Tag Archive for: Higher Ground

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Farmer Jane’s herd instincts are spot on… just don’t mention Apocalypse Cow

These beauties are giving you the hard stare. Stocky they may be, but Dexters punch above their weight in the beef stakes. Cross-bred with Longhorns, not just grass fed but rich pasture-nourished 24 hours a day, they produce meat that is unparalleled.

Expect to find this product from ‘Jane’s Farm’ at Poole Hall, Cheshire – alongside their ultimate free range pork – sizzling off the Josper at the reincarnation of Higher Ground. Repurposed as an ‘agriculturally focused bistro and bar’, it will open to the public in Manchester on Saturday, February 18. Here’s a link to their sample menu. There’s a palpable sense of elation that, three years on, the globe-trotting restaurant team that wowed at a pop-up in the fledgling Kampus development can now really fly. 

Joseph, Daniel and Richard
Flawd’s view over islington Marina

The pandemic restrictions clipped their wings. Two years of planning for one potential site ended in deep frustration. But Joseph Otway, Richard Cossins and Daniel Craig Martin battled back. Most visibly at Flawd, their natural wine bar up at Islington Marina in Ancoats. Otway got shortlisted for Chef of the Year at the 2023 Manchester Food and Drink Awards and was highly praised by Sunday Times reviewer Marina O’Loughlin. All this despite the venue’s very limited cooking facilities.

Cinderwood market garden
Michael, Ste and Richard

The real tools behind his artfully assembled small plates were the salad, fruit and veg sourced from Cinderwood, their own organic market gardenin deepest Cheshire. It was how the Higher Ground gang occupied the lockdown hiatus, turning over the one acre leased to them by Poole Hall’s owners, Jane and Chris Oglesby. Polytunnels and a shed  were built, horticultural nous acquired in the shape of head gardener Michael Fitzsimmons and a supply chain created to a network of enlightened restaurants. The future seeds were sown, but that has proved to be only the beginning as a deal has now been struck to take on Jane’s remarkable meat.

Higher Ground and Climat collab

The latest restaurant in Manchester to source from Cinderwood will be Climat, which hit the ground running just before Christmas. It’s actually quite a long way off the ground – on the eighth floor of Blackfriars House – and was praised to the skies last weekend by Observer critic Jay Rayner. Climat are actually going one step further by tapping into the ‘Jane’s Farm’ link-up that promises to make the resurgent Higher Ground such an exciting destination for 2023. The two restaurants have reserved a four-year-old heifer to share, avoiding wastage, and that beef will be on stream into the spring. But first the triangular farm to fork pathway will be forged by the pork on Joseph Otway’s launch menus.

Jane Oglesby has kept back six pigs from the autumn, which have been gorging on acorns in the Poole Hall woodland, so they each weigh a whopping 150 to 170kg. Noah’s Ark style, every fortnight a pair of pigs will be ferried to an independent, small scale abattoir on the Wirral, accompanied by farm manager Ste Simock. The carcasses then go to Littlewoods in Heaton Chapel, arguably the finest butcher’s in the region, to be jointed for the Higher Ground chef team. 

The end product may include (off the sample menu) pig head terrine, pickled garlic capers (£10), Jane’s acorn reared pig belly with grain and mushroom porridge (£24) and dry-aged pork leg steak, cauliflower, fermented mustard leaf (£20).

The beef, in its turn, will hang for at least four weeks at Littlewoods. Future plans include mutton from sheep sourced from Jane’s cousin in the Dales. A further third of an acre is being leased at Cinderwood, where sheep will graze, turning over the soil naturally, avoiding the plough, just a final ruffling with a rotivator before brassicas are planted on the site. The aim? Both brassicas and meat will be ready at the same time for a seasonal companionship on the plate. This is so true to the agricultural philosophy Jane espouses…

Longhorn
Large Black

Jane Oglesby and the joy of regenerative farming 

After negotiating a maze of rutted country lanes in the Nantwich hinterland it’s after dark when we pull up at Poole Hall. So I have to take it on trust that out there across 200 acres those Dexter crosses and a scattering of their Belted Galloway rivals are revelling in being given the licence to roam and chomp the vigorous wild plant life, while in the woodland thickets Large Black x Tamworth porkers root for acorns. Just like their Spanish cousins. But they are still a work in progress, unlike the 120-strong cattle herd, which Jane Oglesby has been building up for over a decade.

