“Osip is a small farm-to-table restaurant in the English countryside. We have a Michelin Star and people travel countries to come eat dinner here.” Today, Bon Appétit spends a day on the line with Chef Ciaran Brennan, head chef at Osip in Somerset. Operating out of a 300-year-old house in the English countryside, Osip grows most of its own produce, letting nature decide what’s on the menu.
Osip is a 2025 Conde Nast Traveler Hot List Restaurant Winner.
Osip is a 2025 Conde Nast Traveler Hot List Restaurant Winner.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Ossip is a small farm-to-table restaurant in the English countryside.
00:05We are a mission star.
00:06People travel, even countries, to come eat dinner here.
00:09As a head chef, I've moved to the countryside just to work at this restaurant.
00:13We have our own farm in which we grow a lot of our own produce.
00:16You kind of really have to plan your menus according to how farmers grow their crops
00:21or how they raise their animals.
00:23It really lets nature tell you what you need to put on your menu.
00:30Hi, this is Kieran, head chef at Ossip Restaurant.
00:34We're going to start our day today by foraging some wild garlic.
00:38We're here in Bruton in the English countryside.
00:40We're about 10 minutes from the restaurant, so let's get to work.
00:43This is Guinness, by the way.
00:50Wild garlic.
00:51It's like a green leaf, long and flat.
00:53It grows everywhere in this part of the world.
00:57In London, we'd have to buy the wild garlic from local suppliers.
01:00Obviously, this is a lot cheaper and you get it a lot fresher.
01:03These ones you can make oil out of and they're really delicious.
01:06You make oils and soups, but if you're going to eat them raw, you want to use the fresh,
01:10new, young shoots.
01:11This wild garlic is going on the chicken petivier dish.
01:14We dress it in its own oil and it just goes nicely on the plate.
01:18With these shoots, the best way to get them out the ground is just to use a pair of scissors.
01:23If you're pulling at them all the time, you can damage the plant.
01:26So that looks like it's enough for a couple of days.
01:28It's almost 8 o'clock.
01:29Time to go back to the restaurant and do some real work.
01:37We are at work, which is Osset Restaurant.
01:40This used to be a 300-year-old building.
01:43There was an inn before we took it over.
01:45We've done heaps and heaps of renovation to it.
01:48The whole kitchen got gutted out, ripped out and put in brand new.
01:51The boys here are already working.
01:54So I'm going to get it changed and then we're going to break down a whole venison.
01:57So let's go.
02:03So this is the prep kitchen where all the real work gets done.
02:06I'm going to go grab the venison and we'll get started.
02:08This came in last night actually.
02:15So yeah, super fresh.
02:17It's a big old boy.
02:21We'll get this whole animal every week.
02:27I think it's really important to take whole animals as much as you can.
02:30There's way more that you can do with them.
02:32You can be very creative with using kind of waste cuts.
02:35The less things we can kill, the better, in my opinion.
02:38So it's from the Thornberry Estate.
02:40It's a 30 kilo fallow, grade A headshot.
02:43So we have a guy called Matt.
02:45He shoots all our deer for us and brings them in whenever we need them.
02:49So we'll take one to two deers a week, depending on how busy we are.
02:53Making the most of it should last us.
02:55So I'm going to take the back end off first.
02:58I'm just going to get the knife at the lower base of the back.
03:01Cut through until I get some bone.
03:03So you want to use the knife for soft tissue and then only using the saw just to cut through bone.
03:08Because you want to keep the cuts and the flesh nice and clean.
03:10Otherwise it's going to turn into shredded tuna, essentially.
03:14So this is pretty much the back end of game season.
03:17We use venison pretty much from November through to late February.
03:21So this is for our main venison dish.
03:23It's a two-step dish.
03:25We use the heart on top of a little taco and you kind of eat that.
03:28And then it's like a secondary course.
03:31The rest of the meat comes and we serve it very simply.
03:34We have each kind of component on the plate, which would be the belly, the sausage, the loin.
03:38But really it's kind of focusing on the venison and not messing around with it too much.
03:42So it's obviously got its own very gamey taste.
03:44It's very lean, even though this one here I'd say is especially fatty, which is really good.
03:50This is why we get the best venisons in.
