trend. The foodie-thing-of-the-moment is to micro-identify sources, to prominently display to others where we get our eggs, our milk, our meat, our broccoli rabe. It’s not uncommon to walk into many restaurants today and see local ingredients featured on the menu. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. Quite the opposite, I’m pleased to know that people are paying attention to these sort of details even if only because it is a trend and a quick way to increase profit. Unfortunately, it is often only a trend and local items are featured on the same menu that celebrates our ability in this country to get anything we want whenever we want. For many restaurants, a seasonal menu is one that changes four times a year, maybe a few more. This might reflect our construction of “season”, but often negates the complexities of nature. 

Walking into the Chop House the first day was overwhelming. I found myself at a site, working with a Chef who believes that a seasonal menu is one that changes daily. In fact, our menu changed each service, reflecting items that were best right then. Our purchase orders were heavily influenced by growers, foragers, fishermen and farmers—people who were in constant contact with the land, the sea and the sky. We stopped ordering tomatoes in mid-September, not because the season had changed, but because the tomatoes stopped tasting sweet and full. We continued getting strawberries until the middle of October because there was a strangely late fruiting in Kent, the result of a strangely mild summer. This incredible dedication to making sure everything tasted the way Mother Nature actually intended it to taste meant that, as chefs, we couldn’t do too much in terms of planning. We created mise en place lists the night before and often walked in to a supply scenario completely different than what we had planned. We created menu items by opening the fridges and seeing what was available, what looked good and what might go well together on the day. It was an incredible exercise in creativity and taste.

At the Chop House we didn’t use garlic. That was a hard one to swallow in my first few days there. The reasoning behind that decision is simple. Garlic is not commercially grown in England and would have to be imported. Peter takes locality very seriously. You should have heard him the day we received French butter by mistake. Our fish came from small day boats, mostly off the Cornish coast. Peter has spent a lot of time cultivating relationships with these fishermen and it wasn’t unusual for them to call us to let us know about anything interesting they had caught that day. We almost always took it, although occasionally with some conditions. Like the conger eel had to be dead before delivery. Fresh took on a whole new meaning at the Chop House. Our fish generally arrived just the other side of death, still in rigor, within twenty-four hours of being caught. Sometimes, like a very feisty Turbot, they were much less dead and much more jumping out of the prep sink. We also worked very closely with a company called Forager who, in reality, are two guys who spend their days scouring the Kentish countryside for all manners of wild food. We regularly received, when they were in season, odd deliveries of marsh samphire, sea spurrey, laver, stinging nettles, dittander, dandelion and the largest puffball mushrooms I have ever seen. Peter loved to call attention to the incredible bounty of the British Isles, finding potential food in local parks, his brother-in-law’s back garden and growing between cracks in the sidewalk. 

Walking into our walk-in was always adventure, you could never be fully sure of what you might find behind that heavy door. However, it became almost normal to find an entire cow. We did all of our own butchery in-house and our beef was delivered as huge primal cuts. The incredible Galloway or Longhorn beef arrived from Ben Weatherall’s farm aged and tasting of happy cows that lived happy, full lives on the Scottish moors. You couldn’t enter the walk-in without banging into a Berkshire or Middle White pig or a Blackface lamb, hanging and ready for butchering. With the focus on mechanization and efficient processes, butchery is a dying craft. But in the young kitchen of the Chop House, armed with only a simple hand-saw and sharp knives, Peter Weeden and his chefs are working diligently with an accomplished English butcher to preserve the traditional ways.

Paternoster Chop House is a unique restaurant, but not uncommon in type. There are a number of small, independent restaurants in the United States and abroad that have made it their mission to re-embrace local, seasonal foods across their menus. What sets the Chop House apart is that it is neither small nor independent. Originally conceived by Sir Terence Conran as part of the larger Conran Holdings, which in 2006 were bought out by D and D London, the Chop House is one of a myriad of operations in the UK, continental Europe, New York and Tokyo. As part of a larger restaurant group, the Chop House is answerable to a board of directors who might or might not be impressed by the dedication to terroir, but are impressed by the bottom line. The Chop House just celebrated its third birthday and that, in itself, is a large accomplishment in an industry where the majority of new restaurants fail in their first two years. An even greater accomplishment, however, is that each year’s profit has significantly increased- a testament to the overall success and viability of this concept.