Steve Reynolds, The Stagg Inn, Titley

Steve Reynolds is chef-patron of The Stagg Inn, a pub in Titley, Herefordshire, which he runs with his wife Nicola and which won the  first ever Michelin star for a pub. The Staff Canteen spoke to him about his inclusive style of food, his dislike of gardening and his unconventional approach to gaining a star…

You didn’t start out as a chef, is that right?

That’s right, back in the 90’s I was an architectural photographer working in London. When the recession hit, building work came to a standstill and consequently architectural photography came to a stop so it was time for a career change. I’d always been interested in cooking so I sent a letter to Le Gavroche asking for a job and I got it. I turned up there one Monday morning, never having worked in a professional kitchen in my life, and it was a bit of a shock – a baptism of fire I think they call it!

How did you come to be at The Stagg?

After a year at Le Gavroche I moved back to Hereford with my then girlfriend – now wife – Nicola. Our friends had bought a pub called The Riverside at Aymestry so I got a job as the chef. We got quite a lot of recognition locally as what would now be called a gastro pub. We were basically talking to local farmers, using local produce and putting good, simple food on the plate.

After four or five years at The Riverside we bought The Stagg in ‘98 / ’99. It was a real bargain. We roped in friends and family to help renovate and decorate and a month later we opened. We were fortunate to be busy from day one. We had a Michelin inspector in after just two days and I think Nicola called him a b*****d!

Presumably that wasn’t the year you got the star?!

No but we got the star the next year, 2001, so obviously calling the Michelin inspector a b*****d is the way forward!

And that was the first ever Michelin star for a British pub; were you surprised that they were even inspecting you?

It was the last thing we were expecting. At that time, as far as we knew, you could get a Bib Gourmand but that was it, so it was a total shock. Michelin phoned us on a Monday and told us we’d been awarded the star and I said, “No, I think you’ve made a mistake; we’re a pub.” They said, “Yes, you’re the first pub to be awarded a star.” To which I said, “Okay, what does that mean?”

What it meant was, that three film crews turned up on the car park the following morning! The phone just didn’t stop ringing for three months solid and there was only me and one other chef in the kitchen plus Nicola and one other girl at front of house so it was a pretty stressful time!

You have a vegetarian and a children’s menu, which not many Michelin star places have, what’s the thinking behind that?

We try to appeal to a very broad spread of population; you can have somebody eating a vegetarian dish next to someone eating lobster next to someone eating chips. We’ve always tried to cook what people want and if that’s vegetarian then fine. We’ve got a vegetarian dish on at the moment which is basically five raw vegetables with rapeseed oil mayonnaise – it’s just very fresh and very simple.

In terms of the children’s menu, I started off thinking they could just have half portions of the adult dishes but of course children want different things so now we do fresh goujons, fresh chips, homemade tomato ketchup and things like that and we do it with the same passion and hopefully skill that we do with any of our food.

We also have a bar snacks menu which has been going right from the beginning which does things like sausage and mash and steak sandwiches with homemade chips – what more could you want at lunchtime with a nice pint of beer or cider?

Do you get all your produce from local suppliers?

Yes apart from fish which we get off day boats from Cornwall. We’re very lucky here in that we’ve got so much great produce around us. We get game from local shoots in the village: partridge, pheasant and wild duck; all our beef comes from a local farm seven miles away; our pork is all local rare breed; we get Springfield chicken, again, from a local producer; we get beautiful rapeseed oil with a wonderful nutty flavour that we serve with bread instead of olive oil; we get local butter from just across the border in Gloucestershire – we really are blessed.

We even get snails from a local snail farm which is one of only two in the country. The owner has been growing snails for 20 years; no one was interested in them to start with but he struggled on using this old Second World War hangar, and now, of course, he can’t produce enough because everyone wants them. He supplies The Fat Duck and he goes down to London twice a week with his car boot full of snails…

And you grow your own fruit, vegetables and herbs?

Yes, we have an acre at Vicarage Gardens just down the road. We probably grow about a quarter of what we use on the menu. We grow a lot of salad, a lot of broad beans, peas, cabbages in the winter… We employ a gardener to look after it because I find gardening particularly frustrating! There’s always something that can go wrong: it’s either too wet or too dry. When the weather finally is good, all the weeds start growing then the rabbits come and start eating everything – you don’t have any control over it which I find really frustrating, so I’m quite happy to let a professional gardener do it!

Do you have any plans to expand in the future?

We’ve thought about opening another place but we’re so remote that logistically it probably wouldn’t work. We’re just going to carry on doing what we’re doing and add a few things; we’re looking at preserving our own vegetables over the winter months by storing them underground. We’re also starting to grow our own mushrooms in the cellar which is going quite well. Apart from that we just keep trying to improve; the beauty of this job is that you’re only as good as your last day; you have to keep working at it, which is why I like it.

See Steve’s recipe for pressed pork belly here

See Steve’s recipe for ‘potting shed’ here