The Castle at Taunton’s new Summer Opening!

Twelve months ago, almost to the day, we closed The Castle’s principal restaurant. Since its rise to prominence in 1984, when Chef Chris Oakes won our first Michelin Star, the Restaurant became the Hotel’s “shop window”. And I was on a mission to rehabilitate England’s impoverished culinary repertoire – my “English Project”.

Along with a heady mix of history and hospitality, good food and a fine cellar were what we were about. Oakes was succeeded by a grand parade of Michelin laureates: Gary Rhodes, Phil Vickery and, finally, Richard Guest who moved on to open his own place in the autumn of 2010. Guest’s successor was Jamie Raftery, a young Irishman and another gifted chef with a super-star pedigree (Michael Caines, Thomas Keller).

So why did we close the Restaurant in the spring of 2011? Well, by then, “Austerity Britain” had gripped us by the throat. We were losing money and ambitious restaurants across the English provinces were struggling. So we decided to up our game in BRAZZ, the town’s lively town centre brasserie, to concentrate our lunch and dining spaces in one area rather than two.

The strategy paid off. Difficult for me especially, but we had made the right decision. BRAZZ today is busier than ever. The best, most popular eaterie in Taunton …. And yet, from the day we shut our main dining room, I have had to field a roll-call of grumbles from a legion of “regular” clients.

These clients may have dined in the Castle’s Restaurant less frequently than they claimed, but their disappointment was instructive. What they missed was not the menu, nor the quality and ambition of the cooking. What they missed was the style; the white linen and elegance of their surroundings. They missed the grace and serenity of The Castle.

It was time to build bridges. Time to win back lost hearts and, as importantly, reach out to a wider audience.

Anatomy of a new restaurant

This summer will see the opening of a new restaurant at The Castle. Its name is Castle Bow Bar & Grill. And its success will rely on a number of key principles.

• In today’s marketplace, the Hotel needs to be made more accessible to more people. BRAZZ has its own street entrance in the town centre. To get to the old restaurant, visitors had to negotiate a heavy revolving door leading into The Castle’s lofty hall before finding the bar and their table.
• Access to the new Bar & Grill will be direct, with an entrance on Castle Bow - the street which connects the town centre with Castle Green. A perfect location in the heart of the town with a high footfall. To passers-by, it will appear as a stand-alone restaurant.
• Access to the Grill and Hotel from the interior of BRAZZ will be made more transparent by an open passageway. We want to make access between all our bars, eateries and public areas easier and more visible.
• The Grill will not reoccupy the old dining room (now used successfully for events and functions). A new space is being designed with tabling to seat 40.
• The environment and mood we create in this new space will be of the greatest importance. The traditional formality of the old dining room will be replaced by a dash of retro-chic which is at once informal, relaxed, comfortable and stylish.
• The menu will be ingredients-driven, relying on the seasons, clarity of flavours and simplicity of execution. Gastronomic pyrotechnics and over elaboration will be eschewed. We shall be cooking dishes to please our customers, not Monsieur Michelin!
• Pricing will be friendly – in the region of £30 for three courses.

As the saying goes, watch this space.

Kit Chapman, Proprietor of The Castle at Taunton

A tribute to a great wine man. John Avery MW.

Most of us, if we are lucky, will point to one or two special people who enter our lives early on, leave their mark and endure as lasting and seminal influences in our careers.

John Avery MW, who died unexpectedly this weekend, was, for me, such a person. My love of good wine began from our first meeting in the spring of 1976. I had just quit the London advertising world to join the family firm in Somerset, The Castle at Taunton.

My father, Peter Chapman, was keen to introduce me to John who had recently succeeded his famous father, Ronald Avery, as head of the family’s wine business, Avery’s of Bristol. Ronald and Peter had been close friends. And it was to my father that John turned for comfort and advice after Ronald’s death shortly before our unforgettable rendezvous in Park Street.

And so it was that we drove to Bristol on a fine day in late April. After a brief meeting in John’s office (all I recall is being surrounded by hundreds of dusty bottles of wine!), we left for lunch at the Mauretania, an unprepossessing restaurant of little merit situated immediately beneath Avery’s offices.

While lunch was a steak dressed in gunmetal grey, the wine that made my Damascene conversion was a 1929 Ch. Leoville-Barton. I had never tasted claret like it. I was transformed!

From that moment John and I became firm friends. Together we conspired to create weekends of fine wine at the Castle. These became great annual set-piece occasions, each weekend striving to out-glory the previous year’s until we gave up exhausted by the effort and the explosion in the prices we were obliged to charge.

Perhaps the greatest dinner we threw was “The Battle of the ’45s” – a dinner where our centrepiece was to taste two First Growths of the renowned 1945 vintage: Ch. Mouton Rothschild vs. Ch. Latour!

