Locally sourced

Wine from Bordeaux, food from Bristol: Barny Haughton’s restaurant aims to be “the future of food”.  Richard Cree meets an organic pioneer. Photography by Martin Burton

Barny Haughton admits he is fighting a losing battle. One of the pioneers in the UK’s organic movement, he opened his first restaurant in Bristol in 1988, with the idea of using locally-sourced organic produce. That this English teacher turned restaurateur should have named his restaurant Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse, says a lot. Almost 20 years later, Rocinante may have been renamed Quartier Vert, but Haughton is nonetheless still tilting at the same windmills. He laughs at the suggestion:

“I like the picture of Don Quixote, the slightly deluded man with a hopeless mission,” he says. “After all, the only cause worth fighting for is a lost cause.”

This statement is the kicking-off point for a lively and engaging conversation. Over a hugely entertaining lunch at his latest venture, Bordeaux Quay, he takes carefully aimed swipes at some of his more famous peers—“all the celebrity chef nonsense is bullshit”—while despairing over the state of UK food—“Britain has never eaten well”.
But his over-riding message is clear; big, global problems can be solved by individuals taking small steps to improve things. These small steps include insisting on locally produced, seasonal and organic produce; reducing waste and our impact on the environment; and spreading the healthy eating message to schools and the wider community. Bordeaux Quay is an attempt to bring all these strands together. The press blurb for the venture—a restaurant, brasserie, bar, bakery, deli and cookery school—talks, somewhat breathlessly, about “eco-gastronomy”. All of which sounds quite high-minded, very serious, and perhaps just a little bit too worthy (the tagline for the new venture is “delicious food that doesn’t cost the earth”).

But with Bordeaux Quay, Haughton has shown that being environmentally sensitive doesn’t preclude good taste. Based in an old wine warehouse on Bristol’s bustling waterfront development, the conversion was carried out to the most exacting of environmental standards. But neither the bright and airy, open-plan downstairs space that houses the brasserie, bar, deli and bakery (natural woods and exposed brick), nor the more lavish upstairs restaurant, wine bar and cookery school allow their green credentials to spoil a good design. Indeed, hanging from the glass atrium are a couple of amazing steamed-wood lightshades that look like the work of Cornish sustainable design company Sixixis. With only a hint of shame, Haughton admits that they are from Italy.

It’s also immediately obvious from the ingredients on the deli shelves, not to mention the contents of the menu, that not all ingredients are sourced from within 50 miles. “People are very quick to say that the 50 mile thing is a mistake,” says Haughton in defence. “But I am trying to create a ‘food map’ of local growers, providers and retailers in and around Bristol. All of life is a compromise. People talk about being carbon neutral. The only way you can be carbon neutral is to be dead and even then you are going to be producing emissions from the grave. It’s about finding the most sustainable way. If, in order to be sustainable, you have to sacrifice everything that is pleasurable about being alive, such as good wine, lemons and olive oil, then it really does seem pointless.”

This no-nonsense approach means that, where possible, all ingredients are from within the local area. But where this is not feasible, the aim is to keep food and drink miles (the distance an ingredient travels before it arrives on your plate) to a minimum. So why bother at all?

In answer Haughton holds up a glass of his house wine. Naturally, it’s from Bordeaux. “I am trying to make the most of our connection with Bordeaux. Because I want to get people to drink Bordeaux wines again. Bordeaux wines are out of fashion. But this fits the sustainability theme. If the prognosis is correct and we are not going to have any oil to speak of, then we won’t be able to get wines from Chile or beef from Argentina. It will have to come from the local area. We won’t be able to afford wine from Australia—it will be too expensive. This is just preparation so people see it’s not as painful as they think. We just don’t need to import salad from California for Christsakes. It’s so weird, it’s so fin-de-siècle.”

Although born to a teacher father and a writer mother, Haughton spent much of his childhood living on a farm, surrounded by food and agriculture. One of 10 children, he was quick to learn the advantages of being able to cook. “We were a big family, so we had to learn to value food and how to cook. I started making bread at a very early age.”

The seeds of his campaigning on behalf of the organic movement were also sown early, when as a child he and his twin, playing with knives they had been given as birthday presents, happened upon some sacks of fertiliser. They slit open the bags and watched the contents spill out. “It was quite good fun,” recalls Haughton. “What wasn’t fun was that some got stuck in my sock and afterwards I had all these red marks on my skin. Even at that age I thought, ‘if this is doing this to me it can’t be good to eat’. Living on a farm, the difference between this and manure was obvious.”

With this love of food and cooking, it was natural that the young Haughton should fantasise about running a restaurant. But it was to remain a fantasy for some time. As he says, in the late 1960s being a chef was not a career open to someone who had been to public school. “You just weren’t a chef. The very least you would hope for is to be a barrister or a doctor. You had to have a proper profession and being a chef wasn’t considered a proper profession in those days.”
So he followed his father into teaching. “I knew I would be quite a good teacher, but I also knew that actually I wanted to cook. In a funny way, when I got into cooking, I ended up teaching. Because that’s what you do in the kitchen; you are working with people, helping them.”

