For a chef and restaurateur whose ethos is so fundamental – some might say foundational – to the current London restaurant scene, the news that Margot Henderson OBE, founder of the Rochelle Canteen in Shoreditch and wife of St John’s Fergus Henderson, is opening her very first pub, is a big deal. But it’s the fact that The Three Horseshoes is not in the capital, but in the tiny village of Batcombe in the West Country, that will really set the cat amongst the (confit) pigeons.
“Somerset is such a rich, amazing place full of incredible suppliers,” is how Henderson describes the county in which the 17th-century coaching inn is located; she’s currently renovating it with a view to opening in March. “It’s a chef’s heaven. I was driving around the first time and the low winter sun was beaming, and you look down these valleys and everything is just Dingley Dell and beautiful. I couldn’t see any nos, it was all just yes, yes, yes.”
In truth, Henderson is a little late to the party; Somerset has been booming for some time. In just a few years, Bruton – the epicentre of the scene – has been transformed from sleepy market town to Dulwich-on-the-wold thanks to the arrival of an outpost of the international art gallery Hauser & Wirth (complete with open kitchen and farm shop), a Michelin-starred restaurant on the high street (Osip) and even a five-star country-house-hotel (The Newt). Bouji creatives are decamping to the area in droves, but Henderson’s arrival feels more like a stamp of approval than a capitulation.
In fact, when considering her approach for The Three Horseshoes, Henderson says it was actually certain London pubs that provided inspiration: “I looked at places like the French House, Canton Arms, Camberwell Arms, The Eagle,” she says. The Eagle in Farringdon is widely credited as being the first “gastropub” (a term which has been sullied since, but was certainly a compliment at the time), when it was launched in 1991. “We’d never seen anything like that before,” she remembers, as a former punter and staffer. “Everyone was there. No one could believe that you could be in a pub, getting great food, and it had this wild atmosphere. And it didn’t cost you the earth!”
Around the same time as The Eagle opened its doors, Henderson met Fergus, and it wasn’t long until the pair were at the stove together in the kitchen at The French House, a proper Soho boozer for vagabonds and scruffy intellectuals. (It is rumoured that Dylan Thomas once left the manuscript for Under Milk Wood under his chair.)
Fuelled by his era-defining concept of “nose-to-tail eating”, Fergus moved on to found St John, the iconic Clerkenwell restaurant. And Margot teamed up with Melanie Arnold to found Arnold & Henderson catering (the go-to for London’s gourmand-intelligentsia) and later Rochelle Canteen, which is as roundly adored as St John, but slightly less… visceral. The dining room, a former school bike shed, is chicly casual; the menu seasonal and elegant in its simplicity.
When it came to writing menus for a rural pub, Henderson says there was less of a shift of mindset than you might expect. “I think [our London menus] are quite ‘country’ already. It’s just that we’re coming closer to the source, which is a very strange feeling, actually. It’s quite odd to think we’re not hours and hours in a truck, driving through London, which we then call ‘local’.”
The downside is that in the middle of nowhere, you can’t get a bag of parsley biked over at all hours of the day, but less can sometimes be more. “We have to be more thoughtful and use what we’ve got,” she continues. “And I quite like that, the less you have the more you respond to it. And that can be really helpful. The menu writes itself!” Said menu will take advantage of the various local dairies, bakers, smokers and cheesemakers, as well as the sea, which isn’t far. “We'll just we'll be using local produce as much as we can,” she offers, then a clarification. “I hate to say I'll never put an aubergine on the menu… I’m sure we’ll get a few local aubergines.”
The gastropub aspect of The Three Horseshoes is a pragmatic consideration as much as an aspirational one, she admits. The days of the boozer, especially the remote countryside boozer, are gone. “We need to be doing different things to keep it going and pay the bills, because a pint isn’t going to do that,” she says. “I really believe that it should be a pub in the sense that it is open – fingers crossed – seven days a week, for the local people to have a pint. It’s really for the community, and I feel restaurants are very community-minded as well.”
In further honour of those overheads, the pub will offer accommodation – five cosy rooms – and overnight guests can be reassembled by one of Henderson’s “full-Somerset” breakfasts. She’ll be there herself – cooking, hosting, dishing out the crispy pig’s skin – as much as possible. And though Henderson’s oeuvre is synonymous with London, and Rochelle is still Rochelle, you get the sense this country pub idea has been simmering for a while. “I just need a cottage,” she laughs. “And a pony.”
