Gill Meller, River Cottage HQ, Devon

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Gill Meller is the Group Head chef at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage HQ in Devon, where in ten years he has seen his job role range from head chef to teacher to cookbook writer and TV presenter. The Staff Canteen caught up with him to find out what makes the place so special.

How did you first get into cooking and how did you come to be at River Cottage?

I never planned to be a chef. I studied art and photography as I always hoped to be a sculptor or an artist. I left college having done fairly well but it can be tricky to get a job in the arts so I fell into a job working in a decent coffee bar doing very simple food in Dorchester.

I’d always been interested in food; my mum was a great cook; my dad kept a veg garden so I was able to develop the food offering at this little cafe and found that I had a natural affinity with it. I didn’t have any formal training as such; I very much learnt on the job. I worked in various establishments locally and then after a few years I managed to secure a Prince’s Trust grant which enabled me to start up a small food business predominantly catering for parties and weddings. There was a really vibrant food movement in west Dorset at this time. People were really thinking about the ethics of food, growing organically and sourcing locally. My business made the most of the food hub I lived in.

It went really well for several years and I got a name for myself. By chance I cooked some food for a friend of mine who was having Hugh over for supper. Coincidentally a few weeks later, I met Hugh, at a party; we got talking about food and cooking and I explained what I was up to. A few weeks later Hugh approached me to help him set up the original cookery school at Broad Oak just outside Bridport in Dorset.

I’m not directly involved in the day to day organisation of everything at River cottage, just a handful of things. There is a fantastic team of very talented people working really hard across all areas of the company. But I’m involved on a creative level across the board. I'm not cooking in the kitchen as much as I used too, which I miss sometimes.
We have a fantastic head chef at Park Farm who’s been working with us for about a year. I work with him closely on what we’re doing but, after nine years, I have taken a ‘comfortable back seat’ from the daily running of the kitchen. More recently, a lot of my time is taken up with the various media projects and publications we have on the go.

Who sits down and decides what’s going on the menu? Are you still involved in that?

It depends whether I’m in the kitchen or not. We’re so busy, running two or three events and courses every day that the chefs who are running the kitchen or teaching are experienced enough to make right decisions; they understand the ethics of what we’re about; they know the thinking behind the food.
It’s important for me to be involved in how the business develops as a whole and how the ethics and the identity continue to run through what we teach and how we cook, keeping true to the original roots and ideals of River Cottage. It’s actually quite a challenge to maintain the wonderfully simple style of domestic cooking River cottage is so well known for as the company gets bigger. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, on the one hand you’ve got the original River Cottage concept – preparing and cooking very simple food at home, using what you’ve got, with no waste, supporting local producers who are doing good things and keeping everything fresh and vibrant – taking that idea and scaling it up it to a profitable and growing business is a unique challenge.

Writing and media work are a big part of what you do; there must always be a new challenge and a new thing to learn around the corner here?

Yes, I’m just finishing off my own handbook which will be part of our River Cottage Handbook series; this one is about pigs and pork cookery. It’ll have a rough guide to keeping pigs and a lot of recipes. Writing cookbooks is just one of the things I’ve learnt being here. The thing about working at River Cottage is, there’s so many people involved and so many experts that come through and so many authorities on food that you get to work with and learn from, the learning curve is just massive.
Since I’ve been here I’ve learned far more than I would if I’d been head down in a restaurant kitchen and that’s one of the reasons I’m still here after all this time because one day you’ll be down on the seashore finding seaweed with John Wright, whose a fantastic forager and wild food expert, and the next day you’ll be butchering a beef steer and the next you’ll be writing recipes for a book and the next teaching someone how to open scallops; it’s great in that respect.

For a cook, a foodie and a nature lover, and for someone who loves to learn, this seems like the perfect job.

They say with food you never learn everything and it is true that there’s always something to learn. What’s interesting in this kitchen is that we always have different chefs coming through whether they’re on work experience or doing a stage or an apprenticeship and every single one of them has their technique to share, their approach to preparing something, or an interesting view on an ingredient whether they’re junior or some big shot from some other restaurant; it’s just constant learning.

Why do you think River Cottage is so important in today’s world?

We live in a society where people don’t have a lot of time; lifestyles are very busy; jobs are high pressured and hectic and the majority of people live in busy cities.
I think originally the River Cottage idea and ideal enchanted people and captivated their imaginations. That has carried through from 15 years ago. It still entertains people and captivates their imaginations and now that we’ve developed a cookery school, the fans are able to come here and engage with what we’re doing on a practical level.
The awareness of cooking has massively increased. People want to see it; they want to read about it; they want to be part of it – whether it’s just growing some herbs on a window sill or keeping a few chickens – connecting with what you’re eating, understanding where the ingredients have come from is very important and at the top of many people’s priorities. Maybe we offer a way into that world that a lot of people can’t find.