Category: Notes
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Duck, Eggplant and the Landscape of Southern France
Lunch at Château Capitoul felt like the food equivalent of the surrounding gardens – restrained, highly regional and completely confident in its ingredients . The opening dish was a carpaccio of Mediterranean fish dressed simply with olive oil, lemon, apple and radish. Clean, bright flavours with just enough sharpness and texture to remind you how…
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The Quiet Confidence of Château Capitoul – Sète
One of the most interesting things about revisiting a project like Château Capitoul is seeing what happens after the “new garden” phase has passed. Six years on, the landscape has moved beyond installation and into maturity, and it is far stronger for it. The discipline of James Basson’s design is what makes it work. There…
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Nîmes
Nîmes feels like a city designed by people who understood heat long before air conditioning. We arrived and walked first through broad boulevards lined with deep green plane trees, where water sits low in the paving and the hard Mediterranean light is softened by shade rather than hidden from it. Everything here seems designed around…
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Bonnieux
Today felt like a study in sculptural thinking – first in landscape, then in wood. In Bonnieux we visited La Louve, the extraordinary garden created by Nicole de Vésian. What strikes you immediately is restraint. Nothing shouts. The garden is clipped, pared back, disciplined – yet somehow deeply emotional. Rounded shrubs echo the hills of…
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The Landscape Beneath the Garden
There’s something fascinating about travelling through Provence with a group led by garden designer and writer Michael McCoy. After only a few days, you stop seeing gardens as isolated things. They become part of a much bigger landscape – geology, agriculture, climate, architecture, history and food all folded together. Today started with another private garden…
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Travelling Masterclass
For the next couple of weeks I’m doing something a little different – travelling through the south of France as part of a garden tour led by Michael McCoy. There are about twenty of us moving through Provence and the Mediterranean coast looking at gardens, landscapes and the relationship between climate, geology and the way…
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Rough Cut Kitchen – Notes from the Calanques
We spent today in the limestone country of the Calanques National Park outside Marseille, and it is impossible not to think about food when you walk through a landscape like this. The Mediterranean landscape has a particular harshness to it. White limestone cliffs. Thin dusty soils. Dry wind. Salt air. Everything is sun-bleached and water…
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Travelling in Provence
For the next couple of weeks, Rough Cut Kitchen is turning into a bit of a travel food diary. I’m currently in the south of France and, as you’d expect, the food culture here is impossible to ignore. Yesterday was Avignon. Today, Marseille. We’re now based in Aix-en-Provence for a few days while I wander…
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Getting the Sauce Right
Most of the time, what separates something average from something worth eating is the sauce. It doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need a bit of attention. Rushing it, or treating it as an afterthought, is where things usually fall apart. The flavour doesn’t develop, and the whole dish ends up feeling flat.…
Rough Cut Kitchen 