The Michelin Star Restaurant in a 300-Year-Old English Country House

OSIP is a small farm to table restaurant

in the English countryside.

We have a Michelin star.

People travel even countries to come eat dinner here.

As a head chef, I've moved to the countryside

just to work at this restaurant.

We have our own farm in which we grow a lot

of our own produce.

You kind of really have to plan your menus

according to how farmers grow their crops,

or how they graze their animals.

Really lets nature tell you

what you need to put on your menu.

Hi, this is Ciaran, head Chef at OSIP restaurant.

We're gonna start our day today

by foraging some wild garlic.

We're here in Britain, in the English countryside,

we're about 10 minutes from the restaurant,

so let's get to work.

This is Guinness, by the way.

[gentle music]

Wild garlic.

I see green leafed, long and flat.

It grows everywhere in this part of the world.

In London, we'd have to buy the wild garlic

from local supplies.

Obviously this is a lot cheaper,

and you get it a lot fresher.

These ones you can make oils out of,

and they're really delicious,

you make oils and soups,

but if you're gonna eat them raw

you wanna use the fresh new young shoots.

This wild garlic is going on the chicken pithivier dish.

We dress it in its own oil,

and it just goes nicely on the plate.

And with these shoots, the best way

to kind of get them out of the ground

is just to use a pair of scissors.

If you're pulling at them all the time,

you can damage the plant.

So that looks like it's enough for a couple of days.

It's almost 8:00, time to get back to the restaurant,

and do some real work.

We are at work,

which is OSIP restaurant.

This used to be a 300-year-old building.

It was an inn before we took it over,

and we've done heaps and heaps of renovation to it.

The whole kitchen got gutted out, ripped out

and put in brand new.

Roy's here already working,

so I'm gonna get changed,

and then we're gonna break down a whole venison.

Let's go.

[upbeat music]

So, this is the prep kitchen,

where all the real work gets done.

I'm gonna go grab the venison,

and we'll get started.

[upbeat music]

This came in last night actually,

so, yeah, super fresh.

It's a big old boy.

We'll get this whole animal every week.

I think it's really important

to take whole animals as much as you can.

There's way more that you can do with them,

you can be very creative with using kind of waste cuts.

The less things we can kill, the better, in my opinion.

So it's from the Thornberry Estate,

it's a 30 kilo fallon.

Grade A head shot.

So we have a guy called Matt,

he shoots all our deer for us,

and brings them in whenever we need them.

So we'll take one to two days a week,

depending on how busy we are.

Making the most of it should last us.

So I'm gonna take the back end off first.

I'm just gonna get the knife

out the lower base of the back,

cut through until I get some bone.

So you wanna use the knife, the soft tissue,

and then only using the saw just to cut through bone,

'cause you wanna keep the cuts in the flesh nice and clean,

otherwise it's gonna turn into shredded tuna essentially.

So this is pretty much the back end of game season.

We use venison pretty much from November

through to late February.

So this is for our main venison dish.

It's a two step dish.

We use the heart on top of a little taco,

and then you kind of eat that,

and then as a secondary course

the rest of the meat comes,

and we serve it very simply.

We have each kind of component on the plate,

which will be the belly, the sausage, the loin.

But it really is focusing on the venison,

and not messing around with it too much.

So it's obviously got,

it's own very gamey taste.

It's very lean even though

this one here I'd say is especially fatty,

which is really good.

This is where we get the best venisons in.

It doesn't have the same marbling as beef,

but it's very tender.

It's got a kind of stronger flavor profile.

This is a female, so it's doe.

The does in my opinion are a bit better,

they're a bit more mild.

You can get the stags in the wrong season,

when they're kind of full of adrenaline,

fighting each other, you get this really strong flavor

that I don't really like.

So this is a tenderloin.

If this was beef, this would be the filet,

or the filet.

Obviously, some venison so it's a lot smaller.

The bottom side will have this kind of layer

of silver skin.

Silver skin is just a layer

of sinew that's connected to the loin.

The way I like to remove it

is kind of treating it similar to a fish,

and treating it as skin.

I'm just kind of pulling it over,

letting the knife do all the work,

and then you should get pretty clean loin.

The way kitchens work,

or a lot of kitchens work is that you start

on maybe a cold starter section,

or a [indistinct] section,

and then you'll move around the kitchen.

And usually the most experienced

kind of chef [speaking in foreign language],

you call them line cooks in America,

start taking on the grill section,

which would be all the animals, meat, fish,

and that is generally the section where you learn

the most about butchery, I think.

So we're gonna break the belly down.

Any fish or meat butchery,

you're essentially trying to get

as close to the bone as possible,

and, yeah, the best way to do that

is running a knife super close to the bone,

and getting it nice and tight.

So the belly, we're gonna brine them

in a pastrami style bosch brine,

and then we're gonna cook them overnight

until they're really, really soft,

and that's gonna serve as a kind of skewer

to go on the venison dish.

Things like getting an amazing deer,

and working really closely with farms,

makes me life a lot easier.

