To the uninitiated

To the uninitiated, the Anchor at Nayland looks much like any other handsome
riverside inn. The exterior is encouragingly well-presented, the interior
bright and welcoming and on the walls are pictures of ruddy-cheeked country
gentlemen with shire horses and long-horned cows. All very normal, you might
think, for a pub in the country.

But explore a little further and you'll start to pick up clues of something
more, clues like the map in the hall which suggests that the Anchor is an
integrated part of some grand scheme. Clues like the menu, which is peppered
with phrases like 'home-reared', 'from the Estate', and 'our vegetable
garden'. And to cap it all, propping up the bar are the very same country
gentlemen from the photos on the wall.

In fact, although the menu doesn't spell it out, near enough 100 percent of
the meat and around 60 percent of the vegetables served on the Anchor's
tables comes from just beyond the back door. That self-same long-horned
cattle looking down from the photos could easily be the steak on your plate.

For this normal-looking country pub is the public-facing end of a fairly
unique food chain. Think of it as a sort of Narnia of the catering world,
with a big farming operation sitting literally on the other side of the
kitchen, plugged in and ready to go. When the chef needs a leg of lamb or a
sprig of chervil, he doesn't walk through the back of a wardrobe: he just
opens the kitchen door.

It may not be quite Narnia, but the Suffolk village of Nayland does have a
storybook look to it. Half-timbered and gabled houses are mixed with
handsome Georgian residences, and an old stone mile-post in the village
centre pinpoints it as being 55 miles from London and 26 from Chelmsford, on
the fringes of Constable country. One of the artist's canvases hangs in the
church and Dedham (as in The Haywain et al) is just five miles away, albeit
on the other side of the A12.

The Anchor itself sits on the village edge, next to a bridge over the
grassy-banked river Stour in a typically Constable-like scene. It started
life as a bargee's inn in the days when the Stour was used for moving the
likes of wool and coal, but the river is barely navigable these days and the
pub went into a decline, becoming a fug-filled drinking den with a
diminishing number of customers. So much so that it took the former owners
two years to find someone to take it on.

Eventually a local family business, Bunting and Sons, decided to have a go;
they had something innovative in mind.

The Buntings are substantial landowners and have been farming locally since
1820. They'd recently acquired the farmland adjacent to the pub and it
seemed logical to create some kind of symbiosis between the two. "We wanted
to build something we could be proud of," explains Daniel Bunting, who takes
a lead role in running the Anchor along with his brother Hector; the country
gentlemen who appear in the photos on the wall. "We wanted to keep a pub for
the village, but one that served the best quality food that came directly
from the land all around it."

That plan didn't just necessitate an internal re-design for the pub, but
involved re-landscaping 100 acres of farmland. In the years that followed
the purchase in 2000 a large amount of tree-planting and tree clearing was
done to make the Anchor, in its riverside setting, the focal point of a
pastoral scene. Riverside trees were coppiced and kingfisher habitat
created. Traditional breeds of cattle, sheep and goats were chosen for the
adjacent fields, from where they can come down to drink at the water's edge.
And behind the pub some of the family's 12 Suffolk Punches were put to work
ploughing the ground to produce all manner of herbs and vegetables.
Horse-ploughing, say the Buntings, produces fluffier soil, and of course
doesn't shower the produce with diesel fumes.

The net result is something to both gladden the heart and to fill the
stomach. At the Anchor, food miles have been reduced to food yards, feet and
inches. And you can really taste the difference.

For the family business, the project has been a huge learning curve. "Most
farms these days concentrate on five or six crops to become economically
viable," says Daniel. "It is so much easier to work on the basis of
quantity, not quality, for the commercial market. Here, we've had to develop
120 crops in order to provide sufficient variety for the menus, and that has
meant a lot of learning on the job. Of course, we've made mistakes; some
breeds have done badly because the grass here is wrong. So we've tried
again."

Livestock wasn't the only product line to give them problems. Potatoes
turned out to be hard to grow in this soil, ducks from the river proved very
partial to the garden's Brussels Sprouts, and homemade butter didn't really
work. Cheeses, too, had to come from outside suppliers, after initial
attempts failed. "We're not going to stick religiously to our stuff if the
quality isn't right," says Daniel. "And some things we simply can't do -
prawns and wetfish, for example - but people still expect them on the menu."

A particularly successful part of the learning curve has been the creation
of the Anchor's own smokery for sausages, hams, fish and game, which comes
under the supervision of the chef, Carl Shillingford.

For Carl, the job represents quite a change from his previous career in
Michelin-starred restaurants in France. On first sight it might seem rather
a come-down. "I suppose you could say I'm a pub chef doing a farmer's
table," he concurs, "but the task is much bigger than that, and the supply
system that I have means that I have ingredients and quality that usually
only Michelin-starred restaurants would be able to afford."

Carl had been mightily impressed by the emphasis on local produce during his
time in France, and it was that which attracted him to the Anchor job when
he returned to the UK; what could be more local than produce from just the
other side of the kitchen door? The real challenge, however, comes in the
planning, in tailoring menus to what emerges and what will emerge from the
garden and the Bunting's estate. And in processing it all through his small
kitchen, without any middle-men doing any of the donkey work.

One of Carl's typical meat orders could amount to four suckling pigs, a goat
for kid curry, two or three spring lambs and one bullock, all of which needs
to be discussed months in advance with the farm, and to be butchered by him
and his staff. If he wants to try a bit of veal, for example, he can't just
go down to the supermarket and get a pre-prepared joint; he has to talk to
the Buntings to arrange for the bull to visit, so that eventually he'll get
his calf.

Alongside the long-term planning, there's a very immediate need for
flexibility, too, with the various hares, rabbits and pigeon shot on the
estate. When they arrive at the back door, that day's menu needs to change.

But does English farming necessarily produce English food? "To some extent
it does," says Carl. "but in the end I prepare food I like to eat myself. I
don't want to make it too chi-chi; this is, after all, a pub."

So the menu ranges from the Suffolk huffer, a triangular sandwich with a
difference, to beef wellington and roast pork followed by the likes of rice
pudding and jam roly poly. Then there's the smoked platter, the longhorn
steaks and the venison roulade, washed down with Pitfield Ale from the
Bunting micro-brewery (yes, they do their own drink as well).

And when you've consumed all that, you can wander outside to the vegetable
garden to watch the Suffolk Punches at work (usually a horse called
Surprise, on Tuesday and Thursday lunchtimes) and walk around a network of
permissive paths on the Heritage Farm.

The Buntings regularly host school parties, keen to show children just how a
food chain works, but generally they're fairly low-key about promoting what
they've achieved at the Anchor; there's nothing on the pub's exterior about
the integrity of what happens within. The public does get encouraged to
wander out the back to see for themselves, but only after they've tried some
of the produce first. "We don't want to become a visitor attraction," says
Daniel.

As a business proposition, the concept is performing well. It met its
self-imposed target of washing its face, economically-speaking, within three
years, and it is a great example of the quality that can be produced when
the chef has his own food chain.

But whether the Buntings model will be copied elsewhere is debatable. Not
many countryside entrepreneurs have both the opportunity, and the cash, to
buy a pub that happens to have a handy farm on the other side of the kitchen
door.