I’ve come down from Manchester with Joseph and Richard to collect a couple of pork joints for the test kitchen ahead of a New Year’s Eve feast at Flawd (three sittings, check availability with them), where the centrepiece will be pork shoulder slowly seethed in milk. If it follows the Italian method for Maiale al Latte, lemon and sage will feature. As a dish it’s not a looker since when the pork is cooked the milk will have curdled into brown nuggets, but it will be delicious.

Joseph, Richard with pork
Jane serving the broth

Inside Poole Hall, a sophisticated kitchen belying the country house’s Regency trappings, our host Jane offers us each a bowl of restorative beef broth. It reminds me of the ’dry-aged beef ends broth’ reputedly served when the great American ‘farm to fork’ champion Dan Barber transformed his upmarket Greenwich Village restaurant Blue Hill into a pop-up called wastED for two weeks. It later guested at Selfridge’s in London

You nailed it: creating thought-provoking dishes out of kitchen cast-offs. Even the candles were made out of beef tallow, which you dipped your bread into (Caroline Martins at her Sao Paolo Project in Ancoats was recently pulling off the same trick). Akin to the Italian brodo, that Barber brothmay not sound a radical statement but it marks a change of direction in a top-end restaurant culture that can be profligate with raw materials.

Using every part of an animal, capitalising on the virtues of vegetables, respecting the soil – Joseph Otway and Richard Cossins learned these lessons first hand while working together, as fish chef and front of house respectively, at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in upstate New York. Barber’s farm to table restaurant is symbiotically linked with an on-site Rockefeller-funded non-profit farm and educational centre engaged with the pursuit of ‘regenerative farming’. 

That too is Jane’s hands-on mantra across her own increasingly fecund Cheshire land. No ploughing, encouraging wild nutrients in fields formerly given over to dairy farming. Result a yummy riot of clover, yarrow, trefoil, chicory, sheep’s parsley and plantain. She insists: “My belief is that when they have a multi-varied diet the meat is more tasty, all down to the variety of herbs consumed.”

It was through a mutual friend that Jane linked up with the Higher Ground team. As Richard Cossins recalled on my initial visit to Cinderwood: “Chris Roberts (a chef specialising expert in cooking with fire) had told the Oglesbys they really ought to meet us, we’d really get on, so they just turned up out of the blue at our Kampus pop-up launch night. Jane produced this pasture-fed beef from her handbag and Joseph, after opening the windows, cooked these amazing steaks.

“Jane really knew her stuff, had read Dan Barber’s (seminal) book,The Third Plate, and it  had inspired her quest for regenerative beef. We bonded at once and they offered to lease us land to start Cinderwood on the estate.”

One thing led to another. Joseph and his team got to appreciate the quality of the meat, while hosting private dinners for Jane and her husband Chris, chief exec at developers Bruntwood. All this culminated this autumn when the couple rendezvoused across the Pond at Stone Barns with Joseph, Richard and their Flawd/Higher Ground partner and natural wine expert Daniel Craig Martin (this NOMA alumnus met Joseph when the pair were working in Copenhagen). 

For Jane Stone Barns more than lived up to its manifesto of an integrated system of vegetable, cereal and livestock production, dedicated to cultivating new varietals, and its former employees recognised the Barber sustainable quest had even ratcheted up a gear.

What none of them was quite prepared for was their meat course in the kitchen there. By the fireside at Poole Hall Joseph shared phone images of the half a cow’s head they were served. Not nearly as shocking as the infamous horse’s head in the bed in The Godfather. Still it’s more approachable when the choice meaty bits have been levered out for you.

‘Jane’s Farm’ send their animals in pairs for slaughter to Callum Edge’s abattoir on the Wirral. To reduce stress they may be accompanied by Ste Simock. Day to day the herd is calmed by leaving the bulls with them and employing a 15 year-old dairy cow to impart her own field wisdom.

The Belted Galloways, brought in to be ‘finished’ are from her cousins’ farm up in the Dales – Jane’s first contact with agriculture. “As kids we used to come up from London or Birmingham to stay at their farm,” she recalls. Much has happened in the world of cattle rearing since then. Not least the shrinking number of small scale abattoirs like Edge’s, the latest to quit the century-old Mettrick’s in Glossop. The remaining ones are hog-tied in red tape, the industry geared to force-fed, accelerated growth livestock. 

