The Pony & Trap sits in the Somerset village of Chew Magna, about eight miles south of Bristol, in a building that has been a pub since 1831. When Josh Eggleton and his sister Holly took it on in 2006, the kitchen was running pub food of no particular distinction and the business was, in Eggleton's recollection, "struggling along." Fifteen years after its Michelin star, twenty years into his ownership, the pub is still recognisably a pub — draught beer, low ceiling, open fire, the smell of something good from the kitchen — and still, quietly, one of the most important restaurants in the West Country.
"I was twenty-three when we took this on," Eggleton says, sitting at a table near the window while the kitchen prepares for Sunday service. "I didn't know what I was doing, really. I had worked in some good kitchens and I had ideas about what the food should be, but the business side, the people side, the fifteen-years-and-still-here side — none of that was planned. It accumulated."
The Michelin star came in 2011, when Eggleton was twenty-eight, and the recognition brought the attention that always follows it: approaches from investors, conversations about expansion, the implicit question of whether a chef of his ability should be cooking in a village pub in Somerset or somewhere rather more visible. He turned most of it down.
Why He Stayed
The decision to remain at The Pony & Trap through various expansions — he now also runs Root, a vegetable-focused restaurant in Bristol's Wapping Wharf, and has interests in other Bristol ventures — rather than treating it as a stepping stone is one that Eggleton has articulated carefully over the years, and articulates again here with the clarity of someone who has thought it through many times.
"The pub is the thing that is real," he says. "Root matters, the other businesses matter, but this is the place where the identity of what I do was formed. The suppliers I use across all my kitchens — the relationships with the farms, the dairies, the growers in Somerset and the Wye Valley — most of those started here. The cooking philosophy — seasonal, local, honest, not trying to pretend we're somewhere we're not — started here. If I had left, I would have taken it with me but I would have lost the root of it."
There is also, he acknowledges, something about staying that is its own form of discipline. The chefs who cook in one place for a long time — and he names Sat Bains, Stephen Harris at The Sportsman, and Mark Birchall at Moor Hall as examples he respects — develop a depth of relationship with their landscape that is not available to those who move between projects. "The farmers know you. The suppliers trust you. The guests who come year after year — they're not coming for a restaurant, they're coming for a place. You can only build that by staying."
The Current Menu
The spring menu at The Pony & Trap this week is, characteristically, a document of the surrounding countryside in April. Wye Valley asparagus appears in two forms: raw, with a brown butter and hazelnut dressing, and warm, alongside a soft duck egg and cured ham. Somerset lamb — from a farm four miles from the pub — is the centrepiece: the rack roasted simply, the shoulder slow-braised and pressed, both served together with the kind of two-cut approach that makes the most of the spring's best protein.
Desserts include a rhubarb and custard tart that Eggleton says has appeared in various forms on his spring menus since 2008. "Guests ask for it," he says. "And every year the rhubarb is slightly different — earlier, later, more or less acid depending on the winter. The dish is the same and the dish is never the same. That's what seasonality actually means."
The Pony & Trap is open Wednesday through Sunday. The tasting menu is £90 per person; the à la carte is available from £35.