he year is 1988 and Paul Heathcote, in his full chef whites, has been pulled out of service and into the restaurant’s garden. It’s pitch black and he is standing in the pouring rain, up to his knees in mud. Raymond Blanc holds up a bunch of baby leeks to Heathcote’s face with glee, and says: “Now, this is what I call fresh.”
One of his more vivid memories of his jam-packed culinary career so far, this scene was the start of a valuable lesson: you’re only as good as the ingredients you use.
“It was always the case that someone would get ‘Raymondo-ed’ at service, and that night it was my turn,” says Bolton man Heathcote, who in 2009 was given an MBE for services to the hospitality industry in the North West. “He looked at the baby leeks I was cooking as part of a fish dish, pulled open my fridge and asked ‘What’s this?’, pointing at the leeks. Next thing I knew he was dragging me out of the kitchen into the dark garden; we’d grabbed a gardening fork and a torch from the shed and he was brandishing the baby leeks in front of me. By the time we got back to the kitchen I had 14 checks waiting for me and was so far down the river without a paddle. He didn’t care - he had his baby leeks and reminded me very clearly that in fact fresh had to be just that: fresh. Blanc has a real love of fresh produce and at Le Manoir that really became part of me as well.”
It was the combination of training under first the Cumbrian Sharrow Bay Hotel’s “thoroughly nice” Francis Coulson and second Blanc with his “passionate idiosyncrasies”, as well as a stint at tough The Connaught in Mayfair that made him the chef he is today. And the businessperson that 30 years ago made a little restaurant venture called Longridge in Lancashire - a county described as a “gastronomic desert” at the time - work despite opening the year recession hit.
So, it’s 1990 and after soaking up as much knowledge as he could from the greats, Heathcote opens his first restaurant a couple of months before the stock exchange crashed in October.
“My move towards fresh and local sourcing was as much to do with necessity as belief,” he says. “My days with Francis, although the restaurant occasionally sourced from Scotland when it had to, were very orientated around local supply and was certainly British through and through. The Connaught diluted this slightly as it was a hugely international concern that brought in ingredients from everywhere. Raymond obviously brought a French influence and had instilled the ethos of sourcing the best food from the best places and as fresh as possible. But people in Longridge weren’t going to come to my restaurant and pay £18 a head for a French chicken at that time. The most logical solution was to source locally, which cut costs and meant the food was as fresh as it was going to get.”
And it was out of this attitude, as well as sheer determination, that Heathcote became known for flying the local flag. In fact, he was one of the first chefs to highlight local producers on his menus, with not only name checks, but also detailed information about their businesses and the lines they produced.
Now the owner of three restaurants in the North West (Longridge, Heathcote’s Brasserie and The Original Olive Press), the creator of a sporting events catering company and chairman of the Academy of Culinary Arts in the North, Heathcote has a wealth of suppliers and growers in and around Lancashire at his fingertips, but in 1990 we were at the start of “the evolution of British chefs” as he puts it, and consumer confidence in both chefs and producers in the UK was low.
Heathcote walked into Longridge Restaurant and transformed it into not only the place to eat, but also the place growers wanted to supply. What followed was the creation of several local networks, starting with convincing a farmer to rear ducks and geese and then helping build up a wet fish business, and introducing the local wholesaler in Preston to Rungis Wholesale Market in France. “He used to call the kinds of stuff I was asking for - like artichokes and celeriac - ‘queer gear’,” Heathcote says affectionately of Eddie Holmes, who now works for Sharrocks. “And now, he specialises in getting in something different. A whole new line of business grew from bringing the restaurant trade here.”
It’s 2012 and sourcing as close to home seems to be considered commonsense in most areas of the catering trade. After such a keen reliance on local, where does Heathcote see the trend going next?
“We are going towards regionality now and I think that’s the best possible way to go,” he admits.
“You need the best to cook with and we have got to be careful not to push people into producing things that don’t necessarily fit into our season or thrive in our weather. We’ve all got to work together.” -
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