If this doesn’t sound like the shouty, Gordon-Ramsay-style restaurant kitchens of popular myth, it’s because Haughton doesn’t run his kitchens that way. Perhaps this is because he didn’t go through it himself. As he admits, “I didn’t train. I picked it up and then opened a restaurant. Then I realised how hard it was. But shouting at people in kitchens is vile, despicable and unacceptable. I don’t care what people say. Great chefs say it was a good thing they were put through that abuse. But I don’t think it’s a good thing. There is a brutishness and a tyranny about the classic kitchen, which everyone jokes about—fiery chefs and all that—but actually it is not funny. And I don’t think it teaches people good discipline or best practice.” His next comment is even more surprising: “For me, the most important attribute of a chef is humility. That’s what we aspire to.”

In some ways Haughton’s closest celebrity equivalent is Jamie Oliver. Both are devotees of the simple cusines of Provence and Italy and both have drawn inspiration from the River Café. But most interestingly, Haughton’s campaign for healthy, organic eating saw him working with dinner ladies in local schools way back in 1995—a decade before Jamie’s School Dinners. So, how does he see Oliver’s campaign?

“I think Jamie’s great. What I think is not great is that Jamie Oliver, the icon, has become the answer and the substitute for action. We are shocked into a sense of shame at having inflicted such crap on our children over so many years. Jamie woke us all up to that, albeit 10 years after I started doing it here. But sometimes it takes someone who’s got that gift and that charisma, which he has. I’m glad that he’s been doing it, but it’s not enough. The fact is he’s doing it on TV and TV is about entertainment, not education. The celebrity chef nonsense is bullshit. I don’t care what anyone says, we are not cooking better because of TV.”

It’s clearly a subject close to Haughton’s heart and one that elicits the nearest thing to anger. So I suggest he’s wrong and that at some point the sheer amount of food and cookery programmes on TV must be having an impact. He thinks for a minute before calmly putting me right. “The people who are always going to cook a little better than everyone else in society are cooking even better,” is his summation.
Having lived on a low income as a teacher, Haughton is well placed to instruct others how to eat well without spending a fortune. And he seems genuinely upset that, for all the talk of a “food renaissance” in the UK, outside of a small, wealthy, food-obsessed elite, the country is still not eating healthily. “Contrary to myth, even if you can’t eat roast beef every Sunday, you can eat good, organic, fresh food on a low income. But it’s about being able to cook and knowing what to do with things when they come into the market.

“We can ignore that so-called food renaissance, which is colour-supplement led. We are talking a language that is foreign to most people. Even now, even after all the waves of publicity and fashion that the concept of seasonality has been riding on, it still hasn’t penetrated the supermarket mentality. The simple fact is that we don’t know how to cook properly. It’s what Joanna Blythman calls ‘Bad Food Britain’. Her argument, which I agree with, is that despite this so-called renaissance, most people still aren’t cooking, we’re still eating terrible convenience food and fast food.”

But talk of a renaissance suggests there was a golden age when we all ate well. Haughton agrees this is a myth: “Britain has never eaten well. We’ve got a long way to go before we begin to reach what has been centuries of gastronomy in France. Gordon [Ramsay] is wrong when he starts slagging off French food culture as being behind the times.”

Haughton sees some hope in the boom in so-called “gastropubs” (traditional pubs offering restaurant-quality food). “It offers a route to good grub at reasonable prices and that will influence what people cook at home. If they see it in a pub it must be manageable, because it’s closer to home.”

So should more restaurants offer food you can make yourself? “It’s not about doing it as well at home. The first step is learning to distinguish between what’s good and what isn’t. That’s one of the things that we are bad at in the UK. That’s why I don’t have any time for restaurants who say ‘well no-one’s ever complained before’. So what? It’s still a rubbish risotto, and it’s still inedible.”

With profits from Bordeaux Quay subsidising free courses for the underprivileged at his cookery school, its easy to imagine Haughton as some sort of zealous food missionary. But asked what he is looking forward to about Bordeaux Quay, his answer sums up his no-nonsense approach. “Putting aside all my evangelical crap, I’m looking forward to eating white truffles and tagliatelle here with my friends.”

On the subject of being remembered, his focus is also on the food. He talks about the film Babette’s Feast, in which a chef fleeing the French Revolution, winds up in Denmark and is so grateful to the village that gives her refuge that she cooks an extraordinary feast. Without making a big fuss, she completely seduces the village with her cooking. “It’s a great film about a village transformed by someone cooking for them, without any shouting.

“If what Bordeaux Quay does is raise people’s awareness about the big issues we’re facing and gets people thinking or doing things they wouldn’t have done, that’s great. But more importantly, people should remember having a great meal here. No agendas, judgments or preconceptions. That in itself has a certain appeal.”