That evening we were joined by Britain’s reigning Grande Dame of Wine, Pamela Vandyke Price . When she rose to deliver her verdict, she declared that while the Mouton was a great ”voluptuous” wine, the Latour was the more “cerebral”. A show of hands in the dining room gave victory to the Mouton by a slim margin.

These were fabulous moments in my friendship with John Avery. But he gave so much more to encourage my appreciation and understanding of wine. His enthusiasm infused my own passion. As a pioneering force for the New World, it was John who first introduced me to the coming fashions in wine drinking. It was he who introduced me to good Californian Zinfandel, a grape variety I continue to love.

I shall miss him. The wine world will miss him. And to Sarah, his widow, and all the family, Louise and I send our profound sympathy and fondest love.

Kit Chapman, Proprietor, The Castle at Taunton.

Alain Llorca: Garlanded by Michelin, sneered at by TripAdvisor

Louise and I are comfortably installed in a pretty “bastide” on a hillside facing the medieval village Saint-Paul de Vence in the South of France. It is home to the Michelin-starred chef Alain Llorca.

Last night we enjoyed a truly exceptional dinner which included the best plate of  asparagus we have ever eaten. The spears, spanking fresh, came with a mousse-like emulsion of chervil and chives bound with egg whites and a little mayo, the whole crowned by a soft-boiled egg wrapped in feuilles de Brick and deep-fried to a crisp pale gold. Savoury-sweet and fabulous!

Mr. Llorca deserves his Michelin Star. He is an outstanding craftsman supported by a charming team in the restaurant. But in his immediate vicinity of La Colle sur Loup, he is only ranked seventh out of twelve among an indifferent line-up of eateries listed by TripAdvisor.

And out of 35 reviews on TripAdvisor, while 20 rate him “excellent” or ”tres bon”, 9 brand him “mauvais” or “epouvantable” (bad or dreadful). The rest just think he is OK. 

Take it from me, Alain Lorca is worth the detour. And it is an infinitely better restaurant than that famous, but grotesquely over-rated, over-priced institution, La Colombe d’ Or just up the hill in Saint-Paul.

Kit Chapman, proprietor of The Castle at Taunton and author of My Archipelago

TripAdvisor. A game of love and hate.

Hoteliers and restaurateurs rage on about TripAdvisor. It used to be the guide books. Now, in this electronic world, print is surrendering to the internet.

My view on TripAdvisor? I am an agnostic. It has become part of our lives. It will endure. So we had better get used to it and stop whingeing.

It’s so much easier, isn’t it, to search for an hotel or a restaurant on your laptop than to dash out to Waterstone’s to buy a guide book? TripAdvisor is universal, it’s free and easily accessed. It’s word-of-mouth gone mad and it’s brutally democratic. Search for a bed or a bite in any town and you automatically bump into TripAdvisor.

So let the people speak! Anyway, it’s fun playing amateur critic. And like life itself, the reviews that people post about your place are bound to be infused with truth and lies, kindness and malice, love and hate, generosity, prejudice, anger, enthusiasm and every other emotion defined by the human condition. Objective criticism is not the point.

At The Castle we have been praised and scorned with the best. Recently one wag described us as Fawlty Towers without the jokes! But in the round we emerge very favourably – a comfortable town centre hotel where the food is good and the staff are genuinely friendly, efficient and solicitous.

If there is one recurring comment, it is that we are perceived as a little “old fashioned” – a misconceived and pejorative moniker in an age obsessed with celebrities, fashionistas and “hip” hotels. We do not score highly in the ranks of what the media love to label “cutting edge”. The Castle is, after all, a thousand years old and my family have been its custodians for a mere sixty-two of those years.

Our purpose is to remain true to the classical (“old fashioned” if you will) principles of good hospitality. A few too many TripAdvisor fans benchmark hotels by values that are often alien to ours. ”Cutting edge” design in itself does not necessarily buy good hospitality.

Kit Chapman, proprietor of The Castle at Taunton and author of My Archipelago

Music. Food. Love. The Chilingirian Quartet plays Schubert at The Castle

At the start of another Music Weekend – this year is our 36th season – I am reminded of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Duke Orsino’s opening muse, “If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it…”

These festivals are special. I launched them in 1977 to fill otherwise empty bedrooms over dreary winter weekends and we are still going strong. The performers are world-class, offering us an excess of good music – four concerts from Friday evening to Sunday morning, all matched with good food and The Castle’s loving hospitality.

This weekend is a particularly special occasion and we are sold out. The Chilingirian Quartet are old friends, regular visitors to the stage in our Music Room since 1978. And over the next three days they will be celebrating their 40th anniversary as a chamber music ensemble.

