Somewhere in the first week of October there is a morning when you leave the house and it is properly cold. You can see your breath. The light is low and yellow. By the time you reach the restaurant you already know what you want to eat, and it is not what you wanted last week.
Our three kitchens feel it at once. The cooks stop asking for salads and start asking for things that simmer. The pasta team makes pumpkin tortelli and nettle gnocchi in brown butter. The Salt Room team puts a fish pie on the menu and takes the crudo off the top. In Ferro the first soups appear on the counter at lunchtime, and the bakers start making cardamom buns again.
What changes first
It is always the same few things. Squash comes in, and with it sage, chestnuts and the first hard cheeses. Leaves turn from soft to bitter and from green to red. Fish moves from bright to rich: out go the light white fish of summer, and in come turbot, halibut and monkfish. Desserts shift from fruit to quince, chestnut and chocolate.
The cooking changes too. A kitchen in July is full of raw things and quick things. A kitchen in October is full of things that spend a long time in an oven. Our ragù, which cooks for five hours at any time of year, suddenly seems like the only thing worth eating. Lamb shoulder goes on in the morning and comes off in the evening. The bread at Ferro gets darker.
One kitchen, three rooms
We do not tell our chefs what to cook. What we ask is that they cook from the same ten or twelve growers and producers, and that each menu be written in the week the ingredients arrive. The result is that three very different places end up with the same quiet mood. The pumpkin at Ortiga is from the same field as the squash on the Ferro sandwich. The celeriac under the halibut at Salt Room came out of the same field as the leeks in the Ferro soup.
I like that. It means that if you eat with us on a Tuesday in Stockbridge and a Saturday in Leith, you are in different rooms but at the same table.
The autumn menus are on the website now and in the restaurants from the first of October. They run until the end of November, and then the winter menus take over. Come and see which dishes you like best, and tell the team. They read every note.