However, from working in London,

you can pretty much order things at 1:00 in the morning,

and they will turn up 8:00 in the morning the next day,

you don't really get there here,

so you've gotta be a lot more organized with what you order.

They give us the animals

or the vegetables when the vegetables are kind of perfect

rather than just being able

to get it whenever we want essentially.

So the belly we're gonna stick

both of these parts together.

So this is a powder, it's called transglutaminase,

also known as meat glue.

With the venison belly,

they're notoriously thin,

so we wanna kind of have a nice thick wedge.

So what we do is we just dust it

with this powder,

and it kind of acts like a protein,

or like an enzyme,

and it will stick meat together.

So it allows us to get a really nice

fat piece of venison belly.

You want a nice even coating,

so just dusting it through a sieve makes that possible.

You can see all the layers of the belly

through sticking them together.

You get the top layer,

you get some layers of fat,

and you get some layers of meat.

It just looks better,

and it's a lot nicer to eat.

So, it's 10:00 at the moment,

I'm gonna pass this off to my grill chef

'cause there are some lobsters that need tending to

for our lobster course.

So let's get to it.

Sam, I need a big strong man.

[Sam] Oh yeah?

[indistinct]

Grab some deer, put it in the fridge.

[upbeat music]

So, we have beautiful native lobsters here

from off the coast in Cromwell.

You can see they've got a really nice blue color to them,

which is pretty unique.

They came in last night.

We work very closely with the fish supplier.

For lobster, you want, obviously, alive

is one of the most important things.

They have to come alive.

We also look at the hardness of the shell,

that's very important.

If you have a lobster where the shell

is starting to get a little bit soft,

there's a chance when you cook the lobster

the flesh can go kind of mushy.

There's two kind of main techniques

to getting lobster out of the shell.

One is kind of blanching it in water very quickly,

and then freezing it also.

We freeze these tails overnight,

not for very long, just for kind of

four to six hours.

Just making a little incision

at the top of the shell.

You should be able to peel it straight off.

And then I like to uses the back of a spoon,

'cause it's not very sharp.

You don't wanna kind of hurt the lobster in any way.

So just peeling it back very gently,

it should just kind of pop out.

So the quicker you can freeze it from fresh,

and then the quicker you can get it out of the shell,

the better the product's gonna be.

And this is gonna make them really easy to release

the meat from the shell.

And that means that we don't have to cook it first,

which means all of the cooking for the lobster

can be done over the charcoal,

which is a lot better for flavor.

Obviously if you just grill it in the shell,

you're not gonna get the exposure

from the meat to the flanks.

We're gonna put it directly onto the kombu.

Kombu's a type of seaweed that's dried,

it's very thick.

It's got loads of natural umami flavor and seasoning.

And just by storing the lobster roll on the kombu,

it helps dry out the lobster,

gives it a bit of flavor, firms up the texture,

we carve it into kind of four pieces,

and then we serve it with an egg yolk sauce.

As you can see behind me,

we've got the most amazing view

of kind of the field

and the countryside,

and especially coming from London of myself

it's a real treat 'cause after working

in a lot of dingy basement kitchens,

getting to see this everyday is pretty special.

So, a lot of people travel to the restaurant to work

because of the accolades that we've kind of gained

over the years.

We've recently been named in the Conde Nast

Travelers Hot List.

We also have the Michelin star,

which is really important

to getting staff to work here.

We were good food guys restaurant of the year

just a few weeks ago.

So, things are going quite well on that front.

From all the claws and the heads

and the shells, we make this beautiful lobster ragu.

These are ready to go,

I'm gonna blanch these claws off,

and then we're gonna light the grill,

ready to smoke some quinces.

So, I'm just separating the claws from the knuckles

'cause they all take a little bit different time to blanch.

So the big thick crushing claws will take five minutes,

just so you get each kind of piece perfectly cooked.

So when that timer hits four,

I'm gonna add the smaller claws.

When the timer hits two I'm gonna add the knuckles.

This is the quickest way to blanch

all three different parts of the claw

without having to make it take 20 minutes.

[timer beeping]

So the ice just stops the cooking.

Obviously they've been vigorously boiled

for a certain amount of time.

We get them to the point that we like them,

and then we want to chill them down

as quick as possible.

It's gonna keep them fresh,

and also it's gonna stop the cooking

exactly where we want it.

And now it's time to light the fire,

so we're gonna get these away.

[upbeat music]

Here I've got some quinces

that have been roasted in sugar and vinegar,

and they're about to get smoked.

I'm just starting to light the grill.

We have a couiple fire lighters in the bottom,

and then we've got these smaller pieces of kindling

that set fire very quickly.

So we're gonna initially get the fire going with those,

and then as the fire builds

we're gonna transfer to charcoal.

Charcoal is what we cook on.

It keeps a hotter fire, it's a cleaner fire,

but if we're smoking we smoke over wood.

Obviously wood creates the smoke.

Cooking over the lighted fire,

it can be difficult,

but once you know you're doing,

I think it opens a lot of doors.

It essentially allows a larger range of heat,

and it allows you to cook things a lot more slowly.

