Ciaran Brennan on Osip, Great British Menu and farm-to-table cooking

Ciaran Brennan may have shot into the public eye with his success on this year’s Great British Menu, but behind that story is a 10-year working relationship with one of Britain’s top chefs.

Ciaran won the dessert course of the hit BBC show, closing out the banquet in Liverpool.

Turning 30 this year, Ciaran’s career as a chef has been heavily shaped and influenced by Merlin Labron-Johnson, who runs Michelin-starred Osip in Somerset.

“We are a small farm-to-table restaurant in the middle of Somerset, just outside of Bruton,” Ciaran explained.

“It’s the owner Merlin Labron-Johnson’s dream, basically.

“Osip’s location is pretty rural. We recently moved to a new site, which is a restored 300-year-old inn.

“We have a couple of rooms upstairs and I think the food and the menu and the ethos is quite representative of where we are in the world.”

Working with Merlin Labron-Johnson

Osip is not the first restaurant where Ciaran, now head chef, has worked alongside Merlin.

“I started working with Merlin in London when I was 19,” Ciaran said.

“So that's 10 years ago now. He had a restaurant called Portland and then Clipstone.

“Then I left to go to Australia for just over a year and when I came back, Merlin was ready to open Osip.

“So he asked me to come down to Somerset and I've been here since the start.

“I took over head chef duties after a couple of years and have just gone from there, really.”

He added: “I think me and Merlin have a great working relationship and a great personal relationship.

“I've been working for him or with him, for 10 years on and off – mainly on.

“It is all very collaborative. Because I've been working with him so long, my own ideas are heavily influenced by his style anyway.

“So it feels very natural when I'm writing a menu. I know what he wants, I know what he likes.

“I always understand that Osip is his restaurant and it's his baby.

“I just try my best to make Osip as good as it can be whilst keeping the integrity of what the restaurant is.

“Osip has been the biggest project I've ever been a part of. Not that it is my own, but I treat it as such. I care really deeply about Osip and its success.”

The ‘farm-to-table’ ethos

The term farm-to-table has become more commonplace in recent years, but at Osip, it is not simply a buzzword.

The menu changes depending on what is available and grows on the land around the restaurant.

“Technically everything's farm-to-table – so McDonald’s is a ‘farm-to-table’ restaurant,” Ciaran quipped.

“It kind of means nothing. I find it a weird concept in general.

“I think what's specific to us is that we own and grow our own vegetables, and we have a plot of land in which we put care into and we work on it.

“We put a lot of love into the farm as well as the restaurant, rather than just being a restaurant that relies on other people.

“I think being in this part of Somerset and being so rural, as a chef, it gives you a lot of opportunities to be a lot closer to the products that you're serving.

“We're at the base of a pine forest, so foraging and stuff like that is really accessible.

“We're really close to the farms that we work with. And then obviously we grow our own food as well.

“So we're very much in touch with all stages of food production here.”

Asked what the pros and cons are of that approach, Ciaran said: “Growing your own vegetables definitely changes the way you write your menu in every single aspect.

“It can be negative sometimes.

“Recently we went to the farm and the beans had gotten eaten by a deer, so we couldn’t put beans on the menu.

“There are loads of different intricacies to try to work around.

“But 90% of time it's like ‘the vegetables are ready’ and you have to use them very quickly.

“You have to be quite creative with how you put them on the menu because the veg doesn't wait for you.

“The courgettes will be ready and then you have 30 kilos of courgettes to use.

“So now you need to process them and be creative and just find different ways of using different veg.

“I think now that we're seven years in, we've gotten a repertoire of dishes. We've gotten good at growing at the right time.

“So every year we're improving in terms of being really functional and being with the farm in that way.”

He added: “There are definitely more advantages than disadvantages.

“You get to grow things that you want to eat. You get to have a say on how it's grown. You can see it from all the different stages.

“So you can use a vegetable from it shoots up until it seeds, the root, everything, every single part of it we get to use should we want.

“So there are lots of advantages of growing your own stuff and it gives you definitely more respect for what you're buying, purchasing, eating and lets you behind the curtain of how the world works, really.”

Kitchen and garden in sync

To ensure a successful ever-changing menu at Osip, a strong relationship between kitchen and garden needs to be in place, particularly between Ciaran and head grower Jedidiah Gordon-Moran.

“The cool thing is sometimes the vegetable will dictate the dish and then sometimes the dish will dictate the vegetable,” explained Ciaran.

“If we know that we want courgettes a certain size, we can pick them at that size, or if you want them bigger, we can just let them grow for another week.

“The turnips, we want them that perfect golf ball size. We could leave them in the ground until they're massive, but we want them quite sweet and tender and juicy.

“So it's another learning process of what the best time to pick the vegetable is for the specific dish that you're doing.

“We will either ask Jed for specific sizes or he will let us know when the veg is at its best.

“Because he's there all the time, he can be like, ‘radishes are really good right now, you need to take them’. Then we'll just take them all.

“So it's very much a continuous conversation with Jed and the kitchen, and Merlin obviously overseeing everything.”

Ciaran added: “Here at Osip, the menu doesn't really start in the restaurant.

“I think it genuinely starts in the farm and then it's a process to get it to the restaurant, that involves lots of different passionate people.

“I think Osip is a good example of a farm-to-table restaurant that is very conscientious and tries to be better every day and tries to do the right things.

“I think the idea is that the guests should feel like they have gotten away from the city.

“A lot of people come down from London or other places abroad and we really want them to feel like they are in this beautiful, idyllic part of the world.

“They're away from the hustle and bustle and then they just get looked after really well.

“They can eat some beautiful food, they can relax. It can feel quite peaceful.”

Great British Menu success

On the opposite end of the scale from the peaceful tranquillity of life at Osip was the lights and cameras of Great British Menu.

“For me personally, it was hard to process,” Ciaran admitted.

“It's been a bit of a whirlwind.

“It was something that I'm quite proud of and I'm glad that I did.

“I feel like it can potentially unlock doors into other things.

“GBM was, I'll admit, massively stressful, but ultimately really enjoyable and rewarding.

“I still have friends and contacts with people from the show. It was an incredible opportunity and I'm glad it went well, as well.”