The question that follows almost every conversation about the British restaurant industry — "what's next?" — is one that Hrishikesh Desai has spent more than a decade not answering in the way it usually expects. He has been at Gilpin Hotel and Lake House in the Lake District since 2013. He is still there. He shows no visible interest in leaving.
"Cooking in one place for a long time is a discipline that the industry doesn't celebrate enough," he says. "Every year, you know the landscape a little better. You know the farms, the seasons, the specific suppliers — not as abstract relationships but as actual relationships. Your cooking develops roots. That rootedness is the thing that's hardest to transport, and the most valuable thing you have."
The spring menu at Gilpin's two-Michelin-starred HRISHI restaurant launches this week and is, as Desai's menus consistently are, a document of a specific place in a specific season. Morecambe Bay shrimps in a warm bisque with local wild garlic butter. Herdwick lamb from a farm a few miles from the hotel, the saddle roasted and served with a sauce built from bones that have been reducing in the kitchen since January. Lake District wild mushrooms — chanterelles and morels foraged by a supplier Desai has worked with for eight years — appearing in a course that Desai describes as "the forest speaking directly."
The Indian Thread
Desai's background — he trained in India before coming to the UK, working at The Latymer at Pennyhill Park among others before Gilpin — is present in his cooking without dominating it. There is precision in his spice use, a comfort with fermentation and with acidic notes, and occasionally a dish that bridges his two culinary heritages in a way that feels earned rather than contrived.
The current spring menu includes a langoustine course with a light curry-leaf and coconut velouté that has been on various iterations of the Gilpin menu since 2016 — one of those dishes that proves its right to stay by never becoming invisible. "It represents something about how I cook," Desai says. "It isn't a fusion statement, it's just — this is how I think about langoustine. The fat of the shellfish, the brightness of the curry leaf, the richness of coconut. It tastes like somewhere specific to me, and that somewhere includes Cumbria and Mumbai at the same time."
What Staying Produces
The practical consequences of cooking in one location for over a decade are, in Desai's account, almost entirely positive. Supplier relationships that took years to develop now operate with an ease that makes last-minute menu changes manageable rather than disruptive. Staff who have been at Gilpin for five or more years — several of the kitchen team have tenures that long — understand the food at a level that new hires take a full season to approach. The hotel itself, a family-owned property that has grown from a small lake house to a collection of spa lodges and two dining rooms, is an environment where the food and the hospitality are genuinely integrated.
"Some chefs need novelty — new city, new kitchen, new challenge — to do their best work," Desai says. "I think I need continuity. I am not the same chef I was in 2013. The place has changed me more than I have changed it."
The HRISHI spring tasting menu at Gilpin Hotel is £115 per person. The hotel's second restaurant, The Gilpin Spice, offers a contemporary Asian menu from £45. Bookings at thegilpin.co.uk.