“Pasture-fed animals necessarily take longer to grow, but regulations dating back to the Mad Cow Disease epidemic place restrictions on animals over 30 months old,” Jane tells me. This former GP, has said in the past: “The health of my family was what got me into farming. The combination of being a GP and a mother started me thinking seriously about what I was eating. When my daughter was a baby, there was very little information about what was in food or how it had been raised. 

“I started to read about hormone use in cattle. We had a friend who had a beef farm and all his cattle had permanent growth-hormone release things in their neck. I didn’t want my children to be given growth hormones, plus there was the use of pesticides on the cattle feed. I was at the point where I thought I might become vegetarian. Then I thought, we’ve got land, I could have a cow and my family meat that I’ve reared myself. Initially it wasn’t that much of a commitment, apart from the small amounts of time that one cow and its calf take.”

‘Ideologue’ George Monbiot…
On the other side of the fence

But what about the health of the planet, Jane? I ask this in the wake of Animal Liberation activists occupying Michelin-starred Mana in protest at them serving meat. All that cattle-generated methane contributing to global warming. So what are you thoughts on the George Monbiot documentary Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed The Planet?

“Big choices have to be made on behalf of the planet. We have to regenerate the soil. Extensive rewilding is not the right direction, reintroducing wolves and vultures and all that. Monbiot is an ideologue, who sets out to challenge existing norms, but is too embedded in what he proposes. I don’t believe in the stats he uses to convince us how much cattle contribute to global warming compared with so much else. His is not the way.”

Monbiot has been equally dismissive of sheep’s contribution. So let’s finish with a ‘nature will heal itself’ narrative from Jane’s resident flock of Shropshires. “We had this maverick sheep, which went off on its own to just nip off the tops of plantains (the ‘mother of worts not the banana cousin). It set us thinking. Perhaps it was ailing. This was finding medicine  the plantain is one of the great healing plants.”

So what to expect from the 2023 version of Higher Ground?

Faulkner House on the corner of Faulkner Street and and New York Street is the new permanent home for Higher Ground. The 3,000 sq ft space will seat around 50 covers, with the design incorporating floor to ceiling glass on two sides of the building, as well as a large island that will be shared between both the front of house and back of house teams. 

There’s no shortage of experience there. Richard Cossins’ CV includes fronting Feta at Claridges and Roganic for Simon Rogan, but he is pragmatic about the new project they have settled on. “We don’t feel like now is the time to be opening a tasting menu only restaurant. Flawd’s success has shown that an approachable, neighbourhood concept works well. It actually makes us question our original thinking. Starting with Flawd has been the perfect entrance to a new food and beverage landscape.”

Menus will change on a daily basis depending on the season and ingredients will be sourced from the North-West with a focus on organic, small-scale agriculture and small herd, whole carcass cookery.. The wine list will encourage discovery and curiosity with a spotlight on small-scale, low intervention winemakers from around the European continent.

Natural wine expert Daniel Craig Martin
Curing Rebels charcuterie

Expect an a la carte offering as well as a sharing menu option priced at £45 per person, made up of both individual courses and sharing dishes, encouraging family-style eating. Example non-meaty plates could include Cumberland Farmhouse Cheddar Quiche and BBQ Leek Skewers and Cow’s Curd and Celeriac with Spanish Blood Orange and Bay Leaf. Curing Rebels charcuterie from Joseph’s native Brighton will continue to feature. Guests will be offered the choice of sweet or savoury options to round off their meal with Garstang Blue and Lager Rarebit sitting alongside Yorkshire rhubarb, Custard and Caramelised Croissant on the dessert menu.

The grill will be central to the operation. While head chef at Stockport’s Where The Light Gets In Otway followed the ‘second plate’ principles of veg dominating with a reduced amount of meat effectively forming the sauce. With the Oglesby tie-in he has to accommodate butchering and not wasting any part of whole carcasses. “It’s a daunting challenge,” he tells me. “It’s about more than the prime cuts. We are going to have to be creative.

“Now that we will have a full-scale kitchen to work with, we’re eager to further our existing relationships with the many local producers and farms here in the North-West. We should hit the very beginning of spring when the restaurant opens. From a produce perspective it couldn’t be more exciting,” 

Flawd will continue under the stalwart stewardship of Megan Saorise Williams with Where The Light Gets In fermentation specialist Seri Nam taking over in the kitchen.

