The cream of the crop creates homely yet sophisticated dishes with a sustainable focus at this restaurant set deep in the Oxfordshire countryside
One glance at the menu at Five Little Pigs is enough to give you an idea of what's in season at any given time. When The Caterer visits, rhubarb appears no less than three times, wild garlic is in its last throes and fennel crops up here and there.
"We are desperately doing everything we can to be as sustainable as possible," executive chef Aimee Hunt says. When she talks about seasonality, she doesn't want it to be a passing signal of sustainability; she uses each ingredient to its maximum.
The restaurant sits in the town of Wallingford, which is surrounded by lush greenery, countryside roads and rustic brick buildings, and is almost equidistant from Oxford, Reading and High Wycombe. Hunt hails from the latter, having put her degree in history aside in favour of hospitality. She trained on the job, running a café and a catering business before landing with her business partners Rob McGregor and Sam Smith, who run a bar called the Keep in Wallingford.
The menu is laid out into small plates, large plates and desserts – and although Hunt would prefer that her clientele take a mix-and-match, tapas-like approach, she has left the door ajar for a starter-main-dessert comfort zone.
Hunt is proud of her suppliers (whom she calls "phenomenal"), and lets the produce lead the menu, which changes weekly with new dishes coming on as specials and then staying for as long as she has the produce. Small plates might include aubergine rounds cooked in soy and sugar and topped with basil, or Cornish mackerel simply charred and scattered with flaky salt with the aforementioned rhubarb as a pickle on the side. From the bigger plates section, Hunt loves the ham hock broth – a restorative dish flavoured with a mirepoix and aromatics, then served with waxy potatoes, lovage or celery, and an orange-yolked egg.
"It's like proper home cooking but elevated to restaurant level," she says. "I'm a mum and I do think sometimes that comes through in my menu with wholesome dishes."
A waiter heartily recommends the tempura onion, which turns out to be a whole array of tempura vegetables and a dollop of green aioli. A radish – leaves and all – is mummified in the lightest of batters, one of a vast yield grown on the rooftop of the restaurant. Hunt has such a haul that the bar was tasked with creating a radish cocktail, with the resulting drink having a pink hue and a cross-section of a radish as a garnish, making it look like something out of a Beatrix Potter book.
Hunt's team want to grow as much as possible, but space is a limiting factor, so they launched the ‘Spare Bed Project' to get the community involved. Locals will lend a patch of land – anything from a plant pot to an orchard – to grow produce for Five Little Pigs. In return they get a free drink each month and an invitation to a harvest party and the Christmas party.
"Wallingford is blessed with people who have a relative amount of land and they're also very generous," adds Hunt.
It was a customer who brought her the chive flowers Hunt uses to garnish her potato bread. Strong bread flour is mixed with mashed potato, yeast, sourdough starter and smoked Maldon salt, then a seasonal green, such as wild garlic or chives, is added to the dough to add colour and flavour. It's left to prove, then placed into muffin tins coated in wild garlic butter. The cooked bread is then is topped with ricotta made in-house – the whey byproduct of which is added to sauces for extra creaminess, mixed with butter and brushed on lamb, or used for lacto-fermenting tomatoes. Bacon jam goes on top of that, made with bacon, whiskey and a little coffee, along with chives and their flowers.
The produce that doesn't make it onto the menu is made into liqueurs that act as digestifs – such as the nocino made from green walnuts.
"It's a real labour of love but they're absolutely brilliant," says Hunt. "We're trying to bring the same seasonality we have in the kitchen out onto the bar."
With the restaurant in full steam, Hunt dares to glance at future plans – the team are in the process of acquiring the building next door to add rooms to the offering: "That's the next thing on the horizon, which is coming at a terrifying speed, but there we go."
From the menu
Smaller plates
- Confit chicken wings, mint, chilli £9.5
- Scotch egg, Calnan's sausagemeat, black pudding, beetroot ketchup £10
- Ox-cheek fritters, sweet rhubarb pickle £9.50
- Potato bread, house ricotta, bacon jam £8.50
Bigger plates
- Cotswold kid ragu, Witheridge, gnocchi £19
- Wild garlic and watercress pancake, pecan, beetroot £18
- Lamb rump, wild garlic mash, beetroot £26
- Roasted cauliflower, asparagus, broad bean, cashew cream £17
Pudding
- Chocolate ganache, chocolate soil and chocolate mint sorbet £9
- House doughnut, rhubarb jam, vanilla custard £8
26 St Mary's Street, Wallingford, Oxfordshire OX10 0ET
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