Trade Secrets - Local Leaning - The Goose, Britwell Salome, Oxfordshire

This month, Mark Taylor talks to Michael North, head chef of Michelin starred gastro pub the Goose, in Britwell Salome, Oxfordshire

Fresh bread

We make all of our bread on a daily basis. We make five types of bread and we use three types of dough. We use a plain white dough, a bread with a sour dough starter in it, which we then flavour with different seeds (caraway seeds, poppy seeds, fennel seeds, sesame seeds) and we also make granary bread, tomato bread and a plain white loaf. We make about 10 loaves a day. We're baking bread every day but we try to bake a double batch each time. We make two types of bread each day and half of that we will wrap up and freeze for the next day. For our white bread, we use T55 baguette flour, which is a French flour.

Cheese and butter

We get our cheese and butter from Premier Cheese, Bicester, Oxfordshire. They buy products directly from the producers in France, Italy or Britain, and it's very good indeed. I think it was Pierre Koffmann who said that if you start a meal by serving good bread and butter, then everything will be fine, and that's the sort of philosophy we're trying to work to. We make sure the bread is warm when we serve it. The butter we serve is French, handmade, and we serve it at a spreadable temperature; far too many places still serve it straight from the fridge, which is infuriating for customers because you can't spread it and you can't taste it. We make sure the butter is on the table and softened by the time people arrive.

Real ale

Real ale is very important to us and we tend to serve the local Hook Norton beers, which are very popular. Unfortunately, we don't attract enough drinkers to put on more than one real ale at a time, but we still sell one-and-a-half casks each week, which is unusual for a Michelin-starred establishment.

Garden

Our garden's a patio garden and not particularly pretty, but it has proper teak garden furniture and it's comfortable. If there are things going on in the village, then we'll take part and support them. Last year there was an open gardens day in the village, which the Goose sponsored. We got a jazz band to play in our garden and we did a spit-roast pig. People don't expect a barbecue in the garden of a Michelin-starred restaurant, but why not?

Wine

We don't have house wines as such at the Goose. We have a list with about 110 bins on, and a range of between 12 and 20 wines by the glass, which will be a cross section of what's on the list, including reds, whites, Champagnes and dessert wines. Why should people be limited to the cheap and nasty house wine? House wines are notoriously the cheapest red and white, but they should be a benchmark. We buy wines at local tastings and often make those our wines of the week and list them on the blackboard. Where it really works well is when you get a group of people coming in and they all want different styles of wine. We used to sell more half bottles, and less by the glass, but we've found that now we sell more by the glass, we don't sell so many half bottles, which is great for us because it's more fun. It provides more interaction with the customer and it gives us more chance to learn about what we're selling.

Work experience

As a young chef, I spent my holidays doing work placements in top kitchens like Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons in Oxfordshire, Gidleigh Park in Devon and the Mirabelle in London. All of these restaurants work from set recipes that never change - they've been set in stone by the chefs, whether it's Raymond Blanc, Michael Caines or Marco Pierre White, and you don't change them. This work experience was fantastic and I think you can get more out of a stage over a couple of weeks than you can from working there for a couple of years. It's great for getting small snippets of information, ideas and meeting people. If you know what you want to get out of somewhere, I think you can get it in a very short space of time.

Balance between bar/restaurant

We wanted to keep the balance between a pub and a restaurant. Somebody sitting at the back having their lunch or dinner doesn't create an atmosphere, but having a few locals at the bar, having a few pints and a banter does. We want to be an informal place where you can also get good food, and the best way to do that is in a pub atmosphere. We have a small area in the bar with sofas and a real fire, which makes for a very relaxed way for customers to have a drink before going through to the restaurant.

Local produce

Fifty per cent of the menu at the Goose is local produce, including Oxfordshire beef and lamb, as well as pork from Red Lion Farm, which is literally next door to the pub. The pigs at Red Lion Farm aren't rare breeds, but they're free range, reared organically and just awaiting organic certification from the Soil Association.

The beef and lamb we get is from a farm a few miles away. We've always tried to buy the best quality ingredients we can and our customers appreciate that.

Artwork

When we first opened, the bar was full of polo pictures, and there were also lots of traditional pictures of shooting and hunting scenes but having scenes of such controversial sports on the wall isn't going to help us. Although people in the country might like shooting and hunting pictures, we want to attract as many people as possible. We're a high end pub and the people we attract are either for hunting or against it, so to put up pictures of things people have strong views about was a mistake, we'd be eliminating half our customers by having a picture of a fox hunt on the wall. And, anyway, they weren't very good pictures! We chose these three simple ink pictures on handmade paper by Leonie Porton and we get quite a lot of comments about them from customers.

Bar snacks

It was important for us to sell bar nibbles for those people who are just coming in for a pint. We don't sell packets of peanuts, but we make most of the bar nibbles in the kitchen and we sell them from large jars that sit on the bar. We marinate our own olives, we make the salsa for the nachos, we roast the nuts here - it's just a little bit more than selling them in packets. We also have a bar menu every lunchtime and evening that we only serve in the bar. Ultimately it's bad for business because if we have a pub full of people eating the bar menu, we only take a quarter or a third of what we could be taking. We have regular customers who travel a long way for the à la carte menu, which works out at about £30 per head. Some people may still think that's expensive. A Mercedes is expensive, but it's a high-end product. On a Sunday lunchtime, we'll have 30 or 40 people eating the restaurant menu, plus a garden full of walkers who want a sandwich or a bowl of soup. What makes us special is the fact that we offer a wide range of dishes at a wide range of prices.