“We’re a 100% British restaurant,” says Restaurant St. Bart’s co-founder and chef Johnnie Crowe. “Everything that comes through the door is from the British Isles.”
So, in short, if it’s not grown here, raised here or plucked from the water that sploshes around the edges, it’s not going on the menu.
“We’re limiting ourselves in a way, but it just makes things more about the suppliers than about us,” he adds. “I’ve always been fascinated by British farming, agriculture, fishing, so I suppose [the restaurant] is like a real exploration of what growers and farmers are doing in the UK at the moment.”
They call themselves ‘hyper-seasonal’, but somehow that doesn’t quite do it justice. Want to know what’s the best of what’s in season right now? It’s what is coming out of the kitchen at Johnnie’s place, the restaurant he opened with friends Luke Wasserman and Toby Neill in 2022.
It won its first star after just a few months of being open, but they’re arguably more proud of their Michelin green star, awarded to restaurants which excel in the field of sustainable working practices.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he says. “It’s just what restaurants should be doing. I wouldn’t want to run a restaurant that had the same menu all year round, and its products come from all across the world.
“We’re in partnership with the people who grow our produce, and that link between us and them should be as strong as it possibly can be. We work together with them, and they’re as important a part as we are.”
Prior to opening Restaurant St. Barts, the team had shot to fame running the acclaimed Nest in Hackney in East London, while Johnnie was previously at the Harwood Arms in Fulham, the only pub in London to hold a Michelin star.
They also run the Nest Farmhouse, a restaurant with rooms in rural Norfolk, located on a working farm with produce quite literally growing on the doorstep.
“If more and more restaurants went more and more towards buying British where they could, it’s not only good for the environment, it’s good for our farming economy,” he says.
“Like the guys at Ifor’s, breeding wagyu angus cross cattle in Mid Wales, or our chicken suppliers, which is a farm near Glasgow run by AJ and her family. That holds so much weight for me, much more than me taking something and then putting a foam or a tuille on it.
“The amount of people that we meet through doing what we do, who just love what they do like we do, it’s just really inspiring.”
Johnnie and his team will be arriving in Manchester on 25 March for one night only at the glorious Grand Pacific, Manchester’s old Reform Club.
The menu will encompass all of this thoughtful sourcing and hyper-seasonal dishes, from a lobster bun, a duck liver ‘hob nob’ and crab with horseradish and buttermilk to scallop with blackcurrant and duck satay – with a British key lime pie rounding things off.
Included with the ticket is a specially curated wine flight collaboratively devised by Restaurant St. Barts and Berkmann, the UK’s largest family-run wine distributor.
For more details – and book one of the last remaining tables – click here…
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