Bullish talk

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Stephen Bull's London restaurants were beacons of unpretentious, simple cooking. His famous kitchens produced some of the great chefs of today, including Richard Corrigan.

Bull was one of 18 chefs profiled in Great British Chefs 2, written by Kit Chapman, alongside other great names such as Rowley Leigh, Paul Heathcote, Antony Worrall Thompson, Rick Stein and Sally Clarke.

Tired of chasing Michelin stars, Bull moved away from the capital in 2000 to return to his native Welsh borders and open the Lough Pool Inn in Herefordshire.

Five years later, after winning 'Pub of the Year' in the Good Pub Guide 2005 he has uprooted again, this time to the Hole in the Wall in the Cambridgeshire village of Little Wilbraham.

Stephen still lives in Herefordshire and commutes regularly to the 15th-century pub, run by chef Chris Leeton and manager Jenny Chapman. It was Chris and Jenny who persuaded Bull to sell the Lough Pool Inn and move the operation to Cambridgeshire.

Says Bull: "Jenny is from around here and she didn't enjoy all those Herefordshire hills.They did a great job at the Lough Pool, so rather than trying to find another head chef or management couple, we've become partners in the Hole in the Wall."

Although he takes a back seat role in the new venture, Bull still has a major input regarding the menus, which bear all his hallmarks of simple, unpretentious food at highly-competitive prices.

Prices at the Hole in the Wall run from £3.25 to £7.50 for starters and average around £12 for a main course. The maximum price charged for any dish is £14.75 and the average spend is between £18 and £20 per head. Despite this, Bull aims for a GP of around 73%.

He says: "It's always easier to do a good GP when you're busy. When you're not, it falls away quite fast. The more customers you've got, the better the GP because there's less waste."

Stephen admits that his first few months at the Hole in the Wall, which is close to Newmarket racecourse, have felt a bit tougher than expected.

"Basically, my predecessors ran it as a place for their racing chums. When we moved in, hardly anyone rang up, no one came to the door and we were starting to wonder what we'd bought!

"In the first few months, we've been losing as many friends as we've been making. Some people who try our food find that it's not to their taste - they want piles of whitebait, Brie wedges with cranberry sauce and gammon with pineapple."

"I have a rant now and again about these 'clenched-buttock Brits' who are so xenophobic about their food. It's all very well going on about how things have changed in the UK, but the vast majority of Brits aren't interested - they just don't want nice food.

"I didn't have any preconceived notions when I made the move from restaurants to pubs. Even in London, I would occasionally get people in my restaurants who just didn't know how to read a menu or weren't used to eating out properly and had little interest in food.

"It will be very interesting to see how long it takes for our swathe of old customers to fade away. Let's face it - we're after the educated middle-classes. They're the people who know their way around a menu."

In many ways, Stephen was part of the first wave of celebrity chefs, although he is typically modest about his achievements.

"The zeitgeist was in our favour. The media started to get very interested in chefs and that helped a lot. We were all there at the same time, doing similar things, and collectively

influential in some ways.

"Until then, British chefs were

generally perceived as fat, pasty, rather unpleasant people who tended to

feature too often in the crime columns of newspapers."

Despite his success and the extent of his influence on other chefs, Stephen still admits that he feels an imposter, because he was self-taught.

"I'm quite diffident about what I can do, partly because I haven't been through the mill. There are a lot of things I can't do - I don't think I've ever fried a chip.

"Having said that, I was doing more covers at the Lough Pool Inn than ever before and discovered I could hack it. I'd run the pass before at one of my London restaurants but I'd never done a service for 120 main courses. After that experience at the Lough Pool, I didn't feel like such an imposter."

Stephen has strong personal views on what constitutes a good food pub and says that he doesn't want his pubs to be considered simply as restaurants in pubs.

"There will always be fish and chips, steak and kidney pies, faggots, stews or Ploughmans - all done as well as possible.

"Shepherd's pie is a standard dish, but made with good ingredients and a bit of care, it can be really good.

"Albert Roux once said to me that you can have three-star scrambled eggs if you do them

properly. With good eggs, good butter, good cream and good timing, they can be absolutely delicious.

"In my pubs, you can eat the same food everywhere and it must have strong references to what people expect to find in pubs - the sort of food that has been in pubs forever and a day, but with extra things added."

Stephen Bull in the hot seat

What do you think of gastropubs?

"I think the trouble with the idea of the gastropub is similar to what happened following the arrival of nouvelle cuisine - in the wrong hands it quickly became debased and thus discredited. There seem to be a lot of pubs out there trying to re-invent themselves by going back to bare wood and painted plaster, shiny wooden furniture and arrangements of dried twigs. But even if such a make-over works on the public, you're no further forward if there's no talent in the kitchen and no enlightenment among the owners."

Do you think gastropubs are the future?

"Good food in pubs is obviously the future - pubs are a relatively cheap way for ambitious, decent chefs to start on their own, because of the low ingoings and social environment that many chefs find congenial.

London is slightly different - there's more sophistication on both sides of the kitchen door or bar counter. That's particularly true with new produce, such as chorizo and truffle oil, which can used to jazz-up menus without extra skill. That can get slavishly copied in the provinces."

What would you sum up as the problems with gastropubs?

"Some gastropubs are just restaurants in a pub framework - places where the bar has shrunk and having a pint with crisps or a sandwich isn't really an option. This isn't going to help the gastropub find a comfortable niche in the leisure landscape. I hope there will be enough good operators for the word 'gastropub' to avoid becoming a canard, but I won't hold my breath. Nouvelle cuisine became an Aunt Sally and gastropubs could meet the same fate."

On the menu at the Hole in the Wall

Starters:

Home-cured Wilbraham beef with potato and spring onion salad, rocket and truffle oil, £6.75

Seared scallops wrapped in pancetta with chorizo and maple syrup, £7.50

Main courses:

Sweet-glazed bacon chop with cabbage cake, black pudding fritter and mustard sauce, £10.50

Whole baked lemon sole with crayfish, tomatoes and basil, £12.75

Desserts:

Chocolate and griottine cherry roulade, £4.95

Local rhubarb crumble with damson and sloe gin ice cream, £4.95

Chef's CV

Name: Stephen Bull

Born: 1943, Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

Experience: After leaving Oxford University, where he read English, Stephen Bull took up a career in advertising. At the age of 28 he moved on, and after a three-month sabbatical, worked as a waiter at Peter Langan's London restaurant, Odin's.

From there, Bull re-located to North Wales for five years, taught himself how to cook and opened Meadowsweet, his first restaurant, in 1974. Four years later, Bull opened Lichfield's in Richmond, where he was awarded his first Michelin