Why the menu is late on Wednesdays

The delivery from the Vale of Pewsey arrives between half six and seven, depending on whether Ruth has stopped to talk to anybody on the way. The fish comes up from Brixham overnight and reaches the back door at about the same time. Until both of those things have happened, nobody in this kitchen knows what Wednesday’s menu is.

This is an inconvenient way to run a restaurant and an actively annoying way to run a website. People ring on Tuesday to ask what is on. The honest answer is that we do not know yet, and the honest answer is not the one anybody wants to hear.

What we do instead

The menu is written at six in the morning with the delivery notes on the pass, and it is on this site by eight. If you are booked for that evening it reaches you by email at nine. It will be broadly what it was last week, because vegetables do not change their minds overnight, but the fish will be whatever came off the boat and the beef will be whichever part of the side we have reached.

The alternative is a printed menu that runs for six months, which means buying to a specification rather than buying what is good. That is how a kitchen ends up with asparagus in October. It is easier to run and it is cheaper to plan. It is also the reason most restaurant food tastes the same in March as it does in August.

The one thing we will always promise

There will be something on every menu without meat or fish that took as long to make as the beef did, and cost us as much thought. Not a side dish wearing a hat. If we have not managed that on a given Wednesday then we have not done the job properly, and you should say so to Ayo on the way out.