03:52It doesn't have the same marbling as beef, but it's very tender.
03:55It's got a kind of stronger flavor profile.
03:59This is a female, so it's a doe.
04:00The does, in my opinion, are a bit better.
04:02They're a bit more mild.
04:03You can get the stags in the wrong season when they're kind of full of adrenaline fighting each other.
04:11You get this really strong flavor that I don't really like.
04:14So this is a tenderloin.
04:16If this was beef, this would be the fillet or filet.
04:19Obviously it's a venison, so it's a lot smaller.
04:21The bottom side will have this kind of layer of silver skin.
04:24Silver skin is just a layer of sinew that's connected to the loin.
04:28The way I like to remove it is kind of treating it similar to a fish and treating it as skin.
04:33I'm just kind of pulling it over, letting the knife do all the work, and then you should get a pretty clean loin.
04:41The way kitchens work, or a lot of kitchens work, is that you start on maybe a cold starter section or a larder section,
04:48and then you'll move around the kitchen, and usually the most experienced kind of chef de pates,
04:53I think you call them line cooks in America, start taking on the grill section,
04:57which will be all the animals, meat, fish, and that is generally the section where you learn the most about butchery, I think.
05:04So we're going to break the belly down.
05:07Any fish will meet butchery.
05:09You're essentially trying to get as close to the bone as possible,
05:11and yeah, the best way to do that is running a knife super close to the bone and getting it nice and tight.
05:16So the belly, we're going to brine them in a kind of pastrami-style brine,
05:20and then we're going to cook them overnight until they're really, really soft,
05:22and that's going to be served as a kind of skewer to go on the venison dish.
05:26Things like getting an amazing deer and working really closely with farms makes my life a lot easier.
05:31However, from working in London, you can pretty much order things at one o'clock in the morning,
05:37and they will turn up at eight o'clock in the morning the next day.
05:39You don't really get that here, so you have to be a lot more organized with what you order.
05:43They give us the animals or the vegetables when the vegetables are kind of perfect,
05:49rather than just being able to get it whenever we want, essentially.
05:52So the belly, we're going to stick both these parts together.
05:55So this is a powder, it's called transglutamase, also known as meat glue.
05:59With the venison belly, they're notoriously thin, so we want to kind of have a nice thick wedge.
06:05So what we do is we just dust it with this powder, and it kind of acts like a protein or like an enzyme,
06:10and it will stick meat together.
06:12So it allows us to get a really nice fat piece of venison belly.
06:16You want like a nice even coating, so just dusting it through a sieve makes that possible.
06:21You can see all the layers of the belly through sticking them together.
06:25You get the top layer, you get some layers of fat, and you get some layers of meat.
06:28It just looks better, and it's a lot nicer to eat.
06:30So it's 10 o'clock at the moment, I'm going to pass this off to my grill chef,
06:35because there are some lobsters I need attending to for our lobster course.
06:38So let's get to it.
06:40Sam, I need a big strong man.
06:43Grab some deer, put it in the fridge.
06:49So we have beautiful native lobsters here from off the coast in Cornwall.
06:53You can see they've got a really nice blue colour to them, which is pretty unique.
06:56They came in last night.
06:58We work very closely with the fish supplier.
07:00For lobster, you want obviously alive is like one of the most important things.
07:05They have to come alive.
07:06We also look at the hardness of the shell.
07:08It's very important.
07:09If you have a lobster where like the shell is starting to get a little bit soft,
07:12there's a chance when you cook the lobster, the flesh can go kind of mushy.
07:16There's two kind of main techniques to getting lobster out of the shell.
07:20One is kind of blanching it in water very quickly, and then freezing it also.
07:24We freeze these tails overnight, not for very long, just for like kind of four to six hours.
07:29Just making a little incision at the top of the shell.
07:33You should be able to peel it straight off.
07:36And then I like to use the back of a spoon so it's not very sharp.
07:39You don't want to kind of hurt the lobster in any way.
07:41So just peeling it back very gently, and it should just kind of pop out.
07:49So the quicker you can freeze it from fresh, and then the quicker you can get it out of the shell,
07:54the better the product's going to be.
07:56And this is going to make them really easy to release the meat from the shell.
