‘Great food begins with great produce. It still needs great chefs to transform it into great dishes. The South West of Britain is uniquely blessed with all three.

‘It’s one thing to be blessed with lush grasslands, sparkling rivers and seas, shores stocked with shellfish and marine greenery, and austere moor land, rich with game and wild foods. It is quite another to have people who are prepared to nurture, manage and harvest them with care. And yet again, another to find chefs who have the wit, understanding and skill to take this produce and use its unique qualities to create
dishes of equal distinction.

‘The Trencherman’s Guide is now in its 20th year, but even the most optimistic of its early authors could not have foreseen the extraordinary renaissance in raw and not so raw materials, and the growth in the number of restaurants, gastropubs, cafes and tea shops making use of them. The number, variety and quality was unimaginable 20 years ago. Now there is hardly a corner of the South West where you can’t find great cooking based on great local materials, and ‘eat local, eat seasonal’ has stopped being a pious hope and become a brilliant reality.

‘Chefs such as Rick Stein, Nathan Outlaw, Michael Caines, Paul Ainsworth, James Graham and Mark Dodson have each turned to the meat, vegetables, fruits and dairy produce immediately available around them. It is easy to single out these immensely talented chefs, but the same is true of so many less celebrated cooks and their eating
establishments. This has created a network of centres of productive excellence – farmers, growers, fishermen, cheese makers, cider and drinks producers, bakers – and restaurants which support each other and serve as a model for the rest of the country.

‘As The Trencherman’s Guide shows, there is proper food made with proper care from proper, local ingredients to be found in the South West. Adapting a phrase from that long-forgotten poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, I say to anyone remotely interested in food: ‘South-westward go, the land is bright.’

Matthew Fort

Restaurant critic and food writer