New creative era rings in at gastro pub The Bell in Ramsbury

FROM lapsed vegetarian with an aversion for all things green to “Hestonism” convert and Fat Duck disciple, Jonas Lodge’s culinary trajectory is as impressive as it is bewildering.

Back in our parts, the nitrogen foam veteran and water bath fiend is settling into his head chef role at The Bell at Ramsbury, slowly ushering the gastro pub into a new era of subtle experimentation.

“It’s about balance,” explains the 32-year-old, who grew up in Oxford. “You have pub dishes and then you also have something on the menu that’s a bit more challenging. You want to gain people’s trust so they try something that’s a bit little different. I want to surprise people.”

Rather surprisingly, considering his credentials – chiefly his apprenticeship at Heston Blumenthal’s The Hind’s Head in Bray and stints at the Fat Duck – Jonas never intended to become a chef but a vet. His only real experience with food boiled down to helping his mother with the wedding cake commissions she took on in her spare time.

“I vividly remember making the marzipan roses for the cakes when I was eight or nine – mainly because I loved picking at the marzipan any time I got a chance!” he recalls.

When he realised even good A-level results would not make up for average GSCE grades he veered off course. But his love of animals never left him and, in fact, has since shaped his approach to welfare and ethical farming and sourcing.

“In a weird way for me it’s about respecting animals and sourcing them from good farms that treat them with due care before killing them.

“It’s not quite the same as saving their lives as a vet,” he adds with a brief pause. “In my head it works.”

While this belief placed him firmly ahead of the pack at the time, growing up an incorrigibly fussy eater with a loathing of “anything green” arguably did not. Neither did his brief dalliance with vegetarianism in college.

But he soldiered on regardless. Disappointed by his course in Oxford, which involved very little actual cooking, he took matters into his own hands and found a job as a commis at 18 at le Petit Blanc before moving on to Gee’s.

“It was a baptism by fire,” he laughs about his time at le Petit Blanc. “I couldn’t even hold a knife properly and got told off.”

before moving on to Gee’s. After two years he relocated to Madrid but the language barrier proved a major hurdle. He was turned down by every restaurateur and chef in the city until one day he spotted a minuscule eatery. He would not have looked at it twice had his then girlfriend not dragged him closer to peruse the menu board outside.

“It looked awful,” he says with a chuckle. “Then I saw the words ‘sea bream with pesto and chocolate sauce’ on the menu and I thought, ‘Yes, let’s go ask’.

“It turned out the chef used to be the head chef for the king of Spain. It was really cutting-edge food. I didn’t speak a word of Spanish and I would get yelled at a lot, so I learned Spanish in six months and I was promoted to sous chef.”

This avant-garde approach to flavours would form the core of his food philosophy from then on. He later joined the kitchen of Michelin-starred chef Sergi Arola, where he was introduced to the wonders of liquid nitrogen foam, and dishes more akin to chemistry starter kits than, well, starters.

Back in the UK he had an idee fixe – continue his education with the master of all things molecular in the UK, Heston Blumenthal. After a trial at the Fat Duck, the pioneer’s three-Michelin-star restaurant, Jonas was offered a job next door at Blumenthal’s pub The Hind’s Head. All the while he squeezed in shifts whenever he could at the Fat Duck.

After a spot in Manchester, where he carried on his schooling in “Hestonism”, as he refers to it, working under Blumenthal’s former protégé Laurence Tottingham, he returned to the South West for his first head chef job at The Red Lion in Cricklade.

He took the helm at The Bell in Ramsbury last year.

His goal was simple; experiment but leave the gimmicks (he makes a few concessions to the occasional plume of liquid nitrogen) at the door.

The challenge was not a small one – food aside, the team at The Bell was depleted and much of his time until last month was spent recruiting a solid crew. While he did away with part of the menu, making the offering his own, he did so sensitively, bearing in mind his surroundings – a gastro pub is still, he reasons, a pub. He immediately made ample use of the meat and produce readily available on the Ramsbury Estate.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to come in and change everything. You have to look at where you are and you still need some pub food,” he adds. “But the dishes we’ve kept, we’ve refined. They’re more precise. Working with Heston Blumenthal was eye-opening. At The Hind’s Head we would do the same dishes as the three-star restaurant, use all the same flavours and theory but change them into pub dishes. It has to look simple, effortless but you have to push the boundaries, you can’t take flavour combinations for granted.”

Slowly but surely he seems to be winning over locals but he still has some way to go, he insists, and is keen to break new ground, introducing intriguing new flavours and textures alongside pub classics.

Experimentation is part of his DNA and his latest dish, salmon with caramelised yoghurt – a yoghurt which takes no fewer than 18 hours to prepare – and treacle soda bread, is testament to this.

“There’s so much more we can do,” he says without missing a beat. “I can’t wait to see what I can fit in a water bath for 18 hours and see what comes out.

“I hate to get bored but with food you never run out of things to try.”

The Bell at Ramsbury is at The Square, High Street, Ramsbury SN8 2PE. Telephone 01672 520230 or email thebell@thebellramsbury.com.