London Stars Hope for Restaurant Success Outside the City

The chef-restaurateur behind several London institutions and the duo behind one of its best new restaurants will look to Somerset and the Highlands respectively for fresh success.

Margot Henderson, of Rochelle Canteen and formerly the French House, the Quality Chop House, and the Eagle, will open the The Three Horseshoes, a pub in Batcombe; Florence Knight and Jonny Gent, of Sessions Arts Club, will open Boath House near Nairn.

Henderson’s pub, which will sport bedrooms and a walled garden, is opening with a menu familiar to fans of Rochelle: devilled crab; ricotta gnudi with the cheese coming from local dairy Westcombe; a chicken and tarragon pie. Gent and Knight are yet to announce details of the food offering at their new “creative sanctuary,” but it will have not one, but two restaurants. It, too, will have a walled garden.

Henderson and Knight and Gent are part of a growing number of London chefs who have sought to broaden their horizons without leaving the capital entirely. Skye Gyngell, of Spring in Somerset House, opened a restaurant at Heckfield Place in Hampshire; Salon and Levan’s Nicholas Balfe opened Holm, also in Somerset; and Jeremie Cometto and David Gingell, behind Westerns Laundry, Primeur, Jolene, et al, opened Fitzroy in Fowey, Cornwall.

More soon on both projects.