We stopped buying asparagus in October

For the first two years this restaurant had asparagus on the menu for about nine months of the year. For six of those months it came from Peru. It was perfectly good asparagus. It had been on an aeroplane.

Taking it off was not a grand decision. It came out of an argument in the kitchen in October about whether the asparagus dish was actually any better than the celeriac dish sitting next to it on the pass. It plainly was not. It was on the menu because people order asparagus, and people order asparagus because it is on menus.

What happened next

Once one thing goes, the rest follow quickly. Tomatoes went the same winter. Then the year-round strawberry pudding, then the green beans, then a lemon tart that we replaced with quince for four months of the year and nobody noticed except to say the quince was better.

What is left is a menu with about fifteen dishes on it that is genuinely different in February than it is in July, and a kitchen that has to be more inventive in January than it used to be. The hard months are hard. Late February is roots, brassicas, and whatever is left in the store, and that is the month the cooking here is at its best, because it has to be.

The part nobody warns you about

Six weeks a year the asparagus is English, it is two days out of the ground, and it is the best thing in the building. We put it on and it sells out every night. Then it stops and it is gone until April, and that is the entire point. You cannot have the six weeks and the nine months. We chose the six weeks.