Higher Ground, Faulkner House, Faulkner Street, Manchester M1 4DY. Bookings now being taken. Walk-ins welcome.

Kitchen Opening Times: Wednesday 5:30pm-9:30pm; Thursday 5:30pm-9:30pm; Friday 12:30pm-2pm / 5:30pm-9:30pm; Saturday12:30pm-2pm / 5:30pm-9:30pm.

Bar Opening Times: Wednesday 5:30pm-11:30pm;  Thursday 5:30pm-11:30pm; Friday 12:30pm-2pm / 5:30pm-12am; Saturday12:30pm-2pm / 5:30pm-12am.

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Cinderwood –  a fresh approach to sourcing that even elevates the humble turnip

Back from visiting a remarkable market garden in deepest Cheshire, I did three things – rewatched the Netflix Chef’s Table episode on US ‘farm to fork’ guru Dan Barber, Googled ‘Singing Frogs Farm’ in Sonoma County, California and trawled the Internet for deals on celtuce seeds. Damn you spellcheck for repeatedly swapping in ‘lettuce’.

It wasn’t instant. I didn’t actually go straight home following my exploration of sandy-soiled Cinderwood, outside Nantwich. After Arriva had whisked me and Richard Cossins from Crewe into Manchester, I stopped off at New Islington Marina for a few dishes at Flawd natural wine bar, of which Richard is co-owner. We came bearing gifts for his business partner, Joseph Otway – turnips we had picked from a polytunnel an hour before for this much-travelled chef to slice into translucent discs to shelter smokehouse mackerel.

Further Cinderwood produce followed in canny assemblies that belied the limited cooking facilities at Flawd. Particularly lovely was a halved gem lettuce topped with Garstang Blue Cheese and leek with a pungent sprinkle of crunchy stuff. Chilled juicy Gamay chosen by Flawd’s ex-Noma sommelier Daniel Craig Martin added to the ultra-fresh appeal of dining this way. Al fresco would have added but a stiff breeze subverted the Ancoats sunshine.

Many contemporary Manc restaurants are now buying from the Flawd team’s one acre growing arm 40 miles to the south. The distinguished likes of Mana, Erst, Elnecot, 10 Tib Lane, The Creameries. Honest Crust pizza king Richard Carver has placed a huge order for regular fresh basil  a. It demonstrates a burgeoning commitment to letting the freshest of ingredients tell their own story.

Which brings us back to that trio of reflex reactions I opened with. Dan Barber was Richard and Joseph’s boss when they worked at his (literally) groundbreaking restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns in upstate New York, a converted barn just 30 miles (or maybe a million) from Manhattan.

As with other restaurateurs/chefs of their generation, forward thinking yet respective of tradition, Barber’s 2014 book, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, is the duo’s bible.

The Third Plate champions organic flavour-driven produce as a meal focus. Shift to fewer slabs of protein, elevate the finest quality veg and grains to centre stage, respect the earth is the message. The movement has been mirrored over here by Simon Rogan’s Cumbrian farm, and the urban growing project of chef/patron Sam Buckley at Where The Light Gets In, Stockport, where Joseph Otway became head chef.

It’s all about connections. Quite dizzying connections. Richard, who worked for Rogan at his London ventures Roganic and Fera, was general manager of Blue Hill at Stone Barns when Joseph arrived as fish chef there before working at Relae in Copenhagen, where he met Daniel, then a sommelier at Noma. Sounds like a culinary equivalent of ‘Rock Family Trees’, but you get my drift.

So how does ‘Singing Frogs Farm’ (above left) join the narrative? Enter the man destined to be head grower at Cinderwood. Trained at a long-standing organic farm in Southern England, Michael Fitzsimmons (right) moved back to be nearer his native Liverpool. At one point he worked at Michelin-starred Moor Hall near Ormskirk, complete with its own walled kitchen garden. Yet it was thanks to an unlikely cheffing stint at WTLGI that he was steered back to his first love, horticulture. 

The seeds were sown at a late night wind-down in the Stockport branch of Wetherspoons when he bonded with Joseph Otway and sommelier/natural wine expert Caroline Dubois, later to be Cinderwood’s first customer through her Levenshulme cafe, Isca. All three were keen on establishing a true farm to fork link, a commercial sustainable, growing project geared to generate maximum flavour. The Sam Buckley influence was obvious and the innovative Stone Barns Center, while Singing Frogs offer practical inspiration for Michael on how to work with soil. The key? No tillage.

