Great Pub Chefs - A passage to inn cheer
Alex Venables turned his back on Michelin-starred hotels to run a pub… and has never looked back Mark Taylor reports.
Thinking back now, I wish I'd become a lawyer, but I didn't have the brains for it," laughs Alex Venables. "But I was always creative and the great thing about cooking is that you can always change things around and it's never boring." As the chef and co-licensee of one of the most successful gastro pubs in the country, Alex certainly hasn't had time to get bored. With his partner, Alison Ward-Baptiste, he took over the lease of the Tollgate Inn in Holt, Wiltshire, in July 1999 and since then, the pub has gained a reputation across the country for its high quality food, attracting national food writers and winning countless awards.
Until then, Alex had worked almost exclusively in large hotels and arrived at the pub straight from Lucknam Park in Wiltshire, the quintessential country house hotel where he had worked his way up to be-come head chef and kept the Michelin star gained by his mentor, Michael Wormersley. For a chef who had spent the '80s and '90s working in Michelin-starred hotelswith large kitchen brigades, the move to licensee and chef of a village pub may not have been a natural one, but Alex says it was the right decision for him at the time.
"When I became head chef at Lucknam Park, there was a lot of pressure. When you are in that position in a large hotel, the cooking becomes the easy part. "The looking after the staff, the political games played in the hierarchy of large hotels… it tires you and you spend more time stuck in an office with a computer than you do at the stoves. I wasn't enjoying it any more."
Alex is now back at the stoves every day, with just two other chefs in the small kitchen behind the pub's bar.
"I'm more hands-on than I was as a head chef," he says. "When I was at Lucknam Park, there were 12 of us in the kitchen and as head chef, you're always on show. "If you've burned something, which happens, there were always people behind you, niggling you about the fact that chef had burned something. Now, in a small kitchen, people don't get on your back and it's more of a team effort."
Although Alex says he's working harder than he was before, he now has a better quality of life and would never consider working for somebody else again.
"Because I do the breakfasts as well, I start at 7.30am and work through to about 4.30pm. I'm back at 6pm and stay until about 1am because there's always customers who want to have a chat. It's a long day, but I love having a pub and I don't think I would go back to hotels or restaurants."
Part of the success of the Tollgate has been the pub's enormous commitment to using local produce sourced from surrounding farms and suppliers. It is becoming quite common for gastro pubs to include details of who supplies what on the menus, but Alex and Alison are so passionate about local produce that the list now takes up one page of the menu. The menu proudly states that Alex does not use frozen food, all dishes are cooked to order and that everything is made on the premises - and that includes the bread, jams, chutneys, ice creams and even the tomato ketchup and brown sauce.
"We're even planning to put up a map so people can see exactly how close to the pub all this produce is coming from and that we're not mucking about," says Alex. "Our beef supplier is Church Farm at Broughton Gifford, about four miles away. Neil Hooper's cattle are all hand-reared; breeds such as Limousin, Charolais and Blonde d'Aquitaine. "We trade off each other - people who eat the sirloin here for lunch then go to the farm shop at Church Farm to buy some to cook at home. "We've gone big on sourcing local produce and it's really taken off. It's ongoing and we're still looking for new suppliers and people now come to us with their produce."
For a chef whose formative years in the kitchen were spent during the days of nouvelle cuisine and "pictures on plates", such a commitment to traditional values and sourcing British produce may be slightly surprising, and Alex admits that many chefs from that period lost touch with using local produce.
"At the end of the day, it's all about taste and I don't like pretty things on plates. When I was working in country house hotels, I lost a little bit of what I wanted to do - you know, doing five or six garnishes on the plate. "What I want to do now is more like Shaun Hill - concentrating on the dish itself and complementing it with one garnish and one sauce and doing nice vegetables to go with it - that should be enough. "A lot of places put too many flavours in there and they're not actually looking at what they want to give to the customer."
Alex's support of local produce was highlighted by the Gourmand Dinner he hosted for this year's British Food Fortnight. At £42 per person, the Tollgate Inn offered an eight-course gourmet feast, sourced entirely from local West Country produce. From the bread (made with flour from Shipton Mill, Tetbury) to the fudge (made from milk from Ivy Farm at nearby Beckington), each dish contained ingredients from named farms and suppliers. Stars of the show included: a starter of terrine of local game (from Church Farm) infused with local cider (from Somerset Cider Brandy Company) and wrapped in local ham (from Sandridge Farm, Bromham) with a rich game consommé. A main course of Beef Wellington came with caramelised shallots and Brussels sprout purée, followed by local cheeses supplied by the award-winning shop, The Cheese Board, in Bradford-on-Avon.
"It's hard work, but it's always nice when events like this go well," says Alex. "We get farmers coming in here for a pint and a light lunch. You've got to look after local farmers because it looks like they're going to have another bad year with their crops. "The general public like it when they see us supporting British Food Fortnight because we're seen to be supporting local produce rather than doing two steaks for a fiver and the steaks coming from somewhere like Argentina. "It's also about educating the public and it's still very hard because the majority of people don't know why certain things are more expensive than others. They don't understand why this chicken is more expensive because it's been hand-reared rather than intensively farmed. "There's still this 'we want two steaks for a fiver' mentality and some people will still look for that £3.99 Sunday lunch. "Pub food has improved, but there's still a lot of muck out there - straight out of the freezer and into the microwave."
Another thing that sets the Tollgate Inn apart from many of its gastro-pub contemporaries is its support of small microbreweries. Often buying direct from the breweries, there are always four or five real ales on offer, and all kept in tip-top condition by Alison. Recent guest beers have included ales from breweries such as Wood (Shropshire), Exmoor Ales (Somerset), O'Hanlons (Devon), Hydes (Manchester) and the newly-opened Box Steam Brewery (Wiltshire), with ciders coming from Somerset and Herefordshire.
"You've got to support the microbreweries, too," says Alex. "We've also found that a lot of ladies are drinking these real ales with their lunch. If you serve it in a nice glass, they're ordering it instead of white wine and they're finding that a lot of dishes work well with beer."
Although the Tollgate Inn is primarily a food destination pub, the bar is used regularly by locals looking for well-kept real ales, and the light lunch menu - featuring classics such as corned beef hash and Omelette Arnold Bennett - has proved popular with customers who don't want to go à la carte.
"We always wanted to keep the bar for the locals," Alex stresses. "We're a pub with a restaurant, and we wanted it to be unpretentious and relaxed so if people just wanted a pint and a snack, they could."
Five years after taking over the pu
