Restaurants TV show, when Michel Roux Jnr went into raptures over her beef dish. It’s a variation on this that we get to taste next, and it’s easy to see why Michel was so enthusiastic. The meat is smoked over hickory while raw to pick up all the flavours, then cooked over the grill in the hut. The result is tender, blushing pink slices which practically melt in the mouth, and ends – served more well done – that have that intense Marmite-y flavour reminiscent of brisket burnt ends. Sharing the plate is soft fondant potato, rainbow chard leaves cooked in butter and honey and flambéed in damson vodka, and a deep, rich gravy which contains a whole bottle of wine and takes 18 hours to prepare. (Do you now see why you can’t just rock up without booking?) The flavours are wonderfully intense, and are set off beautifully by the Calmel & Joseph Terrasses du Larzac, which we sip alongside. A salad might not seem like the obvious candidate for smoking, but again Kathryn achieves the improbable by smoking a dressing of oil, vinegar, smoked salt and bourbon with a hot coal, before dousing the leaves with the mixture. As salad dressings go, it’s highly unusual – but it works, and creates one of the most interesting plates of leaves I’ve ever eaten. Then there’s a pud of Aebelskiver (little Danish pancakey, doughnutty mouthfuls, laced with cinnamon and deep fried over the open flames), served with vanilla ice cream and berries flambéed with Cointreau. It tastes of autumn and is practically the definition of ‘hygge’. Dessert devoured, Kathryn places a big cauldron-style pot over the flames, and I am ecstatic to discover that it’s filled with cheese. Instead of the traditional fondue recipe of Gouda and
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wine, though, Kathryn’s created a Gloucestershire version with single Gloucester and cider – and it’s so good the only thing that stops me eating is when the last dribbles have been mopped up. The final dish of the night is marshmallows made with rose water, which we toast ourselves over the flames while sipping on caramel damson schnapps. “I like to echo similar ingredients throughout the meal,” says Kathryn. “I use cider for the cocktail, as it features in the fondue, and I use damson for both the chard and the schnapps. It’s subtle, but it brings the courses together.” Many a professional chef would balk at the prospect of cooking such varied and sophisticated meal over flames and smoke, and when you consider that Kathryn has had almost no formal training it makes what she achieves even more remarkable. “I studied for the Leith’s two-year food and wine qualification alongside my A-levels,” she tells us. “Prue’s view was always that you should not put anything on a plate that you wouldn’t eat, or that doesn’t add anything to a dish. If you do a drizzle then it has to add flavour, not just be there for colour. That’s very much influenced the way I do things – although this type of cooking didn’t really feature on the course! “I always liked fires, but it was only when I got this place that I really experimented with cooking with fire. I have travelled around South East Asia, and every time I went to a new country I did a cooking course. In that part of the world there’s a lot of single-point cooking – people’s homes are built around a single wok or a barbecue, basically one heat point – and so I realised that, actually, many of the cuisines I had studied really lend themselves to this type of cooking. “Now I organise my holidays around food, and I still do cooking courses wherever I go to get inspiration and ideas. We’re going to Morocco soon, and staying in a riad where there’s a Michelin-starred chef. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be my best friend!” Look out for some Moroccan-influenced dishes appearing in Kathryn’s repertoire soon, then. In the meantime, the Gloucester Studio might be small, but in all other ways it’s big. Big on flavour, big on creativity, and definitely big on fun! gloucesterstudio.com
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