Tillage is the mechanical manipulation of soil. In its place you should: Disturb the soil as little as possible. Keep as many living plants in the soil, as often as possible. Grow as many different species of plants as practical. Keep the soil covered all the time. Incorporate animals.

According to the Singing Frogs website, “When one understands the myriad scientific reasons for each of these principles, one quickly sees how tillage in all its forms is the complete antithesis of soil health.”

There is a long way to go for for Cinderwood to match the productivity of their likeminded Californian cousins but it is early days yet. It took a further year after that Wetherspoons summit for the twist of fate that helped make the dream come true. 

Higher Ground was the new seedbed. That was the pop-up kitchen Otway, Cossins and Co launched at Kampus, the ‘garden neighbourhood’ of diverse apartments being created across from Canal Street in Manchester city centre. Their restaurant showcase in the site’s inherited ‘bungalow on stilts’ was scheduled to last four weeks but was cut short by the arrival of the pandemic. Which, as it turned out, gave them plus Michael the chance to assemble Cinderwood – via a lot of hands-on graft.

There was land to be cleared, sheds and two polytunnels to be erected, water and electricity supplies to be secured and a ton of pressure on Michael to put his horticultural principles into practice. With success he now has an assistant grower, Mike McCarten, who brings his own cheffing nous from working at Richard Carver’s Altrincham Market side-project, Little Window. The network tightens.

Yet still none of this would have been possible without the arrival of their future landlords at Higher Ground’s launch night in February 2020. Bearing steaks. Their own reared sirloin. As a kind of organic calling card. Jane and Chris Oglesby had turned over their land at Poole Hall near Nantwich to raising Longhorn, Dexter and Belted Galloway cattle in the most natural possible way.

As Richard Cossins recalls: “Chris Roberts (a chef specialising expert in cooking with fire and author of For The Love of Food) had told the Oglesbys they really ought to meet us, we’d really get on, so they just turned up out of the blue. Jane produced this pasture-fed beef from her handbag and Joseph, after opening the windows, cooked these amazing steaks.

“Jane really knew her stuff, had read The Third Plate and it had inspired her quest for regenerative beef. We bonded at once and they offered to lease us land to start Cinderwood on the estate. One acre would be enough for us to get going, though there is an option for a further four, which me might use for soft fruit. The soil is rich from being dairy pasture in the past. It was just perfect for us to work with.”

Family money from the Bruntwood property empire is behind Jane’s 120-strong rare breed herd. Few ‘farmhouses’ are as lavish as Regency mansion Poole Hall, but this is no Marie Antoinette playing a shepherdess vanity project. It’s very hands-on. On our visit I was hugely impressed by the ethical commitment of farm manager Ste Simock, proud that his beef herd benefits from total freedom to roam wild plant-rich pastures. The animals are never kept indoors, never tread on concrete even; the bulls stay with the herd; to avoid any stress in the beasts he accompanies them in pairs to Callum Edge’s small scale abattoir on the Wirral.

Twice a week Michael Fitzsimmons makes his own delivery journey into Manchester, finishing up at Flawd. En route to Cinderwood I had popped into Another Hand on Deansgate Mews for brunch and just missed his drop-off of the radishes of your dreams. The chefs there Julian and Max are huge fans of the produce.

Michael’s own dream would be of a cluster of small-scale nurseries surrounding the city, selling to and fuelling a thriving indie restaurant scene. For the moment we just have Cinderwood.

So what about my third quest – in pursuit of the elusive celtuce I saw Michael carefully tending outside polytunnel 2? That’s a story for the future. Read about it via this link.

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The stalks are high – celtuce makes a comeback on the back of ‘farm to fork’

Readers of this website will be aware of my reverence for leftfield ingredients. So it was a delight to encounter celtuce on my recent adventure down at Cinderwood, the chef-led market garden in Cheshire.

Grower Michael Fitzsimmons pointed it out, an unglamorous leafy straggle in the lee of the polytunnel. At first glance a cross between dandelion and chard. “I’m really excited about it,” Michael told me. “The plant is like a lettuce that has bolted. It grows tall and might productively flourish nine months of the year. This variety is called ‘Purple Sword’. We’ve got our eye on another, but we’ll have to order the seeds from America.”