So most of our meat we will very gently hang

or hold above the grill,

and then when we want to give it surface color

and surface flavor, we'll kind of do it after the cooking.

So it's kind of like a reverse way of cooking,

but finishing it with loads of flavor.

We've let the quinces kind of soak in the syrup overnight,

and they've absorbed everything.

It's red wine vinegar, light brown sugar,

flavor it with some starnase

and some cinnamon.

All of the juice and the pectin,

which is like the protein,

comes out of the quints,

and turns it into this very kind of dense, jammy, red syrup.

That syrup, when it goes over the grill,

will cling and thicken over the quinces,

and you'll get this really nice kind of smoke on there.

'Cause the smoke can attach itself

to viscous liquids a lot more.

They become like a chewy texture.

It's almost like cured meat.

I'm just gonna hang these above.

We could do it in a dehydrator,

and it would take half the time,

but we wanna do it naturally,

and we wanna do it where we're imparting flavor into it.

So, this is a very slow process,

but in the end it's super worth it.

We're gonna let these go.

It's about three p.m.,

and we really need to get started on the chicken pithivier,

so let's move on to that.

[gentle music]

So just garb some chard,

and we're gonna use this to wrap the chicken

for the pithivier.

Pithivier is kind of like a pie,

and we stuff it with black truffles,

and we wrap it in a sausage meat,

and then we kind of shape it into a nice breast with pastry,

and then we do beautiful kind of scoring

all the way around.

This truffle comes from Wiltshire,

which is the next county over.

It does change every week,

but it will be about 800 pound for one kilo,

so, yeah, not to be wasted.

We put it on as a supplement.

The reason why it's a supplement

is simply because they take so long to make.

The kind of skill involved,

I don't think we could realistically make enough

to serve everyone,

and we wouldn't wanna cut corners.

If something is incredibly laborious,

labor costs, probably the biggest overhead

that restaurants have,

so if something takes a long time

you're gonna pay for it.

This is the fast meat that we've made

out of the legs.

So all the drumsticks and the thighs,

we've minced down,

and we've minced it with set powder,

all the trim from the truffles

and diced lado.

And then we're gonna wrap that on top,

and you can kind of just shape it into place.

You want it to be as air thing as possible.

If there's large air pockets inside,

when it goes in the oven there's a chance

it could all explode.

The idea is that when you carve it open

you can see every layer that I'm putting in here.

So on a weekend where we'd sell close to 12,

this is pretty much all I do.

In terms of a normal working day,

we get in at 8:00, we stop maybe once for some dinner,

and maybe once in the morning for some breakfast,

but we can go til 1-2 in the morning sometimes.

It's tough all day, it's tough on the legs.

So this is a sheet of puff pastry,

All butter pastry.

It's gonna get very soft very quickly,

especially in a warm kitchen.

So you wanna move nice and quick,

and you wanna work from the fridge at all times.

You're treating it almost like a ravioli.

You're trying to push out all the air from one side,

bringing it to the other side,

so that you don't have any big air pockets.

When you cook the chicken in the pastry,

it really helps keep the chicken moist,

so that's gonna go straight back in the fridge,

and then we can kind of make it look pretty

once the pastry's nice and hot again.

These are gonna chill in the fridge for a while,

and later on we're gonna score them,

and glaze them in egg yolk.

I'm gonna check in on my team,

and have a pre-shift meeting.

[gentle music]

[indistinct]

This one is no sugar.

[gentle music]

Part of my job is checking in with the team,

trying things, tasting new dishes,

and kind of making sure everyone's running smoothly.

[indistinct]

I might like this one better.

Yeah, I think so.

I think it's more like [indistinct]

which makes it more floral.

It becomes instantly more refreshing

the more you get.

That's good.

[upbeat music]

So now it's 4:30,

and we're having family meal.

[indistinct] pasta. Just how much?

A bit more. A bit more?

[people chattering]

Guys, it's 5:00, it's time for our pre-service meeting.

I'll change my chef [indistinct]

so let's do this.

[upbeat music]

All right, welcome to today's dinner.

So we got 25 people in starting at six with four tables.

During the pre-shift meeting,

I tell the front of the house

exactly how many portions of the supplements

that we have to serve,

just kind of updating them really.

We have seven lobsters,

which will be 14 portions.

We have six pies.

Cut of venison today will be the loin.

Sounds great.

Let's have a good service.

Oui, chef.

We're just cleaning now for service.

Everything kind of speeds up for the moment.

We're all rushing around, setting up for service,

so, yeah, it's gonna get pretty intense.

So the way service runs is

the dockets will come on here,

we slide them, it's kind of like a leather docket row,

and then we've got the two sections,

the grill and the garnish section.

Everything will kind of come

through a funnel through me,

and then we expedite it out the kitchen that way.

So it's 6:00, thanks for following me,

I hope you've got a good idea

of what it's like to be a head chef at OSIP restaurant.

I'm gonna be here until maybe 12-1:00 in the morning,

and you guys don't wanna stick around for that,

so probably time to go.

[upbeat music]