Their programme of concerts is a heady mix of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert with a little Brahms and Ravel for good measure. There is also one famous quintet tonight when the Chilis will be joined by Bernard Gregor-Smith, another old friend, as the second cello in a performance of Schubert’s magisterial String Quintet in C, D956.

This piece of music with, perhaps, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” Quartet, is a great favourite and in 2010, when my family celebrated 60 years as custodians of  this venerable castle, the Chilingirian and Bernard played the last movement of the Quintet before the Gala Banquet to mark our Diamond Anniversary.

I can’t wait to listen to all four movements again this evening. More than the food of love, this is music to die for!

Kit Chapman, proprietor of The Castle at Taunton and author of My Archipelago

Brussels fiddles while Athens burns.

Greece, my Motherland, is close to anarchy and social collapse.

The Greek people – the poorer classes that is - are close to despair. Meanwhile, the rich have been quietly shipping their cash reserves out of the country… an estimated 85 billion euros over the past few months.

Much of this wealth is landing in London. Estate agents in Knightsbridge, Mayfair and Belgravia are having a ball, among their clients the Greek Orthodox Church.

As an amateur observer, and with Europe’s finance ministers holding yet another round of talks, all I see is more muddle and confusion. What’s clear to me is that Greece now faces her final death throes as a member of this exclusive Euro-Club. The senior members of the club have had enough, their patience exhausted. All along they blame Greece. And now the well of goodwill has dried to the point where Greek and German ministers have been trading insults.

Brussels, Germany and the other northern European states are as much to blame for this mess. Greece may have cooked the books to gain entry to the club, but equally the bureaucrats and politicians in Brussels were criminally negligent in their due diligence, one pompous fool declaring that Europe could not deny the land of Plato and Aristotle membership of the Eurozone.

Anyway, how any sane economist could imagine the successful convergence of so many disparate economies and cultures is beyond me.

Brussels has dithered and continues to dither. Unless Germany takes a determined lead to rescue Greece – unlikely! - the proud land of Plato and Aristotle will be shamed and bankrupted before the end of 2012. 

In my last book, My Archipelago, I describe what I saw as a child in Salonica, Greece’s second city, just after the war. Now, as a pensioner, am I to witness once again the homeless; beggars; children scavenging for scraps in the streets and gutters?

Greece deserves better from her friends and neighbours.

Kit Chapman, proprietor of The Castle at Taunton and author of My Archipelago.

The Vienna Philharmonic breathes optimism into the gloomy omens for 2012. The Castle at Taunton does the Waltz.

A very happy New Year from all the Team at Taunton’s Castle Hotel and BRAZZ!

Our good wishes are heartfelt even though pundits and politicians are telling us to expect another miserable year with increased doses of austerity to make us even more miserable.

Well, against the omens I’m feeling pretty buoyant and optimstic about 2012… Possibly because Louise and I always like to listen to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s live concert from the Musikverein on New Year’s Day. With every TV and wireless in the house tuned to BBC2 and Radio 3, the music of the Strauss Family lifts the spirit and transforms our outlook on the world.

There are other reasons for all this optimism. We had a cracking good Christmas, serving over 150 lunches on Christmas Day in both BRAZZ, our town centre brasserie, and in the Castle’s elegant Dining Room. And last night’s New Year’s Eve party was another resounding success (“best ever”, said our happy revellers!) with Chef Jamie Raftery presenting a menu which would have had the Michelin Man showering his little stars all over our kitchen brigade.

Here’s what we ate! To start, a light goat’s cheese mousse with celery, apple and walnuts. This followed by poached Loch Duart salmon atop a small buttermilk pancake filled with leeks and dressed with a mustard emulsion and pickled red onions. The main was a slow-roast Creedy Carver duck with a red cabbage puree, caramelised pear, curly kale, and a honey and five-spice sauce. To finish, Jamie served up his sublime Somerset cider-apple mousse with the fruit’s jelly and sorbet… Magic!

But what of the future? 2012 will see the start of an exciting new chapter in the history of The Castle. In a week’s time, Marc Mac Closkey arrives to take up his appointment as our new General Manager. On the same day, contractors move in to demolish our crumbling outbuildings to make way for an enlarged carpark which will open up the views of both the hotel and our close neighbour, Taunton Castle, home to the magnificent Museum of Somerset… All part of the improvement and relandscaping of Castle Green.

And then there is our programme of special events. Our first wine seminar in February led by The Queen’s wine merchants, Corney & Barrow. And the continuation of our 35th Season of Musical Weekends. Just check our website at www.the-castle-hotel.com

Yes, with a spring in our toes, we are waltzing into 2012!

Kit Chapman, proprietor of The Castle at Taunton and author of My Archipelago.