Iain Pennington, The Ethicurean, Wrington, Bristol

Iain Pennington's The Ethicurean is the kind of restaurant that could only be found in one particular place at one particular time; the place is just outside Bristol and the time is now.

Set in a glasshouse inside a Victorian walled garden that supplies most of its fresh produce, The Ethicurean is at the forefront of local, sustainable, seasonal cooking in the UK, winning The Observer’s Best Ethical Restaurant in 2011 as well as a host of other accolades.

The Staff Canteen caught up with Iain Pennington, one half of the chef/brother partnership (the other being Matthew Pennington) to find out how a sense of place informs one of the UK’s most exciting new restaurants.

How did the idea for The Ethicurean first come about?

My brother Matthew was running a chain of delicatessens across Bristol importing the best European produce you could find. After about ten years of doing that he started to realise that there was actually really good British produce emerging so he set about, along with Jack [Adair Bevan, front of house manager],starting The Ethicurean to celebrate the fact that there are really amazing British artisan producers that can rival the best of the European produce. In a time when climate change is rife, why would you be importing from elsewhere when you’ve got something so good on your doorstep?

They started The Ethicurean at farmers’ markets. I was in my last year at uni at the time and every holiday I’d be down in Bristol cooking and doing the farmers’ markets with them. As soon as I graduated I moved back and at that point Paula [Zarate, general manager] joined. We were cooking out of Paula’s kitchen for the farmers’ markets before we set up the restaurant.

How does your relationship with Barley Wood Walled Garden and gardener Mark Cox work?

Mark is a separate business to us; he looks after the garden and grows all the produce. He’s been here close to six years now. He grows some of the best produce I’ve come across – really interesting heirloom and heritage varieties that you just don’t get nowadays. He sells the produce to us on a daily basis and we have a brilliant working relationship with him. The amount of produce that he’s brought us that we didn’t even know existed and is just so delicious is amazing.

How much of your produce comes from the walled garden and where does the rest come from?

At this time of year about 70% comes from the garden. About three miles away there’s a community farm and that’s where we get the rest of the produce – they’ve got a much bigger acreage for things like potatoes, onions and everything that takes up a lot of space that we just don’t have at the garden. We get rabbits from the garden; we get deer & pheasants from the Mendips, which we consider an extension of the restaurant’s garden, and the occasional bit of pork and beef from close by.

The radius for our produce is probably about 20 miles max but we don’t set a real limit on what the radius is; we just try to find very good quality, sustainable produce and if it comes from ten miles further than the nearest farm to us but it’s better quality, the animals have had a better life and it’s farmed in a sustainable way, then that’s what we’ll support.

You and your brother Matthew are both self-taught chefs; how did you develop the techniques and style of cooking that you use at The Ethicurean?

Because we were limiting ourselves to British produce, the first year was a bit of a kick in the teeth to us because we got here in October with a fair bit of produce still around but as we got into winter and early spring  there was no produce available. We still refused to import produce because it was completely against what we’d set out to do, so the menu did suffer in the first year quite a lot. That was the point when we realised that when we had gluts of produce in summer we needed to preserve them for the winter when the produce is more limited, so that’s when we started learning preservation techniques.

We started off with pickling and we pickled everything in our first year. Jack would be out shooting and he might bring back two deer which would be too much for the restaurant, so then we learnt how to cure meat. Everything we’ve learnt has come about through necessity really, not wanting to waste food, and that’s what has developed our style of cooking and our style of food essentially.

Can you tell us a bit about your home-produced drinks like your homemade apple juices and Vermouths?

With the apple juice we’ve got about 75 different types of apple over two orchards. Throughout the year you’ve got apples that ripen earlier than others so as they’re falling, we’ll press them and as we’re tasting it we’ll be balancing more acidic varieties with sweeter varieties and just constantly pressing, tasting and balancing so each batch, week to week, will change ever so slightly depending on the apples. The Vermouth made sense because the four of us have always loved it and a lot of the herbs we’ve got growing in the garden are what you find in vermouth. Mathew and I go out and forage a lot as well and the things we find like really bitter leaves go well in Vermouth too.

 It just makes sense to make a drink that has a sense of place and that really reflects the evolution of the business, a Vermouth that really applies to right here in Somerset, and it’s up there with the best Vermouths that I’ve tried. It’s delightful.

How would you sum up the philosophy of The Ethicurean?

It’s seasonal; it’s as minimal impact on the environment as possible - we want to preserve our land and everything around us for future generations to enjoy; it’s sustainable, and it’s to really tie the food to a sense of place. The Ethicurean is unique to here right now and if we were to set up a restaurant in Scotland, it would be a completely different thing with different produce – that’s what’s really given the restaurant an identity and the menu a real voice.

Do you think we need more restaurants like The Ethicurean?

I think in this day and age we definitely need to be looking at what’s close to us and what’s available instead of just thinking we’ve got a limitless bucket of produce we can use from wherever in the world, whenever in the year, and actually British produce that’s close to where you’re sourcing it is so fresh and so delicious and changes vastly through the year and is always in abundance. The only time you have to worry about is early spring when you’ve got the hunger gap but if you’re intelligent about it then you can get through it. Actually I’d say our menu is possibly at its most interesting in late winter, early spring because that’s when we’ve got all of the preserved and fermented items on.