Higher Farm, Shepton Mallet: 'Gunning for national recognition'
And well deserving of it, too.
Chris wrote this review in August, and since then Higher Farm has announced they are closing at the end of October for winter renovations, during which they will extend the ‘farm caff’ and possibly renovate their cider barn. So, we’re urging you to make the pilgrimage before then. Pick the next sunny day, enjoy the drive with the windows down and the tunes on; revel in the last throes of summer. Pack your swimmers, take a dip in the lake and then warm up in the sauna. And then dinner. It’s glorious.
My first memory of Higher Farm was nearly being walloped across the face by a breaching sea monster from the slightly murky lake in which I was swimming. Clearly he'd read some of my reviews. Meg reassured me that it was actually only a three-inch tiddler (she hadn't even seen the fish), so I bravely continued my front crawl, beneath deftly swooping swallows, zigzagging dragonflies and the odd, less graceful, woodpigeon.
Later, scrambling up the muddy banks and retreating to the deckchair area for my own safety, I shivered over to a wood-panelled sauna to recuperate.
By now you’ll have realised Higher Farm — a few miles south of Shepton Mallet and somewhere you’ll definitely need Google Maps to find — is not your average restaurant. It is a relatively new endeavour from brothers Matteo and Giacomo Grasso, the first of whom I met — handsome and half-naked — in the sauna. Charming and thoroughly invested in the farm in more ways than one, I learned he made his money in London (of course) in finance (of course), before deciding he wanted a simpler life, eventually buying this not-so-little plot with his brother. Like a Gen Z Jeremy Clarkson — though hopefully less deportation-happy — with a frisson of Gary Stevenson.
But I didn't just come to swim and perv. I'd heard the food was good too. In a nattily converted barn, with a blackboard and exposed beams, large windows allow light to flood through over the pond from one direction and the large, covered courtyard in another.
A short menu, trendily un-mellifluous “mackerel on toast”; “lamb belly, pepper, black garlic”, was headed “week 33”, hinting at the relative newness of their food operation. Which isn't to say they haven't taken it seriously. George Barson, a man of serious pedigree with River Cottage, Dinner by Heston, and, more recently, Bath's Beckford Canteen on his CV, was drafted in to head up the kitchen, and Yarrow recruited to cover PR. Moves like this hint at gunning for national recognition which, spoiler alert, is almost definitely on the table.
Cocktails mostly had a fruity twist: fig leaf oil in a very good negroni, apricot in the mezcal margarita. The menu, meanwhile, made good use of what could be sourced in and around the farm, littered with peas, beetroot, mint, tomatoes, chard and the like. Beetroot hummus and duck liver parfait were both solid examples of their sort, thankfully metaphorical rather than literal, the former a pleasing magenta hue under its pretty garden scene of flowers and leaves.
“Mackerel on toast” belied the nuanced complexity of the dish. Although mackerel is obviously a sea fish, eating it at least felt like some sort of retaliation to the earlier unprovoked aggression of his freshwater brethren. Carefully grilled and piled onto toasted sourdough with lightly acidulated, joyously flavoursome tomatoes at the peak of their summer powers, salty sea herbs and bright fuchsia flowers, I laughed as I ate - partly out of revenge, partially due to such purity of flavour and, ironically, face-slapping freshness.
“Lamb belly, pepper, black garlic” did, in fact, turn out to be not much more than that, the belly pressed into a uniform cuboid and crisped up, joined on the plate by splashes of vivid green, brooding black and a peppery jus. Some leafy matter was largely an irrelevance. Accompanying “chips” were a throwback to Barson’s time at Cora Pearl, being those little stacked cuboids of layered confit potato, three to a plate, sprinkled with not enough of a herby salt and needing also just a little more cooking, butter and love — those three things being practically synonymous.
Eating with two of the best bakers in Bristol, a bad cheesecake would have been as welcome as anchovy on a vegan's pizza. Up to this point they had been suitably impressed by thick slabs of sourdough, hardly surprising given that it comes from Bath's pioneering, if somewhat earnest, Landrace Bakery. A variant of the near-ubiquitous Basque style (on a recent trip to a Korea and Japan, I saw more burnt cheesecakes in the wild than gruesome deaths in Squid Game) used clotted cream to add a certain velvet-rich, West Country je ne sais quoi. Given the season's bounty, and its accomplished use across the rest of the menu, a brightening garnish of crimson strawberries wouldn't have gone amiss, though they were relegated to ice-cream form, a sad end for any ingredient. The bake itself was hard to fault; properly burnished, almost pockmarked, on top, and yoghurty-smooth beneath.
The largely unmanned farm meant nobody to tell us not to take a sunset stroll through the grounds, although it does in fact seem to be encouraged.
We explored muddy beetroot fields — the bounties of which will apparently be put to use in a ketchup which the brothers intend for the mass market. One field over, chatty but nervous ducks and geese were brought out of their shell by a sprinkling of Vietnamese coconut biscuit (if it's true you can taste the diet of the animals in the finished flesh, these quackers will be delicious if they ever reach the table), and a large polytunnel of tomatoes. That unmistakable grassy, slightly spicy smell hit me as soon as I stepped inside, evocative of my grandfather’s Eastbourne greenhouse, which took up most of his smallish garden. Hopefully my new Italian friend won’t miss a tomato or two.
The following night, we ate at The Pony in Chew Magna, holder of a Michelin star for many years before a change of focus towards sustainability and accessibility, and something of a South West institution, although by no means resting on its laurels. Or fennels, judging by its bounteous midsummer flower beds, nirvana for the butterflies and bees flitting and buzzing around.
These two restaurants share definite similarities in vibe, views, ambition and output — in fact Higher Farm’s spring onion rarebit felt very much like a dish that could have been whisked in from Root, the Pony Group’s vegetable-focused restaurant at Wapping Wharf.
But as it stands at the moment, the Trapless pub feels more polished, literally more bedded in. Based on our assured, generous, rigorously seasonal allegedly three course meal that soon became more like seven, a Green Star must be round the corner. If Higher Farm take Pony's ethos as a benchmark, they surely can't go too far wrong.
All words by PXandTarts, photos by Meg Houghton-Gilmour
Higher Farm, Shepton Mallet BA4 6QF
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