Designing menus that are on-trend and work for the pubs, is a delicate balance between listening to what our guests want, whilst also offering choice, and dishes they might not have thought they wanted to begin with. Each menu offers all the old favourites, plus new and exciting dishes, a good choice of steaks, fish dishes, other meats and salads, pies and slow cooks, plus raw and grated with a dash of decent dressing. We’re constantly looking to add great vegetarian and vegan choices too, as well as dairy free and wheat free dishes, as well as catering for the all plethora of allergies too. Great value lunches, indulgent blow out treats on the weekend, and of course the best Sunday Roast in town.
That’s the puzzle. We’ve spent the last 20 years trying to perfect our menus. Changing as tastes evolve, and the media inform us all of what we should be eating, and Nigella cooking what we all want to eat if we burnt 6,000 calories a day.
At the heart of it, our goal is a menu that reads like a menu, not a random collection of ‘stuff’. Food and flavours that go together well, helping make the experience a dinner party every day. Mindful of the fact that there are many reasons we eat in the pub, from breakfast to dinner, Monday to Sunday.
One of the hardest debates often had, is how many dishes? Several graveyard restaurants have often not been honest about what they can deliver. We have to be realistic about what a team of proper Chefs, cooking fresh Gastro Pub food can cook well on a busy service. Complex is the enemy of good. Too many different things all at once can damage the quality of the dishes that leave the kitchen.
So here’s our challenge (and we will always enjoy the ongoing debate with our guests). We want it to be fresh, and from the U.K wherever possible. We want to be sustainable. We want it to work for all reasons you want to visit us, and we want it to get delivered in a timeframe that you expect. And most of all we want it to be delicious!
We hope you love what we do. Talk to us in the pub or contact us below. We are always listening. Food has said so much about who and what we are for thousands of years, and now it seems to have risen to the very top of the discussion tree.
We will be here playing the challenging, delicious, confusing, enlightening game of food Tetris.