The Trip
This week Emma took me to L’Enclume in Cartmel for our first tasting menu experience… at least she had bought us vouchers as a birthday present last year, and I then tried to surprise her by arranging the trip when they called me with a pre-valentines reserve list slot. Emma reckoned she’d never been to the Lake District and so I arranged a couple of surprise whirlwind nights; sleeping on the shore of Lake Windermere on the first night and visiting a few hotspots - including the Courtyard Dairy, on route in Settle - where we picked up some Richard III Wensleydale for our Valentine’s Menu at this Monday, Coniston - where we discovered that Grizedale Arts had moved away from the Ruskin Museum* - and then back down the far side of Coniston Lake to find Grizedale Arts in their new home The Farmers Arms Pub, where we went instead of the trails of the Grizedale Sculpture Forest.
Ruskin and Grizedale Arts are relevant to some art projects we’ve done - which I’ll talk about at a later date.
You don’t get much more glamp than this! We found a totally isolated secret hideaway on the shore of Lake Windermere, involving several secret codes and dirt-rough tracks to get there, some one-pan stove-top cooking and even a morning dip! In February!!!
The L’Enclume experience, on our second night was really incredible I have to say. We were actually seated on the same table as Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon were when they did their Trip episode here (Season 1 Episode 2). We watched that again a couple of nights earlier, but the Coogan and Brydon characters as played by Coogan and Brydon had been pretty uninterested in the food - and were much more about doing their James Bond impressions.
This was 15 tiny courses; Every flavour was incredibly vehement and well balanced - and something about the reduction of portion sizes intensified the experience and preciousness of every mouthful. We loved it anyway; It must be amazing to develop food and a theatrical experience such as this - with upto 14 people in the kitchen apparently and 16 more serving on the restaurant floor - all to serve 50 customers each night.
Taking photos of the food seemed a bit naff (and customer’s photographs of their food are usually pretty awful in the dark/yellow night of an evening restaurant (let me tell you)). It didn’t actually occur to me to take photographs during the early parts of our meal - being in the moment as we were - but as the wine had its effect towards the end, I did manage to take a couple of snaps…
Our meal at L’Enclume was full of highlights - Emma loved the frozen Tunworth Cheese (Like a cheese ice-cream, or snow) and we had at least a couple of beautiful ingredients that neither of us had tried before; Sea Buckthorn - which was sharp and beautiful with a Candied Pumpkin and Cobnut Cream, and Crosnes, a kind of small artichoke which look like fat maggots but are lovely to eat. They were served with Fuseau Artichokes, Maida Vale and Chrysanthemum. L’Enclume has its own farm and super-budget for such finery. But I’m thinking of asking our friends and volunteers at Preston Park Victorian Walled Garden across the road if they can plant us some Crosnes. *We’ve done a little bit with the Preston Park Walled Garden in the past, including making them a couple of end-of-season community meals. We’ll post a bit about this project later on.
Grizedale Arts and The Farmer’s Arms near Barrow in Furness.
Grizedale Arts launched The Farmer’s Arms in 2021, as ‘an inn for the 21st century’, after a fundraising campaign to save this historic pub attracted community investors and donors to join the purchase. We turned up out of the blue on Thursday, Thank you their Director of Making Tom Philipson for showing us around. The artistic, social and commercial enterprise provides the community and visitors with a shop, bar, cafe and holiday accommodation alongside community events and diverse educational and volunteering opportunities. Good inn food and drink seguays with craft workshops and courses in a very similar vein to the Cafe project we instigated at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art a few years ago, as for a short spell mima set about changing its ethos and culture to orientate towards a useful art that facilitated a creative community and regeneration. The Farmer’s Arms’ future plans include supporting local creative enterprise, enhancing the inn’s farmland and using Grizedale Arts’ international network to contribute to an exciting programme of art and community development. Grizedale Arts is long established, with working links to village ‘renovation’ projects in Japan and elsewhere. I’m interested in staying in touch with the pub and Grizedale Arts with a sense of shared values.
The pub, which includes permanent craft/maker and pottery workshops, and an Honest Shop - is gearing up for providing a different kind of hospitality experience - and artistic life for its community. As I think I mentioned in a post earlier in the week, GA and the pub are advertising a job for a director of the pub and its food and art programme, which looks right up my street if we weren’t already doing all of that here in picturesque Teesside.