“Faites simple!” A famous dictum ignored by too many chefs

“Faites simple!” commanded the legendary chef, Auguste Escoffier.

These two immortal words are probably the most famous in the culinary lexicon. They are also the two words most ignored and abused by legions of young chefs today – cooks who care less about their customers, more about preening their egos.

There are a number fine pubs in the Somerset countryside run by convivial landlords offering menus which have won listings in the principal guide books. Among them, The Apple Tree Inn at West Pennard, near Glastonbury ranks high. Here Chef-Patron Lee Evans’s food embraces Escoffier’s mantra with deeply satisfying results – food for the soul as much as for the appetite. You step out of The Apple Tree Inn at peace with the world! Good food at its best, like good music, can be transforming.

I wish I could say the same about some of the other “gastro” pubs (dread phrase!) Louise & I have visited in recent weeks. I suspect the chefs in these places watch too much of BBC TWO’s Great British Menu where many of the confections assembled in aid of Comic Relief are fanciful to the point being inedible!

Over ambition, gastronomic whimsy and stunted palates have infected young wannabe chefs in their impatient dash for stardom. At one pub we went to the other day, I chose a spiced ox heart salad with onion and parsley which tore the roof off my mouth. One of a catalogue of horrors I have tasted in several well-regarded inns around here.

Give me Lee Evans’s menu anyday – a chef whose simplicity of approach results in inspired cooking.

Kit Chapman, Proprietor, The Castle at Taunton

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The Spirits of George Perry-Smith and Elizabeth David are alive in Ashburton today!

The A38 linking Exeter to Plymouth is a super-expressway so fast that you bypass Ashburton in a blink.

Casual hearsay led us this small town on the southern fringes of Dartmoor National Park – more out of curiosity than in any high expectation. But moments after parking, we were charmed by the timelessness of the place.

In the town centre we discovered shops of real class and originality. Better still, the streets were mercifully innocent of big national brand names. No Boots. No WHS. No Next. No Pizza Express. No Burger King. No pound shops. Just a daisy chain of fabulous independents run by their passionate owners, all of them doing brisk trade on a chilly Saturday morning.

There are remarkable gems to be found in the antique shops and antiquarian booksellers’. The artisan baker had sold out by midday. Arts and crafts are the real thing. And Ashburton’s two delicatessens were so good we bought supper from them.

I should add that this is not a place for metro-fashionistas in search of the “cutting edge”! The watchword in this town is wholesomeness where values remain determinedly retro.

For me, of course, the greatest find of the day was its principal restaurant, Agaric (www.agaricrestaurant.co.uk), owned by Nick and Sophie Coiley whom I hadn’t seen for a decade or more.

Nick is a graduate of the Joyce Molyneux school of cooking. He was her top student when she ran the celebrated Carved Angel in Dartmouth. Joyce in turn, and now in her eighties, was the most distinguished disciple of George Perry-Smith, the patriarch of British chefs and the seed that finally flowered into Britain’s culinary renaissance. I guess this makes Nick Coiley George’s spiritual grandson in the kitchen! And it shows.

The significance and influence of George Perry-Smith and Bath’s Hole in the Wall, the restaurant he made famous in the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, should never be forgotten. Inspired by Elizabeth David, Britain’s greatest food writer, he transformed eating-out in this country and led the way for a new generation of gifted chefs. Sadly, too few young chefs these days have even heard of these two seminal luminaries. A fact I find kind of tragic – like not knowing who your mum and dad are.

Nick Coiley’s restaurant in Ashburton is as wholesome as the town – a wood burning stove in the centre of the room radiating a warmth of welcome. And his approach in the kitchen would certainly make George and Joyce proud. He bakes his own bread, cures meat and fish, makes his own pickles and preserves, ice creams and sorbets. And his menu is equally worthy of his great mentors.

To today’s ambitious young cooks, I say: Give the latest TV chef’s book a break and start reading Elizabeth David!

Kit Chapman, Proprietor, The Castle at Taunton & author of Great British Chefs (Vol.1 1989/Vol.2 1995)

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