08:00And then it means that we don't have to cook it first,
08:02which means all of the cooking for the lobster can be done over the charcoal,
08:05which is a lot better for a flavor.
08:07Obviously, if you just grill it in the shell, you're not going to get the exposure from the meat to the flames.
08:13We're going to put it directly onto the kombu.
08:15Kombu is a type of seaweed that's dried. It's very thick.
08:18It's got loads of natural kind of umami flavor and seasoning.
08:22And just by storing the lobster raw on the kombu, it helps dry out the lobster,
08:27gives it a bit of flavor, firms up the texture.
08:30We carve it into kind of four pieces, and we serve it with an egg yolk sauce.
08:33As you can see behind me, we've got the most amazing view of kind of the fields and the countryside,
08:39especially coming from London for myself.
08:41It's a real treat because after working a lot of kind of like dingy basement kitchens,
08:45getting to see this every day is pretty special.
08:48So a lot of people travel to the restaurant to work because of the accolades that we've kind of gained over the years.
08:53We've recently been named in the Condé Nast Traveler's Hot List.
08:56We also have the Mission Star, which is really important for kind of getting staff to work here.
09:01We were Good Food Guys Restaurant of the Year just a few weeks ago.
09:04So things are going quite well on that front.
09:06From all the claws and the heads and the shells, we make this beautiful lobster ragu.
09:12These are ready to go. I'm going to blanch these claws off,
09:15and then we're going to light the grill, ready to smoke some quinces.
09:17So I'm just separating the claws from their knuckles because they all take a little bit different time to blanch.
09:23So the big, thick, crushing claws will take five minutes,
09:27just so you get each kind of piece perfectly cooked.
09:34So when that timer hits four, I'm going to add the smaller claws.
09:37When the timer hits two, I'm going to add the knuckles.
09:42This is the quickest way to blanch all three different parts of the claw
09:46without having to, like, make it take 20 minutes.
09:49So the ice just stops the cooking. Obviously they've been, like, vigorously boiled for a certain amount of time.
10:01And we get them to the point that we light them.
10:03And then we want to chill them down as quick as possible.
10:06We're just going to keep them fresh and also it's going to stop the cooking exactly where we want it.
10:10And now it's time to light the fire, so we're going to get these away.
10:12Here I've got some quinces. They've been roasted in sugar and vinegar.
10:19And they're about to get smoked.
10:21I'm just starting to light the grill.
10:23We have a couple of fire lighters in the bottom.
10:26And then we've got these smaller pieces of kindling that set fire very quickly.
10:30So we're going to initially get the fire going with those.
10:34And then as the fire builds, we're going to transfer to charcoal.
10:39Charcoal is what we cook on. It keeps a hotter fire. It's a cleaner fire.
10:43But if we're smoking, we smoke over wood. Obviously wood creates the smoke.
10:47Cooking over the live fire, it can be difficult, but once you know what you're doing,
10:50I think it opens a lot of doors.
10:52It essentially allows a larger range of heat and it allows you to cook things a lot more slowly.
10:57So most of our meat, we will like very gently hang or hold above the grill.
11:01And then when we want to like give it surface color and surface flavor,
11:06we'll kind of do it after the cooking.
11:08So it's kind of like a reverse way of cooking, but finishing it with loads of flavor.
11:12We've let the quinces kind of soak in the syrup overnight and they've absorbed everything.
11:16It's red wine vinegar, it's light brown sugar, flavor it with some star anise and some cinnamon.
11:21All of the juice and the pectin, which is like the protein, comes out of the quince
11:26and turns it into this very kind of dense, jammy red syrup.
11:31That syrup, when it goes over the grill, will like cling and thicken over the quinces
11:36and you'll get this really nice kind of smoke on there
11:39because the smoke can attach itself to like viscous liquids a lot more.
11:43They become like a chewy texture. It's almost like cured meat.
11:47I'm just going to hang these above.
11:50We could do it in a dehydrator and it would take half the time,
11:53but we want to do it naturally and we want to do it where we're imparting flavor onto it.
11:57So this is like a very slow process, but in the end it's super worth it.
12:02We're going to let these go.
12:03It's about 3 p.m. and we're going to get started on the chicken pettivier.
