London may be widely regarded as the UK’s food capital but there are plenty of other regions around the country having culinary moments of their own. Somerset is certainly one of these, with towns like Bruton already high on the hit-list for foodies venturing out of the big cities. Chefs too are following suit, with many choosing to open restaurants in the South West and Nicholas Balfe is one of them. Having already established himself as a force to be reckoned with within the London’s restaurant industry, in 2021 he relocated to the rural village of South Petherton to open Holm, where he has a closer connection than ever before to the produce that appears on his menu.

Nicholas didn’t always aspire to be a chef however; whilst growing up in Harrogate, he worked in a local restaurant run by a friend’s dad, but it was never more than a way of earning money. ‘It was definitely a means to an end more than anything,’ smiles Nicholas, who was only a teenager at the time. ‘A lot of us worked there and we’d often come in bleary eyed on a Sunday morning, having got smashed the night before. I enjoyed it, but I was in no way approaching it as a career at the time.’

Instead, Nicholas went off to study marketing at university in Manchester, where he continued to work in kitchens to earn money until he graduated. His degree from Manchester led to positions at multiple marketing agencies but by the age of twenty-six, already growing weary of the corporate world, Nicholas had decided to leave his job. ‘I suppose it was a bit of a quarter-life crisis,’ he laughs, ‘but throughout that period I had been using cooking as a bit of an escape outlet, so I knew that I wanted to reimmerse myself in the world of food. I didn’t know in what capacity at first, so I just started helping out with a few pop-ups and things like that.’

Nicholas started undertaking stages at various different restaurants around London, deciding to gain experience by working in kitchens rather than going to culinary school, and was quickly inspired by those who taught him at the likes of St. John and Moro. ‘That ingredient-led, flavour-first style of cookery really appealed to me over and above fine dining,’ he explains, ‘and I think a lot of that came from my teachers. I remember Sam at Moro once shoving a pot of cumin under my nose and speaking so passionately how important an ingredient it was for him and how evocative the smell was. And I think that passion about provenance and ingredients, which I witnessed a lot of early on, is a principle I’ve taken with me throughout my career.’

After spending time working at Rochelle Canteen followed by a stint as head chef at Brunswick House, having worked in other people’s kitchens for less than four years, Nicholas made the bold decision to do to open his own place. Taking inspiration from the Parisian gastronomic scene at the time, where the likes of Septime and Le Châteaubriand were serving progressive yet refined food in otherwise rustic spaces, he launched Salon in Brixton Market – an area coming into its own at the time.