Williams tells...
Nigel Huddleston meets a head chef with a passion for quality.
The first thing to note about Anthony Williams is the fact that he runs the kitchen in a pub called the Williams Arms is pure coincidence. When he says: "They named the pub after me", he's joking. The pub is called the Williams Arms because it was originally the watering hole for agricultural workers on the Williams' Devon family estate.
These days it's a stop-off for holidaymakers on the north Devon coast between Barnstaple and Ilfracombe, though Anthony notes that business is "less seasonal than it used to be". It's a big place, with a 130-cover restaurant doing up to 700 meals a day at peak season. As well as an á la carte menu and blackboard specials, there's a daily carvery which increases the ability to serve a high volume of meals. "It's literally a cattle market," says head chef Williams, before quickly adding, "but one where we're still serving the best quality food that we can."
The carvery has been in place for 12 years. "We've got a hell of a good reputation for it," says Williams. The á la carte menu is very much what you might call traditional, but with an extra bit of Williams' own ingredient X' that takes it beyond pub grub. For instance, bread and butter pudding might be made out of Cornish saffron cake to give a west country feel. Williams is currently in the process of giving the á la carte menu an overhaul. "We're changing the way we do the menu. At the moment you can have the printed menu wherever you are in the pub, but we're going to have a restaurant menu and a lounge menu, which sounds a bit better than bar menu. We're trying to create a more relaxed feel in there with sofas."
The menu overhaul will aim to keep both the customers and the kitchen staff interested. "There'll be new dishes coming on. The current menu has been our most successful ever, but obviously prices go up because the cost of things changes. But also we've got to change so that we're not cooking the same things all the time. "Once we've put the menu into action when it's all done, we can go back and create new dishes for the specials boards."
They've been a proving ground for items that can earn a permanent home on the á la carte menu. "There are a lot of things on the menu that have been on the specials board, such as the steak and venison pie, which was made for the Steak Pie of the Year Competition. It was runner-up and became so popular because of the publicity it had, it has gone on the menu and is now impossible to take off." One of the new dishes making the transfer from specials to á la carte status will be venison steak with a berry sauce, and another will be local lamb marinated in dark rum, oranges and spices.
Some fish dishes will be revamped too. "The sea bass has been on the menu for about 14 months in a sweet chilli and lime butter, which to me when I did it sounded wow', but I wanted to liven it up, so we're now doing it on sweet ginger and walnuts in butter on a bed of noodles. "The butter melts over the fish and the walnuts go well with the ginger and the sea bass and don't overpower it, which the chilli can do." Perhaps the most important menu revamp was 25 years ago when Williams arrived from a spell with TrustHouse Forte.
"The menu was awful," Williams recalls. "It was a joke packet soups and boil-in-the bag meals and tinned potatoes and mushrooms and ham. It really was bad. I said I'd come here on the condition that I can start doing home-made meals. Their concern was I'd leave them after a year but I'm still here. It was along hard process to build up a reputation but we did it. The transformation hasn't necessarily meant fancy food. The Williams Arms menu is still identifiable as pub food, but it's now at the top rather than the bottom of the scale.
Williams says: "There are a lot of people who are happy serving up rubbish, but we're not like that. We've got a good team who all think along the same lines. I've always thought about owning my own restaurant but there's always something to do. The job's not finished. We are one of the best pubs in the west country and I want us to be one of the best in the country."
