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I was sitting in a seat I had sat in before. Valentine’s Day, 2020. A table for one.
I wasn’t single, but my girlfriend (who later went on to become my fiancée, then my wife, then my ex-wife) was busy. Feeding, not breaking, hearts. To the lions, wolves and tigers twenty-odd minutes down the road at Longleat Safari Park.
This time my current, and hopefully final, fiancée had the generosity to come with me.
Both times I have been engaged, I was proposed to. I can’t tell whether that is a compliment or an insult. On one hand, at least one person has been so head over heels in love with me they wanted to spend the rest of their life eating tarts and drinking sweet sherry. On the other, both parties clearly felt I was incapable of popping the question in good time when left to my own devices. I digress. But if I had concluded, after this meal, that Briar was the second best restaurant in which I had eaten at Number One Bruton, it would be similarly hard to deduce compliment or insult.
My first time in said building — a corner spot at the base of the high street — it was Merlin Labron-Johnson’s Osip, since moved on (though not far, geographically speaking) to bigger and better things. Now it is home to Briar, run by Sam Lomas. Who, twenty years after setting up The Diced Carrot in his bedroom (aged 9), has also moved on to bigger and better things. First to River Cottage and agro-tourism guest house Glebe House in Devon. Then Great British Menu, where he radiated charming leprechaun energy (definitely a compliment not an insult) representing the north west. Like the editor of this publication, he grew up there but became a traitor to his people and flew south. Now he has his own gaff in Bruton.
This time, it wasn’t Valentine’s, although the restaurant would make a good spot for a date. “My” table especially; wedged in next to the bar, a cosy enclave within a dusky yellow cocoon, shelves sparsely lined with trailing pot plants and the odd bit of cheeky exposed brick. A little fancy but not fussy. And the food is great. Or at least, a lot of it is. Enough that, if you conspired correctly, you could curate yourselves a near-flawless meal. Start with the bread, some local cider (two bottles of best-in-class Wilding are available, but I plumped for a smaller bottle of the Burrow Hill sparkling from Somerset Cider Brandy Co; woody, aromatic and powerfully apple-y) and some cured fish. End with the brown butter cake. The rest you’ll have to plow your own path.
We began, in an event as surprising as Trump attempting to bully his country to footballing victory, with bread and butter (£4). Warm bread had about it the nutty, grainy aroma of a flatbread that has been slapped onto a hot tawa, though it was absolutely not flat. It could hardly have been more spherical. Perhaps the use of heritage grains was behind an aromatic steam that puffed out as the rolls were unceremoniously ripped apart. It would be in keeping with the sustainable, local mantra of the kitchen, which extends to a small kitchen garden up the road. A pot of gold to the side contained a sunshine yellow cubical pat of grassy butter, warm and ridged like a squat radiator, sudating grains of salt like beads of condensation.
Gougères (£6) were too crunchy. Almost savoury cheddar cookies rather than custardy, puffy domes of choux. Wee blobs of pickled walnut ketchup took the classic cheese and pickle vibe and ran with it. You’d be delighted with these at a wedding buffet but I got the impression Briar could do better.
Fried chicken (£9) came perilously cold and presumably not deliberately à la David Chang. More forgotten in the holding cabinet at KFC than two star bar food at Momofuku. It was also rather dainty, not quite popcorn chicken but certainly not Zinger proportions. That said, it remained beguilingly crisp and juicy, enlivened by a gentle prickle of black pepper in the mayonnaise dotted under thin veils of pickled cucumber. And the colonel certainly isn’t emulating Briar’s farm-to-table approach and sourcing his birds from named farms.
Over the course of a year of jet-setting in which the primary focus was shovelling as many local delicacies as possible into my ever-growing gob, I ate plenty of seafood. From the incredibly delicious — sweet, buttery sea urchin melting into grade 9 Korean sirloin round a bar hidden away in Sokcho Market — to the downright fetid. That would be fermented skate, also in South Korea. Fermented skate smells like a portaloo five days into Glastonbury. I’d rather sample festering festival faeces than put myself through hongeo-hoe again.
Back in Bruton, a dish of cured wild bass, green strawberries and red chilli (£11) was very much the polar opposite. A more beautiful, precise, pristine plate of food would unlikely be found even if we traversed the globe for another twelve months. And we only had to pootle a leisurely hour down the A37. Travel = overrated.
Each irregular rhombus of fish sat atop a slice of crunchy, fresh green strawberry, a ring of chilli delivering fresh, jolting heat and a cluster of fennel flowers tweezered on top. I tend to prefer the use of tweezers for removing errant ticks after hiking through Stourhead than excessive food poncery these days, but for dishes as accomplished as this I can make allowances.
If that level of cooking wasn’t quite maintained, and not just because to do so would have been nigh-on impossible, then a dish described as duck salad (£16) must take some of the flack. Hot smoked, the breast tasted eerily of ham, with similar soft succulence, and came fanned out next to a crunchy, piquant smacked-cucumber-esque salad knitted with herbs and chilli.
After several meals in Bruton over the space of a couple of summery weeks, I can tell you one thing with the confidence of a nuclear orange president trying to steal the Jules Rimet: the arty cognoscenti love an almond sauce. Ajo blanco with beetroot and cherries at the new The Old Pharmacy aka The Pharmacy was a thing of effervescent delight. Meanwhile, a chilled almond sauce at Briar came topped with nicely caramelised knots of roasted cauliflower, a small fistful of golden sultanas, more slivers of the nut and a welcome whoosh of mint (£12). A restrained sweetness that segued us nicely into dessert.
Chocolate marquise festooned with cherries, buttermilk ice cream and hazelnuts seemed a popular choice in the room. It’s a rare dessert that has me snubbing something chocolatey, but the promise of brown butter cake (£10) did just that. What a darling little thing it was. The shape of a flattened fairy cake, it was as buttery as you’d hope from its name, crisp around the edges and moist enough to send Nigella into raptures. The repeating sense of ye olde cereals reared its head, the combination with browned butter bouncing together like Romero and Martinez — two more who tried to cheat their way to the World Cup — and just as nutty.
A thick splodge of crème fraîche was ringed by cross-sections of pinkish-green rhubarb stem. Surfaces freckled with xylem, they proved just a little too crunchy and too tart for the genteel cake, which was as debonair as the silver-haired Bruton locals.
And as for this exact spot? Two excellent restaurants from two notably distinct, yet in many ways similar, young chefs. I’d be hard pushed to pick a favourite, but if I had to spend the rest of my life with one, it might just be Briar. I guess I’ll just have to sit tight and wait for Sam’s proposal.
All words by PXandTarts, photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
Briar, 1 High Street, Bruton, BA10 0AB
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