Easter Sunday at The Hand & Flowers in Marlow this year marks the return of a service that Kerridge ran annually until the pandemic interrupted it: a whole roast lamb, carved at the table, sourced from a single Buckinghamshire smallholder and slow-cooked overnight in the pub's kitchen. The tradition, paused through 2022 and 2023 while the team rebuilt post-lockdown, is back for 2026 as a ticketed Sunday lunch available across both sittings.
"Easter lamb feels like the most honest thing you can put on the table at this time of year," Kerridge says. "It's the season, it's the occasion, and it gives the kitchen something to really commit to technically — you can't rush it, you can't recover it if it goes wrong, and it rewards the time you put in."
The lamb comes from a farm near Princes Risborough with which Kerridge has worked on and off for over a decade. The animal is dry-brined 48 hours in advance, stuffed with wild garlic and anchovy butter, and roasted at low temperature before being finished over the pub's wood fire. It arrives at the table whole, on a board, and is served with Herdwick dripping-roasted potatoes, braised spring greens and a bone broth gravy reduced over two days.
Spring Menu
The Easter Sunday service sits within a broader spring menu that The Hand & Flowers has been running since mid-March. The approach, as has always been the case at Kerridge's flagship, is classically French-trained British — technique-heavy but grounded in local sourcing and ingredients that read clearly to the diner rather than requiring explanation.
Starters this spring include Cornish crab with cucumber and dill crème fraîche, and a pressed terrine of ham hock and foie gras that has appeared on the menu in various forms since the early years of the pub. A new addition is a warm salad of grilled asparagus with crispy hen's egg and a sherry vinegar dressing — asparagus season in the Chilterns starting, Kerridge says, around the last week of April in most years but already arriving from Worcestershire growers in the meantime.
Main courses run to a roasted rump of Hereford beef with bone marrow crust, a butter-poached fillet of halibut with Jersey Royals and seaweed beurre blanc, and a mushroom Wellington built for the pub's vegetarian diners that Kerridge describes as "not an afterthought — it has to earn its place."
Desserts lean into the season: a forced rhubarb tart with custard ice cream, and a milk chocolate and salted caramel egg that the kitchen has been preparing for Easter specifically since early March.
On the State of the British Pub Dining
Kerridge, whose output now includes The Coach in Marlow, Kerridge's Bar & Grill in London and a number of licensed product lines, remains committed to The Hand & Flowers as the expression of what he describes as the irreducible case for serious food in a pub setting.
"There's still something that happens when you come into a space that looks and feels like a pub — low ceiling, open fire, no tablecloths — and the food that arrives is genuinely extraordinary," he says. "People are surprised every time. They didn't expect it. And that surprise is something that a restaurant with a Michelin reputation and white linen can never quite reproduce."
The Hand & Flowers Easter Sunday lunch is available from 12:00 and 14:30. The menu is £95 per person. The full spring à la carte is available Wednesday through Sunday.