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

[gentle music]

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

raise their animals.

Really lets nature tell you

what you need to put on your menu.

[breeze rustling]

Hi, this is Ciaran, Head Chef at Osip Restaurant.

We're gonna start our day-to-day

by foraging some wild garlic.

We're here in Bruton 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. Let's take a green leaf like long and flat.

It grows everywhere in this part of the world.

In London,

we'd have to buy the wild garlic from local suppliers.

Obviously this is a lot cheaper

and you get it a lot fresher.

These ones you can make oil

out of and they're really delicious.

You make oils and soups,

but if you're gonna eat them raw, you want

to use the fresh new young chutes.

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 chutes, the best way to kind

of get them out 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 days.

It's almost eight o'clock, time to go back to the restaurant

and do some real work.

[door shuts] [keys jingle]

[car starts]

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.

Boys here are already working.

So I'm gonna get changed.

And then we are gonna break down a whole venison.

So let's go.

[lively instrumental 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.

So this came in last night actually. So yeah, super fresh.

It's a big old boy.

We'll get this whole animal every week.

For me, 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 Thornbury Estate.

It's a 30 kilo fallow grade A headshot.

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 deers 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 at the lower base

of the back, cut through until I get the bone.

So you want to use the knife for soft tissue

and then only using the sword just to cut through bone

because you want to keep the cuts

and the flash 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 you kind of eat that

and then it's like 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 would be the belly, the sausage, the loin,

but really it's kind of focusing on the venison

and not messing around with it too much.

So it's obviously got its 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 why 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 a 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 filet.

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

The bottom side will have this kind of layer

of silver skin.

Silver skin's just a layer of sinew

that's connected to the loin.

The way I like to remove, it's kind of treating it similar

to a fish and treating it as skin.

I'm just kind of pulling it over, using,

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 like maybe a cold starter section

or a ladder section and then you'll move around the kitchen

and usually the most experienced kind of chef de parties

think you call 'em line cooks in America,

start taking on the grill section,

which will be all the animals, meat, fish.

And that is generally the section where you learn

the most about butchery I think.

And so we're gonna break the belly down.

Any fish with 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 kind

of pastrami style brine

and then we're gonna cook them overnight until

they're really, really soft and that's gonna be served

as a kind of skewer to go on the venison dish.

Things like getting an amazing deer

and working really closely

with farms makes my life a lot easier.

However, from working in London,

you can pretty much order things at one o'clock

in the morning and they'll turn up at eight o'clock

in the morning the next day.

You don't really get that here.

So you have to 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 these parts together.

So this is a, it's a powder called trans glutaminase,

also known as meat glue.

With the venison belly,

they're notoriously thin.

So we want to 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'll stick meat together.

So it allows us to get a really nice fat piece

of venison belly.

As you want like 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, 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 o'clock at the moment.

I'm gonna pass this off to my grill chef

'cause there are some lobsters I need attending to

for our lobster course.

So let's get to it.

Sam, I need a big strong man.

[Sam] Oh yeah, you won't find one here.

Grab some deer, put it in a fridge.

[mellow music]

So we have beautiful native lobsters here

from off the coast in Cornwall.

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 like one

of the most important things, they have to come alive.

We also look at the hardness of the shell.

It's very important if you have a lobster

where like 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

and 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 like 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 use the back of a spoon

'cause it's not very sharp.

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

So just peeling it back very gently

and 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 then it 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 a flavor.

Obviously if you just grill it in the shell,

you're not gonna get the exposure

from the meat to the flames.

We're gonna put it directly onto the konbu.

Konbu is the type of seaweed that's, it's dried,

it's very thick, it's got loads of natural kind

of Umami flavor and seasoning.

And just by storing the lobster raw on the konbu,

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 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 fields

and the countryside, especially coming from London.

For myself it's a real treat,

'cause after working a lot of kind

of like dingy basement kitchens, getting

to see this every day 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

for kind of getting staff to work here.

We were a Good Food Guide's 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 their knuckles

'cause they all take a little bit different

time to blanch.

So the big thick crushing claws will take five minutes.

And just so you get each kind of piece perfectly cooked.

So when that timer hits 4,

I'm gonna add the smaller claws.

When the timer hits 2, I'm gonna add the knuckles.

This is the quickest way to blanch all three different parts

of the claw without having to like make it take 20 minutes.

[timer beeps]

So the ice just stops the cooking, obviously they've been

like vigorously boiled for a certain amount of time

and we get them to the point that we like them

and then we want to chill them down as quick as possible.

Which is 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.

[mellow music]

Here I've got some quinces, they've been roasted in sugar

and vinegar and they're about to get smoked.

I'm just starting to light the grill.

We have a couple 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 with a live fire,

it can be difficult

but once you know what 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 like very gently hang

or hold above the grill.

And then when we want to like 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, it's light brown sugar,

flavor it with some star anise and some cinnamon.

All of the juice and the pectin, which is like the protein

comes out of the quince

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

That syrup, when it goes over the grill, will like 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 like viscous liquids a lot more.

They become like a chewy texture.

It's almost like cured meat.

Then we're 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 want to do it where we're imparting flavor onto it.

So this is like a very slow process

but in the end it's super worth it.

We're gonna let these go. It's about 3:00 PM.

And we really need to get started on the chicken pithivier.

So let's move on to that.

[lively jazzy music]

So just grab some chard.

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.

Now this truffle comes from Wilkshire,

which is like 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 the skill involved.

I don't think we could realistically make enough

to like serve everyone it

and we wouldn't wanna like cut corners.

If something is like 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 mixed it with like set powder,

all the trim from the truffles and diced lato.

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 tight as possible.

If there's kind of 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 kind of putting in here.

So like 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 eight o'clock, we stop maybe once

for some dinner and maybe once in the morning

for some breakfast.

But we can go 'til 1:00, 2:00 in the morning.

Sometimes it's a tough old day, it's tough on the legs.

So this is a sheet of puff pastry with all butter pastry,

it's gonna get very soft very quickly,

especially in like 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 hard 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 our pre-shift meeting.

[bright music]

[Chef] This is back here.

This one is no sugar.

Part of my job is kind of checking in with the team,

trying things, tasting new dishes

and kind of making sure everyone's running smoothly.

[both speak indistinctly]

Earl Grey. Earl Grey.

And [indistinct] I might like

this one better.

Yeah, I think so.

I think it's more like comfy vibe.

With the Earl Grey, it makes it more floral.

It becomes instantly more refreshing the more you get.

That's good.

[smooth jazzy music]

So now it's 4:30

and we're having family meal, some sort of tomato pasta,

I think.

Just that much?

A bit more. A bit more?

You are hungry.

Hungry boy. There you go.

Okay, so it's five o'clock, it's time

for our pre-service meeting.

And more changes to my chef notes. So let's do this.

All right, welcome to Tuesday dinner.

So we got 25 people in, starting at 6:00

with four tables.

During the Pre-shift meeting, I tell the front

of house exactly how many portions of the supplements

that we have to sell, just kind of updating them really.

We have seven lobsters, which will be 14 portions

and we have six pies.

Cut of venison today will be the loin.

Sounds great. Let's have a good service.

We shall. [mellow music]

We're just cleaning down for service.

Everything kind of speeds up at the moment.

We're all rushing around, setting up the service.

So yeah, it's gonna get pretty intense.

So the way kind of service runs is

the dockets will come on here.

We slide them into kind of like a leather docket round

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 six o'clock. 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.

So I'm gonna be here until maybe 12,

one o'clock in the morning and you

guys don't wanna stick around for that.

So probably time to go.

[mellow music continues]