Charlie Hibbert
Charlie Hibbert
After learning the culinary ropes at Jeremy Lee's legendary Quo Vadis in London, Charlie Hibbert now heads up the beautiful Ox Barn restaurant at Thyme, a vast country retreat with beautiful homegrown produce on the doorstep. Focusing on honest, hearty, super-seasonal British fare, his dishes are always confident, comforting and full of flavour.
As far as country house hotels go, Thyme – a sprawling ‘village within a village’ in Southrop, The Cotswolds – has to be one of the most ambitious. Fifteen years in the making, it now offers thirty rooms, a shop, a spa, a cookery school and gardens, with its own farm to boot. But the jewel in its crown is Ox Barn, the airy, open restaurant headed up by chef Charlie Hibbert.
Charlie grew up in London, but his family moved to Southrop when he was thirteen, so he knows the area well. With a mother and grandmother who were both fantastic cooks, food was always a part of his childhood, and at the age of thirteen he worked as a pot wash, then a waiter, then behind the bar of the village pub. ‘I never really considered cooking as a career, until I went to Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland for three months when I was eighteen,’ says Charlie. ‘After that, I moved to New Zealand for a year and a half and worked as a chef at the Craggy Range Winery, which I loved. By this point I hadn’t really done anything else except cook, and I fell in love with the kitchen culture, so when I returned home I headed to London to continue working as a chef.’
Charlie landed himself a job in the kitchen of Quo Vadis, the legendary restaurant run by the equally legendary chef Jeremy Lee. This was where he would spent the formative years of his career, studying under one of the true masters of classic, homely, British cookery, where a love for food and cooking was just as important as the skill of any chef that worked there.
‘It was so much fun working in the kitchen at Quo, and so many of my friends today are from when we worked together there,’ says Charlie. ‘It was all about the enjoyment of cooking above all else – there weren’t specific recipes written out that you had to follow to the letter; it was assumed you knew how to cook and Jeremy just helped us to do things in the best possible way. If we were to roast a chicken then we’d just keep it simple and roast it – but really, really well. It had a hugely profound effect on my cooking and it’s something that’s shaped everything I do.’
As Charlie was learning and growing into the chef he is today, his family was working on something monumental just outside the little village of Southrop. Thyme started life as an old manor and a few derelict barns, and it took fifteen years to turn it into the vast, fashionable destination it has become. With Charlie’s mother leading the project, working with the rest of his family to get Thyme up and running, it was always destined that Charlie would return to the fold when Ox Barn – Thyme’s restaurant – opened its doors in 2018.
‘We’re all quite young in terms of running a restaurant – I think I’m the oldest at thirty – but it’s been quite a smooth journey since we opened,’ he explains. ‘I managed to walk in when everything was pretty much ready, which was nice! But even since we opened in 2018 our cooking has become a lot more confident, and we’re now just focusing on improving the experience our guests have, rather than building anything new.’
Charlie’s food is clearly influenced by his time at Quo Vadis, with comforting, rustic yet clean and confident iterations of well-loved British and European dishes. His love for slow-cooked braises and recipes that require plenty of time to prep and care for come to the fore in his menus, but what he really enjoys is being able to use the produce from Thyme’s own 2.5-acre kitchen garden and larger farm. ‘Our garden and farm supplies us with a lot of what we cook with throughout the year – less-so in the winter, but we do have our own orchard,’ says Charlie. ‘We try to rely on ourselves quite heavily. There are also some great butchers in the local area, so getting fantastic quality meat is easy.’
As Thyme is a family business, Charlie has no plans to move anywhere else, which means he can focus solely on making Ox Barn his own and develop it into a true destination restaurant. With such beautiful surroundings and some fantastic, honest, seasonal cooking in the kitchen, we reckon he’s pretty much there already.
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