Most mornings, before anyone sits down upstairs, the back door at Royal Maritime House sees more traffic than the front. Eggs from a farm a few miles inland. Meat from a butcher on Ryde High Street. Fish from Cornwall, cheese from London, the odd parcel from further afield. What ends up on the plate is only as good as what comes through that door.
These are the people behind it. Some are on the Island and some aren’t, and we’re not going to pretend everything we cook grew within sight of the Solent. We buy each thing from whoever does it best, and where that’s someone down the road, all the better.
The eggs: Hazelgrove Farm, Ashey
Fourteen trays of eggs arrive from Hazelgrove Farm every Wednesday. The farm is at Ashey, a few miles inland from Ryde, and has been in the same family since 1965. They’ve kept hens since 2011, and there are now around 4,800 of them across eight houses, out foraging in the grass from dawn to dusk.
It’s a small operation run by people who care about it. The eggs are collected by hand twice a day and graded on the farm, and the hens are fed on grain from the Isle of Wight Grain Group. When the family were asked a few years ago why they do it, the answer was simple: “It has to be a passion really as there’s not a lot of money in it.”
You’ll find them in the Hazelgrove egg mayonnaise sandwiches on the afternoon tea stand, and at breakfast most mornings. If you want some for home, the farm shop at Ashey is open around the clock.
The butchers: D.W. Jarvis, Ryde
D.W. Jarvis Family Butchers is on Ryde High Street, a few minutes’ walk up the hill from us. When the kitchen needs something for the next day, it’s a phone call or a text the day before and it turns up in the morning. Having a proper family butcher that close is one of the quiet luxuries of cooking in Ryde.
The specialist meat: Alternative Meats, Shropshire
For the cuts a high street butcher wouldn’t usually carry, we buy from Alternative Meats in Shropshire. It was founded in 2001, and it’s now owned and run by Rachel Godwin, the head butcher, with an all-female team, which, as they point out themselves, is still a rarity in the trade. They supply Welsh Wagyu, British rose veal, rare-breed pork and game to a lot of kitchens whose names you’d recognise.
The fish: Flying Fish Seafoods, Cornwall
You might expect an island restaurant to get all its fish from the Island. The Solent has its moments, but our fish comes from Flying Fish Seafoods in Cornwall. Johnny Godden started the business in 2006, and it now supplies some of the most demanding kitchens in the country. The promise that matters to us is theirs: from the boat to the plate within 48 hours.
If you want to know which fish to order when you’re here, our guide to the fish menu goes through it.
The caviar: Exmoor Caviar
The caviar we buy comes from Exmoor Caviar, which started in 2012 in the foothills of Exmoor in Devon and describes itself as the UK’s only sturgeon caviar farm. The original farm ran on Devon spring water filtered through slate and sandstone. It’s a British product doing something most people assume has to come from the Caspian, and it does it well.
The wasabi: The Wasabi Company
Fresh wasabi is a different thing from the green paste in a tube, which is usually mostly horseradish. The Wasabi Company were the first growers of fresh wasabi in the UK and Europe, and when a dish calls for the real thing, that’s where it comes from.
The cheese: La Fromagerie, London
La Fromagerie began with Patricia Michelson selling a single wheel of Beaufort from her garden shed. She opened her first shop in Highbury in 1992, and it’s now three shops in London, each with its own cheese room, and a wholesale business that supplies restaurants around the country. When there’s a cheese course, the cheese usually comes from them.
And the ones you never see
Not every supplier ends up on a plate. Olleco collects our used cooking oil to be recycled instead of thrown away. Nobody ever writes about their oil collection, but a kitchen that fries chips every day gets through a surprising amount of it, and it seemed wrong to leave them out.
Things change
Suppliers come and go with the seasons, and with what’s good that week. If you’re curious about where something on your plate came from, ask whoever brings it to the table. If they don’t know, the kitchen will.
For what the Island itself grows, catches and makes through the year, read the Isle of Wight larder.
Questions we get asked
Where do RT Café Grill’s eggs come from?+
Hazelgrove Farm at Ashey, a few miles inland from Ryde. The farm has been in the same family since 1965 and keeps around 4,800 free-range hens.
Where does the fish come from?+
From Flying Fish Seafoods in Cornwall, who aim to get fish from the boat to the plate within 48 hours.
Is all the food from the Isle of Wight?+
No. We buy each thing from whoever does it best. The eggs and a lot of the meat are local; the fish, caviar and cheese come from specialists on the mainland.