Alongside Hampton Manor’s wellness director Dr Sally Bell, David and Anette spent a year gathering the growers, farmers and fisheries they now work with, meeting the UK’s small community of regenerative farmers in the process. The rest of the work involved restoring Hampton Manor’s half-acre walled garden outside the restaurant, doing so organically and without chemicals. Though it isn’t able to fully supply the menu, its chefs – aided by head gardener Lou Nicholls – are guided by what’s growing there, and able to pick produce moments before service, preserving it at its freshness. ‘It’s a bit of an emotional rollercoaster,’ David laughs. ‘You get very excited about something and then find out it’s been eaten from the inside or there’s a wasp problem – there’s all sorts of issues. That’s why you just have to take what you can and accept it’s not there if it’s not. We had a sweetcorn dish that lasted a week because all our sweetcorn went from ripe to over abnormally quickly.’ While pickled white strawberries have featured on the Grace & Savour menu, red varieties – trickier to grow organically – have only been on for two weeks since opening, David says. Ultimately, if it’s not growing in the garden or can’t be found nearby organically, it isn’t used. ‘It’s opened my eyes to how comfortable I had become with how accessible produce is, without understanding where it’s from,’ he nods. 

While that could be seen as limiting, David says the opposite is true; ‘When you have got the whole world to use I found it numbed my creativity,’ he says. ‘We have to make choices, and that’s the exciting challenge here.’ A culture of creativity underpins the kitchen, inspired by David's time at Maaemo, where chefs from the likes of Restaurant Sat Bains, Evelyn’s Table and Noma were – for good reason – trusted to bring their own projects to the table. In his kitchen, he points to head chef John Bluck as an example of a chef constantly trying to innovate; he’s recently turned truffles into a rye truffle miso, using rye, yellow sweet peas, barley koji and magnolia pickle. ‘If you don’t have that culture, ideas will fall flat,’ David says. 'Not every dish here is on me. In that process there’s a lot of failure, though – there’s an awful lot of time spent figuring out something for it to go wrong.’

Being so directly instructed by the seasons makes techniques like fermentation and pickling essential. ‘It’s the backbone of how we keep things going,’ David says. ‘We’re coming out of the season of abundance now, and the amount of fruit we’ve had to prepare over the last month is absurd. Once the last apple falls off the tree in November, if you are growing regeneratively there won’t be fruit in the UK until June, when the first gooseberry appears.’ The end result is a menu with dishes including wild sea bass tartare with salted turnip, crème fraiche and dill, alongside Cornish crab with fennel cracker, pickled sea buckthorn, anise syrup and garden shoots. This quickly impressed Michelin inspectors, who awarded Grace & Savour a star in the 2023 guide. ‘It’s about sharing the stories of British farming, giving people an authentic, deeper connection to what they are eating,’ he explains. ‘The reason we do fifteen courses is each dish is effectively a story of a different grower or farmer. It’s giving space for each bit to sing and celebrate – that’s the sort of whole idea, celebrating these people and serving it in a beautiful setting.’ 

At Hampton Manor, David is part of the wider team, working alongside the likes of head baker Min Go and Stu Deeley, who heads up its Smoke restaurant. ‘This is a family effort – it’s like coming to Alton Towers and it’s very unique,’ he laughs. ‘The calibre in terms of Stu and Min at the bakery is so high – each area has got its stamp and its place and that’s what makes it so special.’ It’s just a quick wander through the garden and into an old furnace house to find Smoke, where head chef Stu (who won MasterChef: The Professionals in 2019) has been leading the kitchen since it first opened in autumn 2021. As its name suggests, food is cooked over coals, but Stu says chefs use smoke to subtly enhance dishes rather than finishing everything over flames. Though it's arguably Hampton Manor's more relaxed spot, Stu is loath to pigeonhole its style, with the menu weaving the likes of roast Hereford beef strip loin and Megrim sole with XO and miso sauces (its boulangère potatoes have also become a particularly popular dish). ‘I like to say that it’s good food in the comfort of your living room,’ he says. ‘We aren’t too in your face, we aren’t putting down plates at the same time – we just want to make sure everything is really tasty and cooked to the best of our ability.’

Stu first joined Hampton Manor as a development chef at Peel’s, but was soon presented with an opportunity to cook his own food (he had been due to open his first restaurant in early 2020, before Covid scuppered his plans). ‘I spoke to James, went home, wrote a long list of everything I'd need, got a bit carried away and stayed up until 3am getting it together,’ Stu laughs. ‘James looked at it and said ‘alright, you’re serious’ and that was that.’ Smoke, as Stu had envisaged it, became a reality, replacing its predecessor in the furnace house. Stu’s team also benefits from the walled garden – its produce is weaved through its menus, including in the garden grazing snacks, served with the likes of cured meats, Min’s sourdough and chive emulsion. And even where ingredients aren’t taken directly from the garden, Stu says having a barometer of what’s coming into season on the doorstep shapes what he serves.

Hampton Manor is fast becoming a culinary destination, and – perhaps equally as importantly – a gateway to an area that committed food-lovers might have yet to explore. When Birmingham was named The Good Food Guide’s most exciting food city of 2022, Hampton Manor was cited as a reason (you can read our insider's guide to the city with chef Aktar Islam here). Ultimately, its blossoming reputation can only help the rest of the area flourish, Stu says. ‘I’m a Brummie and have always worked around Birmingham,’ he nods. ‘The thing is, Birmingham has always had a good food scene, it’s just that London has obviously had a bigger one. If there’s nowhere for young chefs to go they will end up going to other cities, so it’s great for us to be able to keep talent here.’