That’s where chef Joseph Otway first discovered the joy of celtuce when he was working at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a groundbreaking high end ‘farm to fork’ restaurant yoked to non-profit educational space Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. The emphasis there is on tasting menus using produce plucked from the fields hours before.

I’m going to have to take the word of transatlantic celtuce fans for what a mature plant turns out like. Apparently at full maturity the stems are roughly 20cm long but just 5cm wide. One food writer described it as like a cos lettuce on top of a gnarly broccoli-like stem, the tops long and luscious. Its origins are in the Mediterranean, but it found its true home after it migrated to China and Tibet via the trade routes.

In that country the stem and leaves are referred by different names: wosun and yóumàicài and have different uses. Like our own Swiss chard it is two vegetable in one.

Generally the slightly bitter leaves braised in a broth; in Sichuan the nutty, mild-tasting stems, once peeled, are stir-fried quickly or, raw, they add a water chestnut-like crunch to salads. It pickles well, too. And you can grill it like lettuce (no relation).

Via Dan Barber’s championing of it at his Blue Hill restaurants its has become a green rival to kale and sprouts on menus from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Expect it to conquer all before it eventually in Manchester. High in vitamins A and C and potassium, it even panders to health kicks.

Barber has credited Jack Algiere, the farm director at Stone Barns, with ‘discovering’ celtuce, but it is a vegetable that has ‘been in the public domain’ since the 1890s when it was sold as asparagus lettuce. In the early 1940s it made a reappearance in the catalogue of Pennsylvania’s W.Atlee Burpee Company after a missionary posted some seeds from China. I discovered all this from Jane Grigson’s perennially useful Vegetable Book (1978), where a page and a half on celtuce is sandwiched between celeriac (also once ‘queer gear’) and chayote (still is).

And so to hon tsai tai…

In less enlightened times greengrocers used to call exotic veg ‘queer gear’. The late TV talk show host Russell Harty used to claim that his stall holder father Fred “introduced the avocado to Blackburn Market”. Sadly diminished these days, it’s unlikely to be showcasing the likes of hon tsai tai any time soon.

But this leafy Asian arrival may soon be joining celtuce in the sprouting ranks at Cinderwood. Michael Fitzimmons’ next ‘project’ may be cultivating this plant, whose kinship is with cime di rapa (broccoli rabe). It sports dark green leaves with purple veins and deep purple stems with small yellow flowers. Everything is edible and apparently offers a sweet mustardiness, brought out by the inevitable stir-frying.

Another veg of Chinese origin, kailan, offers a similar taste profile. Might this be the next ‘new’ veg on our plates? So many greens, so little time.

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Flawd rises as sea buckthorn and saumur champigny share the waterfront

In the week that Noma belatedly gained a third Michelin star after years of accolades for transforming the way we look at the food on our plate and how we source the raw materials it seems entirely of the moment to be talking low intervention wines with one of its alumni.

No, not on the Refshaleøen waterfront in Copenhagen, where chef Rene Radzepi works his culinary magic; our view is of New Islington Marina, extension of Manchester’s own hip enclave, Ancoats. Dan Craig Martin is the curator of the wine offering at Flawd, latest arrival on Marina Promenade. Originally from Oregon, Dan spent three years working at Noma. 

New Islington Marina looks idyllic in the autumn sunshine… time for natural wine and charcuterie

Crucially he was previously at Blue Hill at Stone Barns restaurant in upstate New York – the farm to table crucible where the Joseph Otway/Richard Cossins project, Higher Ground, was forged. Richard was general manager at Stone Barns when fellow Brit Joe arrived as fish chef.

In 2020 Higher Ground sprang up in Manchester as a residency in the Kampus development. Here’s my Manchester Confidential review, which also unravels the partners’ CVs that include America, London, Copenhagen and Stockport.

After further peripatetic pop-ups their eyes are on a permanent restaurant site in the NOMA (the acronym is catching) district near Victoria Station, probably next year. Higher Ground has benefited from keeping their terrific team intact too – the likes of Meg and Chris.

The gang are all together at self-styled neighbourhood wine bar Flawd. Awkward name for a destination that decidedly isn’t. OK, the lack of an extractor fan means there’s no cooking on the premises. So expect assemblies of produce grown at Cinderwood, a Cheshire market garden they are partners in or platters of British cheeses and charcuterie with bread from neighbours Pollen Bakery, naturally.

