How Native’s Ivan Tisdall-Downes is looking to ‘fix the food chain’

From city boy to adopted country lover, self-taught chef Ivan Tisdall-Downes has had his own unique route into the role he holds today.

More than a decade on from first developing the Native concept, alongside Imogen Davis, Ivan is now executive chef and creative director of a countryside restaurant on the Worcestershire-Herefordshire border.

Native, which previously operated out of London, champions hyper seasonal produce, Ivan having a big focus on sustainability and doing what he can to “fix the food chain” in the UK.

“Native is effectively a farm-to-table restaurant, truly seasonal, dictated to by what is grown in the gardens and what we can forage in the fields surrounding the Netherwood Estate,” Ivan explained.

“We look to create food based on nostalgia, what I enjoyed eating as a child, what evokes memory and to reinvent the forgotten flavours of the British countryside.

The farm-to-fork concept has become somewhat of a buzzword around the industry. So exactly how much of what is grown around Native makes it to the plate in the restaurant?

“The garden is the lifeblood of what we do,” insisted Ivan.

“We let the land dictate to us what we serve on the menu.

“For me, cooking with restraint is where I become more creative. If I had a larder or a pantry full of every ingredient, I probably wouldn't be that good a chef.

“But when we're there in January with only artichokes to cook, we have to make ice creams and make desserts with artichokes. That is where we really connect with the land and the garden.

“When nature tells us that we have to stop serving courgette, we run out into the garden and go, oh, well, what can we use next? That’s how you may come across a better version of the dish than you created before. It really drives my passion to keep cooking.”

Ivan added: “We’re estimating that at the moment we're using between 80 to 90 per cent of produce solely from the garden. Obviously we're buying in our proteins, some fish and dairy. But vegetable-wise, we're only really buying in onions and a few carrots.

“We’ve got pretty much everything that we need. There's empty patches in the garden because we've used that produce. It's a working garden. There’s stuff that has overgrown, which is wonderful in itself because instead of just looking at picking the produce when it's supposed to be picked, we can see the whole life cycle and go, actually, we can use the flower or we can use the seed pods or we can use the root late on. We do use the garden in its entirety.”

And it is not just the garden which Ivan utilises.

“Netherwood is an amazing historical estate,” he said.

“It provides us with some cold-pressed rapeseed oil. We get honey from the estate. There’s also our calves, which go off to the neighbouring field about three miles away to become amazing Aberdeen Angus cattle. Also lambs and goats.

“It is also a source of customers. It has holiday lets on, so it is a working estate. When you are eating, you will see the tractors out there bailing the hay.”

cooking up a storm at uni

Growing up in London, having a sustainability-focused restaurant in the country could not have been further from Ivan’s plans.

But, over time, things have “snowballed”.

Discussing his path to where he is now, Ivan explained: “My career as a chef started at university doing a business degree, which wasn't the normal path.

“I started learning how to run a business and thought ‘I'm going to put it into practice’. But at that time I had no interest in cooking, didn't know I could cook.

“But while at university, I saw the pleasure you could give people through a plate of food and kind of got a little bit addicted to that, to be honest.

“As my parents moved out of London, down to the countryside in Sussex and I started foraging, I kind of married the two together.

“I actually started off making jams and chutneys originally, selling them at a farmers’ market. From there it just kind of snowballed into hot produce on a market stall, into a pop-up restaurant, into Native and 10 years later I’m here.

“In hospitality, a day is a week and a week is a month. It just went and went.

“The first restaurant was in Neal's Yard in Covent Garden. I was there for two-and-a-half years and then moved on to Borough Market, where we did another two-and-a-half years and then lockdown happened, so we had to close that restaurant down.

“We had a brief stint on Osea Island (in Essex), which was an amazing restaurant, for about two weeks and that's all we can manage.

“Then we went to Mayfair most recently and now luckily enough, I find myself here.”

american dream

Along the journey, Ivan spent time in America, working under the revolutionary Dan Barber.

“I met the Blue Hill Farm team when they came over to Selfridges to do the wastED pop-up and told them about myself,” Ivan explained.

“They were really kind and organised all my paperwork. I flew out to New York and it was the most amazing experience, everything that I wanted it to be and more.

“It was a machine. It was 30-40 staff in that kitchen, but everything was as they said it was. We had about seven different bins in the kitchen to make sure everything was recycled in the right place, made charcoal from the bones. It was amazing.

“My other experience in restaurants was at River Cottage. So it was amazing to have these two sustainable farm-to-table restaurants, maybe at different ends of their service style, but equally serving the most amazing tasty food.”

Back to the city?

Native only opened on the site of Lee Westcott’s former Michelin-starred Pensons a few months ago, but Ivan already has a vision for the future.

He said: “For me, in my Native journey, it’s important to work towards being zero waste, but to make it approachable to everyone.

“We could invest in fancy machinery, but that's not going to trickle down to the consumer at home and effectively won't have an effect on our environment. So for us it's important to do stuff like eradicate cling film that doesn't biodegrade, single-use plastics, teach people how they can use carrot tops or eat broccoli stalks and put that in a luxury fine dining setting as well. It hasn’t got to be deemed as waste.

“It's just about re-educating and rethinking about that produce that we have.”

He added: “We've always aimed to have a restaurant in the countryside.

“We fit seamlessly into this place. We know how to forage, we know how to work with the produce from the garden.

“This is Native headquarters now. This is what is going to give value to everything that I want to do. If we want to grow the Native brand, this is going to be the blueprint. We'd love to get more rooms on the site and really make this a destination restaurant.

“I'd love to have a smaller restaurant either back in London or maybe another city, maybe Birmingham, Bristol or Edinburgh. Because for me to fix the food chain, we need to connect the country to the cities.

“We need to look at how we supply the cities with produce from the countryside and how these kind of restaurants can work in unison.

“So if we can have a restaurant in the country and a restaurant in the city and we kind of work off each other's waste and produce, then that's the dream really.”