British Larder Suffolk

  Madalene Bonvini-Hamel and Ross Pike run The British Larder, a pub restaurant just outside Woodbridge, Suffolk. The British Larder started off as a website created in 2008 as a recipe diary where Maddy and Ross could share their cooking tips and culinary discoveries among likeminded foodies. On 6^th August 2010 they opened The British Larder, Suffolk and within the first year it had won awards such as Best Gastro Pub East Anglia 2011 and was one of only 13 new entries in the Good Food Guide that year. Maddy grew up in South Africa. She came to Britain in the summer of 1994 and began her career with Rowley Leigh at Kensington Place as a commis chef. She worked in a number of Michelin starred kitchens, as well as contract catering. Before creating The British Larder with Ross she worked in product development. Ross started his career as a pot washer in his local village pub in Hertfordshire. He worked his way through the ranks from five star hotels to contract catering, which is where he met Maddy.   Ross, Maddy thank you very much for inviting me in. Sum up British Larder Suffolk for me in a paragraph if you can. (Ross) British Larder Suffolk is an evolved pub from a website. We started nearly three years ago in which we wanted to create a place that someone could walk through the door in a pair of shorts or they could come dolled up on a Saturday night in a suit and a tie and just enjoy really good food, cooked really well, not too complicated, but just cooked with of love, using local food, You are living the dream aren’t you?. (Maddy) We are, and my main draw is, British seasonal and regional food. We do not serve strawberries in the middle of December. Why have we lost the seasons? Is it Supermarkets do you think?… (Maddy) I think partly its supermarkets. As a chef… (Ross) It’s just chefs being lazy. (Maddy) No I think that's slightly unfair. Michelin star restaurants drive, is about being consistent. To be consistent you have to serve the same thing every single day exactly the same. When I was working in a Michelin star restaurant in London you’d get asparagus in the middle of December and they’re all perfectly straight, they’re all absolutely the same size and it was normal.. On the contrary I was brought up in a country where we had sanctions. We had to be self-sufficient and we “ate the seasons”. Michelin stars are great, there's a place for them in this world and they absolutely need to exist because it gives us all something to aspire to. If their choice is to use these ingredients great for them and I'm really pleased they’ve managed to actually source the ingredients 365 days of the year. It shows their dedication to what it is that they’ve set out to do. However, our ethos and aim here is to celebrate the seasons and encourage diners to think twice when they are having the urge for asparagus in the middle of December. The British Larder website when you created the website was the end goal to create a living, breathing entity or is it just natural evolution that the pub has come along? (Maddy)No it wasn't. It was a natural evolution. With the website purely we wanted to give something back to this amazing industry. We realised there's a lot of skill lost and there's a lot of fast. People go to catering college, and all of a sudden they walk out a finished article, a chef de partie, I've had young students applying for head chef’s jobs, but who put this idea in their mind? They should go through a development process, and start at the bottom. I've worked with some amazing people who have been hugely generous, whether it’s recipes, advice, experience, or just teaching me about seasons, teaching me about British traditions, whatever the case might be. We just wanted to give something back. The pub came about because we needed to move the website on, people ask when is the cookbook out and the other popular question was where can we eat this food? The Website was a huge success? (Maddy) Oh absolutely. (Ross) Yeah definitely. (Maddy) We did drive it. It became a slight obsession. In my book I write about obsessions and it was definitely obsession from both of us. (Ross) The first year every minute of the day we had spare, we were developing recipes, either photographing dishes, coming up with something all the time. It was all about the website and we both had day jobs. (Maddy) But it came to a point where you’re almost being slightly deflated because you don’t know where is it going to go, it was back to the drawing board to think, ‘Okay what are we going to do?’ and the natural thing came up to have a business. We didn’t know what that business was going to look like. We love our brand, we thoroughly believe in our brand. (Maddy) We looked at a tearoom we looked at pubs, we looked at a restaurant, we looked at a shop, we looked at delis, we looked at… A cookery school would have fitted in my mind yeah. (Maddy) Yes however it needed to accommodate both of us. We're two very big personalities. Do you argue? (Maddy) Oh absolutely but it’s healthy, healthy arguments. (Ross) Yeah, we're both passionate about the British Larder and we just want the best for it and we've always got different ideas about what we're putting our energy into next and we probably think of too many things if there's a downside to that we… So you live together, you work together but is there a time where you just need to be on your own? (Maddy) There was a time when we first set up the British Larder Suffolk when both of us worked in the kitchen and unfortunately it came to a point financially where we’d chosen a really tough county and we had a really, really bad winter. We were snowed in and it was make or break and after a period of time of having so many different general managers, who tried managing us, which is slightly impossible, we are slightly just too difficult to manage, we can't even manage ourselves. It was a very lonely time, we could almost not speak to each other as we where scared. We realise that we have to change how we do things and it’s the best thing we've done for ourselves. Now Ross spent most of his time in the kitchen where he's in his own little world and he manages his own team. I'm a percentage of my time outside front of house and I do have a bit of dabs in the kitchen, I do the bookwork, not physically writing just the cookbook but I'm running the business, I'm general managing the business, hiring, firing, employing, you know, stock take every week, purchasing, the banking, marketing, PR, everything else that it requires to actually run a business. We where and are always putting the business first, then the two dogs and finally our own health and wellbeing. (Ross) And to get the business off the ground in such a short period of time as