However, this is exactly where Isaac McHale, chef-owner at The Clove Club in London, set up his small holding earlier this year.
“We only got going in May,” McHale says as we walk past the school football (or soccer, if you prefer) pitch. “It was really late so we’ve been playing catch up – we knew we wouldn’t get a full year of growing, but it’s a good start.”
Developed in partnership with the local council and OrganicLea, an urban food growing co-operative, the project was a natural next stage in McHale’s desire to grow produce as close as possible to the restaurant. “I’ve worked with Organic Lea for about 10/12 years. They rent a greenhouse on the outskirts of Epping Forest and grow crops for local communities, and we would buy a few things from them. They offered a space to us, which fell through, then this came up,” McHale says, gesturing toward the polytunnel in a far corner of the field.
Hale has hired gardener Hugo Silva to tend to the half-acre plot, reporting back throughout the week on what’s ready now and what’s coming in the next few weeks. The time it takes from picking the crops to their arrival at the Shoreditch restaurant can be as little as 30 minutes. Right now, McHale thinks The Clove Club’s restaurant/garden project is the only one of its kind in London.
Despite being in its infancy and having not yet hit a full growing season, the garden is already providing around 40 percent of The Clove Club’s vegetables and herbs. “This isn’t replacing the carrots, the onions, the basic workforce things we need; this is a project to create the beautiful additional vegetables we want,” McHale says. “It’s not a cost saving exercise – this is for growing money-can’t-buy stuff.”
“Things like this are one of the reasons we wanted to start our own garden,” McHale tells me as we walk through the humid polytunnel, holding out a tiny cucumber in his palm, flower still intact. The cucumber will be pickled; it’s flower “It’s the kind of thing chefs dream of being able to buy. Now we can grow them ourselves.” As we make our way through the rows of plants, carefully avoiding leaves and stems, McHale picks from the greenery, handing back specimens for me to try and letting Silva know what he wants sent to the kitchen next.
The varieties are delightfully weird and wonderful: sweet English tomatoes, a tub of which Silva kindly sends me home with; wild chamomile (also known as pineapple weed); UFO-shaped patty pan squash; and Shezuan peppers so strong that one nibble leaves your mouth tingling for half an hour. Silva is staunchly against the use of any pesticide or chemicals and is adopting a crop-rotation approach to prevent disease setting in and protect soil integrity as the project progresses.
The core of McHale’s inspiration comes from Forgotten Fruits: The Stories Behind Britain’s Traditional Fruit and Vegetables – an all-incompassing guide to the UK’s niche seed species by Christopher Stocks. “It’s an amazing book,” he says. “The stories of Britain’s different heirloom varieties have really inspired me throughout my career. Things used to be grown for flavor – as time has gone on, vegetables have been grown for quantity, speed and ease of transport, not flavor-first. Those old varieties that grew slower but grew better have fallen by the wayside.”
Well-intended farming restrictions brought in in the 1970s have seen many of the heirloom varieties McHale is so captivated by dwindle, but having his own growing space means he and Silva can work to reignite diverse crop growing. For inquisitive types like McHale, Forgotten Fruits directs to Thomas Etty, a small company based in Kent that dutifully documents — and sells — heritage seeds. “This is where most of our seeds have come from,” Hale says. “Its catalogue goes back to the 1600s, 1500s – even the 1400s … It’s an amazing chance to get some of these storied varieties back,” McHale says.
Eventually, the green-fingered duo aim to plant these seeds of change in the next generation of chefs and gardeners. The day I visited the garden coincided with the first time McHale had seen an additional polytunnel erected by the school, with the aim of hosting outdoor learning sessions.
“Lots of local schools have started community gardens,” McHale says, but circumstance has led to them being abandoned. “There ended up being lots of sad, decayed school gardens and everyone gets annoyed by the mess. From the start, we have wanted to integrate with the school and maybe run lessons. We don’t want to be here with no connection.” As we walk back towards the gates, the school bell coincidentally rings and hordes of teenagers pile out. None seem keen on planting vegetables yet, but time will tell.
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