12:06So let's move on to that.
12:08So just grab some chard.
12:14We're going to use this to wrap the chicken for the pettivier.
12:17Pettivier is kind of like a pie.
12:19We stuff it with black truffles and we wrap it in a sausage meat
12:22and then we kind of shape it into a nice breast with pastry
12:25and then we do beautiful kind of scoring all the way around.
12:28This truffle comes from Wiltshire, which is like the next county over.
12:31It does change every week, but it will be about £800 for one kilo.
12:35So yeah, not to be wasted.
12:37We put it on as a supplement.
12:39The reason why it's a supplement is simply because they take so long to make.
12:42The kind of the skill involved, I don't think we could realistically make enough to like serve everyone it
12:47and we wouldn't want to like cut corners.
12:49If something is like incredibly laborious, labor costs probably the biggest overhead that restaurants have.
12:54So if something takes a long time, you're going to pay for it.
12:58This is the fast meat that we've made out of the legs.
13:00So all the drumsticks and the thighs we've minced down and we've mixed it with like set powder,
13:05all the trim from the truffles and diced lardo.
13:08And then we're going to wrap that on top and you can kind of just shape it into place.
13:13You want it to be as airtight as possible.
13:15If there's kind of large air pockets inside, when it goes in the oven, there's a chance it could all explode.
13:22The idea is that when you carve it open, you can see every layer that I'm kind of putting in here.
13:27So like on a weekend where we'd sell close to 12, this is pretty much all I do.
13:31In terms of a normal working day, we get in at eight o'clock.
13:35We stop maybe once for some dinner and maybe once in the morning for some breakfast.
13:40But we can go until one, two in the morning sometimes.
13:43It's a tough old day. It's tough on the legs.
13:46So this is a sheet of puff pastry with all butter pastry.
13:50It's going to go very soft very quickly, especially in like a warm kitchen.
13:54So you want to move nice and quick and you want to work from the fridge at all times.
13:59You're treating it almost like a ravioli.
14:01You'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.
14:07When you cook the chicken in the pastry, it really helps keep the chicken moist.
14:11So that's going to go straight back in the fridge and then we can kind of make it look pretty once the pastry is nice and hard again.
14:18These are going to chill in the fridge for a while.
14:20Later on, we're going to score them and glaze them in egg yolk.
14:22I'm going to check in on my team and have our pre-shift meeting.
14:25Part 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.
14:48I might like this one better.
14:55Yeah, I think so.
14:56I think it's more like comfy vibe with the air grey.
15:00It makes it more floral.
15:01It becomes instantly more refreshing the more you get.
15:04That's good.
15:12So now it's 4.30 and we're having family meal.
15:15Some sort of tomato pasta.
15:17Just how much?
15:18A bit more.
15:19A bit more?
15:20I'm hungry.
15:21I'm hungry boy.
15:22There you go.
15:24Okay, so it's five o'clock.
15:25It's time for our pre-service meeting and more changes to my chef whites.
15:28So let's do this.
15:34Alright.
15:35Welcome to Tuesday dinner.
15:37So we got 25 people in starting at six with four tables.
15:42During the pre-chef meeting, I tell the front of house exactly how many portions of the supplements
15:46that we have to sell.
15:47Just kind of updating them really.
15:49We have seven lobsters, which will be 14 portions.
15:52We have six pies.
15:54A cut of venison today will be the loin.
15:56Sounds great.
15:57Let's have good service.
15:58We're chef.
15:59We're just cleaning down for service.
16:02Everything kind of speeds up at the moment.
16:04We're all rushing around setting up for service.
16:06So yeah, it's going to get pretty intense.
16:08So the way kind of service runs is the dockets will come on here.
16:13We slide them.
16:14It's kind of like a leather docket round.
16:16And then we've got the two sections, the grill and the garnish section.
16:19Everything will kind of come through a funnel through me and then we expedite it out the kitchen that way.
16:24So it's six o'clock.
16:26Thanks for following me.
16:27I hope you've got a good idea of what it's like to be a head chef at Osset Restaurant.
16:30So I'm going to be here until maybe 12, one o'clock in the morning.
16:33And you guys don't want to stick around for that.
16:35So probably time to go.