Restaurant Jericho is not the kind of place you'd accidentally stumble across but the exciting new venture is likely to make food lovers want to seek it out. Set the sat nav to Plungar, a village roughly 16 miles from Nottingham city centre, and it will take you via the A52 and off down a country lane.
Diners will arrive at a unique, off the beaten track destination at a farm, deep in the heart of the Vale of Belvoir countryside, just over the Nottinghamshire border. An imaginative 12-course tasting menu will be served using the wealth of unusual fresh herbs, fruit and vegetables grown literally outside the door.
Before being seated in the rustic-style restaurant, drinks and amuse bouche such as egg crisp, verjus and salted yolk, will be served in a bar. Built during lockdown, it has a homely style with wooden beams and armchairs... and a boar's head mounted on the wall.
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Moving into the restaurant, a series of small plates will follow. Smoked eel, pumpernickel, apple and oxalis, maize crème brûlée, chicken, fish skin and winter tarragon, and pigeon poutine, Violetta potato and gooseberry are on the menu.
After a crossover of shiso iced tea follows desserts of Jake's Mum's honeycomb (Jake is one of the chefs) with tomato and smoked yoghurt and plum, buttermilk oats whey caramel and hyssop. The feast will end with cheese, fermented honey and pickle bread
Everything will be served on bespoke plates and in bowls created by Maria Woolley, aka the Claymonger, who makes wheel-thrown pottery from her garden studio in Carlton. The £90-a-head menu will be a "premium experience" with the option of paired wines for a further £60.
Chefs will put the finishing touches to the dishes, taking garnishes from the herb bed right outside the window. Less common varieties, obtained from "herb royalty" Jekka's Herb Farm near Bristol, and the little leaves are packed with flavour. Oyster leaves taste like the shellfish while buckler sorrel has the tartness of a Granny Smith apple.
Siberian chives, borage, Vietnamese coriander, shiso, Good King Henry and szechuan peppers have been planted. "The whole idea is just before we send it to the table we go and pick it. If you have ever picked anything straight out the garden the taste is amazing," said Richard Stevens, the founder of Restaurant Jericho, with his partner Grace Ross.
Across the driveway is the kitchen garden where salads, strawberries, potatoes, rhubarb, courgettes - and because of the heatwave - even watermelons have been cultivated. To the rear is a bountiful orchard.
"We try to grow stuff we can't readily source. We are experimenting. We never thought watermelons would grow but with the weather we have had they're coming up. There's heritage corn, like red sweetcorn. In the polytunnels we have heritage tomatoes and peppers - we don't use the peppers but feed them to our chickens and it makes the yolks really, really vibrant orange," said Richard.
Restaurant Jericho, at Orchard Farm, was previously home to Dickie's Farm Dining, a steakhouse using meat from its own butchery. The stars of the show were Belted Galloway sirloin and Aberdeen Angus rib steak, which diners described as "out of this world."
But owner Richard decided to put Dickie to bed after a successive run of five years. Richard, who comes from a family of livestock and arable farmers going back to the 1700s, said it was the right time to change.
"There will be meat on the menu but it won't be as heavily biased towards meat. Where we were with Dickie's it was all about meat. Don't get me wrong, it was fantastic - it was a stepping stone towards where we are now.
"We've managed to nail and get very good at sourcing, aging and cooking meat. The reason for the change is not because Dickie's wasn't working, we got to a point where we felt that serving big slabs of meat, even if it was the best meat we can find, wasn't going to be sustainable going forward.
"It was getting ever more pricy and if I'm being honest we kind of fell out of love with it a little bit. It was really restrictive on creativity so we couldn't put out that menu we wanted to put out. We were growing all this beautiful produce and it got a little bit frustrating we couldn't do what we wanted to do.
"Dickie's had a really good name and we are really proud of it but the main drive now is so we can use this beautiful produce we've got literally ten metres away. Our aim next year is to double the size of our kitchen garden and to be a minimum 80 per cent self-sustaining. It's a long shot but it something to aspire to."
The destination restaurant was purpose-built for Dickie's, which served its last customer on August 6. Since then it's been all hands on deck to give the barn a complete makeover. The floors have been stained, the walls and tables have been changed, and the open kitchen, where some of the food is cooked over hot coals, has been remodelled.
There's a new entrance into the bar, through a sturdy metal door removed from a barn at nearby Jericho Farm, in the next village Barkestone. That was the farm where Richard's ancestors started farming 300 year ago and where he spent a lot of time as a child. "That door has been in my life since I was born. I remember looking up at it as a young boy - it was massive. There's little graffiti marks. To have it here now is brilliant," he said.
"There's other elements we've got from Jericho as well. Jericho means a lot to me and my family and essentially it means growing things." Orchard Farm came along 100 years ago when Richard's great grandmother Elizabeth Stevens bought the land.
After lockdown Richard and chefs Jake Pole and Tom Bull were serving 100 covers a night. Now there will just be 20 and, unusually, it will be one mass sitting at 7pm with everyone served at the same time rather than staggered.
Richard said: "It will still be a laid back easy-going vibe. We do want that element of fine dining. We put a lot of effort in using time and techniques and skills we've got in the kitchen."
Dickie's diners used to travel from West Bridgford, Newark, Charnwood, Grantham and Derbyshire. Grace said: "I love that people travelled 50 minutes to try our food, that makes me so proud."
But she believes there's a whole untapped market of food lovers across Nottingham who don't know of their existence. "A lot of people in Nottingham probably won't have heard of us yet. Before they said they'd stumbled across our Instagram and never knew we were here. I think there's a huge community in Nottingham that don't know we exist. I think they would love it if they came."
Before Dickie's Richard was a tractor engineer and Grace worked as a veterinary nurse. She said: "He's not a chef and I'm not a trained front of house manager so we've always been really open to other people's advice. We've listened to our customers and other people in the industry. A lovely lady said to me I think you've done so well so far because you don't have an ego and you've not worked at restaurants, you're trained in other industries, and it means we can be accepting of other people's opinions."
Restaurant Jericho will launch on September 1 and will be open Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. While they find their feet there won't be any vegetarian alternatives but that is a consideration once properly up and running.
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