Not just any charcuterie, mind. It’s sourced from Curing Rebels in Brighton, up there with the UK’s best producers of cured, fermented and smoked treats. The £12 plate on the menu for my visit featured salami, smoked sausage and coppa. So perfect to share a bottle of wine over with a view of barges and wildfowl (oh and the odd steepling apartment block in the distance).

I warmed immediately both to the wines and ciders on Flawd’s shelves, to drink in or take away, and to new partner Dan’s approach to specialising in ‘low intervention’. It’s no secret that natural wine apostles can turn into zealots, given consumer resistance. Here the choice, with affordable wines by the glass too, is much more welcoming. 

Natural wines will always be a broad church. Some wines will be a challenge to traditional, maybe hidebound palates, but there’s so much to convert you with proper advice from Dan. We share a love of less alcoholic Loire reds from Cabernet Franc and Gamay grapes. Among the most vibrant vignerons in the region is biodynamic champion Thierry Germain, marrying a modern approach to tradition (he uses both shire horses horses and specially light quad bikes in the vineyards). His Roches Neuves Saumur Champigny is £37 to drink in and at £28 to carry out. I couldn’t resist the latter.

To accompany a trio of dishes I was recommended a red from Northern Spain that combined old favourite grape Mencia with a dash of Palomino, white grape best known for sherry. Fascinating and very drinkable. 

Each of the dishes showed the value of Cinderwood. This one acre biologically intensive market garden in Poole, Cheshire, is based on the regenerative, organic principles championed by Dan Barber at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in a quest for the best possible flavours 

Under grower Michael Fitzsimmons, Cinderwood is supplying an increasing number of Manchester’s best places to eat, including 10 Tib Lane, Elnecot and The Creameries, which all share a similar ethos. Flawd, though, benefits from a daily supply chain, on which they base a swiftly changing menu.

What also cheers me is the presence of ‘signature’ ingredients that featured in that first Kampus tasting menu – the likes of smoked cod roe, Tropea onions, sea buckthorn.

Rings of Tropea, that intense red onion originally from Calabria, join an ox heart crumble in a sweet/savoury jumble on the freshest ice queen lettuce, another Italian ‘expatriate’ variety

Wafer-thin slices of courgette come dotted with Morecambe Bay shrimp in an elderflower dressing; even prettier and mouth-tingling is a dish where almost transparent discs of cucumber are coated in (the acceptable face of taramsalata) an emulsion of smoke cod roe and garnished with strips of lemony sorrel.

Most of the small dishes range in price from a fiver to £8. Seated next to the pass with Joe hard at work, the most popular dishes on the night appeared to be smoked salmon with Manchester sea buckthorn hot sauce and Lancaster Smokehouse mackerel on toast.

Of the new ventue Joe has said: “We really just want to open a neighbourhood wine bar for the growing New Islington community, to create a space for people to drink great wine, relax and have fun. Treat it as an ideal destination for an after-work drink, an aperitivo before dinner, or a few drinks before a night out in surrounding Ancoats or the Northern Quarter.”

I think it’s going to be hugely popular and I’m looking forward to a proper investigation of its bottleshop shelves. Still, it feels a product of canny expediency, a stepping stone towards a full restaurant experience Higher Ground. Now that would lift the spirits for 2022. Joseph Otway cooking on gas again!

Flawd, Unit 3, Mansion House, Marina Promenade, New Islington, M4 6JL. Wine bar hours: Wed/Thu/Sun: 5pm-11pm; Fri/Sat: 5pm-11:30pm. Bottle shop hours: Wed/ Thu/Sun: 12pm-11pm; Fri/Sat: 12pm-11:30pm. Main image left to right: Richard, Meg, Joe, Dan and Chris.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns 

This is the (literally) groundbreaking project of farm to table guru/chef Dan Barber. With a messianic zeal, his book The Third Plate: Field Notes for the Future of Food (Abacus) champions organic flavour-driven produce as a meal focus. Shift to fewer slabs of protein, elevate the finest quality veg and grains to centre stage, respect the earth is the message. To see what can be achieved on the plate, check out series one, episode two of Netflix’s Chef’s Table.

Natural Wine primers

I’d suggest two books by Alice Fiering – Natural Wine for the People (Ten Speed Press) and The Dirty Guide To Wine (Countryman Press), the latter in conjunction with Pascaline Lepetiere. Less terroir hardcore and covering organic and biodynamic producers is Wine Revolution (Jacqui Small) by Jane Anson.

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