Working seasonally and letting ingredients shine: meet Alex Dome, Wilding’s new head chef

After a busy lunch service the week before Easter, our comms lead, Anna Ford, grabbed a few minutes with Wilding Kitchen’s new head chef, Alex Dome, to ask him how he’s finding life at Knepp, and what we can expect from his refreshed menu. Here’s what he told her.

What drew you to the Knepp Wilding Kitchen?

I have a varied cheffing background, working with Michelin-starred chefs, as a consultant and with high street brands. Throughout my career, what I’ve enjoyed the most is working with the best possible ingredients, and deciding how to make them shine.

I heard about Knepp just before lockdown, and about the White Stork Project. Since then, I’ve been visiting regularly to explore the Wildland. When this role came up, I was actually travelling in Vietnam. I saw the advert, and thought “right, that’s my calling!”. So I stopped travelling and came back.

You’ve been refreshing the menu. What can we expect?

Now, we have one kitchen and one menu, which serves both the people who are come for a long, leisurely meal, and the ones who pop in for a post-walk lunch and want something quick like a toasty, or a soup.

We’ll be changing the menu seasonally, but also reviewing some dishes weekly so we can be responsive to the fresh produce coming from the Market Garden and from the rewilding project. And there will be a few staples which we will keep on the menu throughout.

This week, for example, we have lamb on the menu, in a nod to Easter, from a local farm. And we have fresh asparagus arriving, and vibrant green garlic from the woodlands.

Can you tell us about meat at the Wilding Kitchen?

We have a nature-led menu, and incredible quality meat from the rewilding project. We use what nature gives us which is usually venison, beef, and sometimes pork. At the moment, our venison dish is really beautiful. It’s a char-grilled loin, which is a muscle which does hardly any work, so it cooks beautifully. And we serve it on some barley with a really rich sauce, and fresh wild garlic.

You talk about nature-led food. What does that mean?

For me, nature-led is about ingredients being recognisable, for what’s around us right now, and what’s in season. If you were to do a tour of the Market Garden, you would see the same things as are on our menu this week. We want people to make that link.

And we’re making sure the ingredients are recognisable for what they are. So, for instance, with our Market Garden salad, we serve the whole leaf. We’re not tearing it down. And with the red kale, at the start of the season it was a few centimetres long. Now it’s probably double in size. We’re not chopping down those leaves.

Rhubarb is another example. We’re cutting it into batons rather than inches. So it’s both delicious and recognisable. We want people to feel a connection with the ingredient they’re eating, and how it grows.

With you as head chef, will there be plenty of options for vegans and vegetarians?

Yes. We ‘hero’ the fantastic ingredients that come from the Market Garden, and think about how to create delicious dishes around them. So, I’m not going to be trying to recreate a steak that is vegan, but instead, I’ll be letting the natural produce shine.

Asparagus is coming in at the moment – that doesn’t need an egg-based hollandaise sauce to be exceptional.

As a chef, it must be quite unusual to have such direct connections with the producers of the food?

Yes, it’s amazing. The produce from the Market Garden is grown just yards away. The meat comes from the wildlands on our doorstep. And all of our fish comes from one trusted day boat fisher, who fishes just off the coast of Bognor.

We work with what is ready and what is fresh, rather than what we request. With the market gardeners, we plan ahead as they’re ordering seeds for the next season. They’ll order seeds in January for tomatoes which will be harvested in August. We’re in constant communication with them, asking what’s ready this week, what’s early, what’s late? At the moment, we’re forward planning for a summer bounty of tomatoes, squashes and courgettes, and will adapt our menu accordingly.

And with the meat, we’ll be speaking with the butchery, and adjusting our menus according to what people are ordering and what meat is coming through from the rewilding project.

For the fish, we only work with one fisher, who works ethically, and sustainably and doesn’t trawl. Sometimes he uses a line, and sometimes he drops nets. And our agreement is that we take absolutely everything he catches. Last week was really good – we had cuttlefish, mullet, skate and sea bass. The week before, we only had sea bass. So what that means is we need to be really flexible with the methods of cooking our fish.

It’s an inspiring, dynamic way to work. And it means our customers know that will always get fresh, locally-sourced dishes.

Has working at Knepp changed your mindset in any way?

Knepp has opened my eyes to how incredible meat can taste, when the animals have lived healthy, free-roaming lives, and are left to forage for their diets naturally from the Wildland, rather than being stuffed with industrially-produced grains and antibiotics.

Working with this quality of meat, the challenge is often: how little can I do with this ingredient to let it shine? So, for me it’s about really stripping things back and simplifying the processes.

How do you want people to feel when they’re eating your food?

When you come into the Wilding Kitchen, I want you to feel looked after, welcomed and at home. We cook with the best, freshest ingredients and to the highest level, but I want it to feel accessible and for customers to recognise the techniques we’re using. I’d love people to feel like they can go home and try to recreate something they’ve eaten at Wilding Kitchen.

Even though the rewilding project has been going for a couple of decades, we’re a young restaurant, still building our reputation and customer base. I’d love people to feel a connection with the Wilding Kitchen too, and to support us by coming to see what we’re doing with the produce from the Wildlands.

We understand that team welfare is important to you. Is that right?

Yes, absolutely. There’s an old saying: if you have happy chefs, you have happy food. I think you can really tell when food is cooked with care.

We’re lucky have an open kitchen. So many chefs work in kitchens in basements. We look out at the courtyard every day. Sometimes, we see white storks flying over. We saw a barn owl the other day. I mean, it’s an incredible environment for our team. And that’s an important ingredient in building a happy team.

Barbecue season is about to start. Are you looking forward to it?

So from May, every Friday night, we’ll be doing barbecues in the courtyard. What we’re trying to do this year is really simple. One dish will be a steak from the Wild Range Meat butchery, and the other – a char-grilled aubergine – will be from the Market Garden. And then we will serve that with simple salads from the Market Garden as well.

As a team, we’ll wheel out the grill from the Kitchen and we’ll work outside. People can come, grab a drink, grab a bite and have a great time. So, yes, the barbecues will be fun evenings.

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