There is a particular kind of resilience that runs through the best country chefs — the kind that does not romanticise hardship but simply gets back to work. Mark Shakesby has had cause to draw on it recently.
For 19 years, Shakesby's Restaurant at 3–5 West Street in Horncastle was a fixture of Lincolnshire dining. Award-winning, locally rooted and built on a cooking philosophy that took traditional British ingredients seriously, it was the kind of independent that defines a town's culinary identity without ever making a fuss about it. Then came October's floods. For a business that had already navigated four difficult years — and what Shakesby himself describes as "a turbulent 6 months" in the immediate run-up — they were, in his own words, "the straw that broke the camel's back."
Shakesby's closed. But Mark Shakesby did not stop cooking.
A New House, the Same Kitchen Philosophy
He has recently joined the Ingram Arms in Laughton, a village pub between Gainsborough and Scunthorpe that has long had a reputation as something more than a wet-led local. The fit is an obvious one. The Ingram Arms has the bones of a proper Lincolnshire country pub — cask ales, a beer garden, an open fireplace, the kind of rooms that feel like they were designed to be settled into — and has been looking to establish its food offer as a destination in its own right.
Shakesby's appointment does that at a stroke. The pub has named its restaurant section Shakesby's Restaurant, a decision that signals the seriousness of the arrangement on both sides. For diners who have followed Shakesby's cooking since his Horncastle days, it provides a clear forwarding address. For the pub, it attaches a name with genuine regional standing to a dining room that is now equipped to justify it.
"I have recently started at The Ingram Arms in Laughton near Gainsborough," Shakesby wrote in the announcement on his own website. "Some of Shakesby's favourites along with The Ingram's favourite dishes" will feature on the menu — a formulation that suggests continuity rather than reinvention.
What the Menu Looks Like
The cooking is grounded in the same tradition that ran through 19 years in Horncastle. Starters include garlic stilton mushrooms and grilled red mullet fillet with sweet chilli buttered wilted leeks — confident, unfussy dishes that let ingredients carry the weight. Mains run from homemade shortcrust pies — steak and ale, lamb, rabbit — to black garlic chicken and chargrilled ribeye, with a price point that reflects the setting without gouging the customer.
The pub side of the menu runs alongside, offering burgers, fish and chips, pizza and classic comfort dishes for those who want something more casual. It is a dual-register operation that requires a kitchen capable of managing both without either suffering — the kind of range that marks out a confident operation.
What It Means
The closure of Shakesby's in Horncastle was a genuine loss. Nineteen years of loyal custom, a team that Shakesby credits as integral to everything the restaurant achieved, and a body of work that had earned recognition across Lincolnshire — ending not because the cooking had run its course, but because a building filled with flood water.
What the Ingram Arms appointment represents is less a consolation than a continuation. The ingredients, the suppliers, the dishes that regulars will recognise — these move with the chef. For the pub, tucked on Blyton Road in a Lincolnshire village, it represents the kind of upgrade that money alone cannot buy: a kitchen now in the hands of someone who has spent two decades understanding exactly what this region's food can be.
The Ingram Arms is open Tuesday to Sunday. Shakesby's Restaurant is at 10 Blyton Road, Laughton, Gainsborough, DN21 3PR. Bookings and enquiries at theingram-arms.co.uk.