Clisby, who joined the Cotswolds venue earlier this month, oversees the food offer in the hotel’s restaurant and glasshouse.
He has put together a menu that includes ricotta raviolo, lemon, sage, parmesan; salad of confit duck, chicken livers and watercress; Tamworth pork loin, cavolo nero, pumpkin, grapes and sage; warm marmalade and almond tart, and Jersey cream; and meringue, cardamon custard, and quince.
Clisby’s CV includes time in Michelin-starred kitchens and formative roles under Adam Byatt, Mark Hix, Tim Hughes and Anthony Demetre. After leaving Petersham Nurseries he launching his own restaurant residency Emile in Shoreditch in 2019.
“It’s great to be in at The Rectory - I’ve loved getting to know all the wonderful local producers and suppliers, and we’re really pleased with the first menu we’ve put out,” he says.
“All of us here are aligned on the kind of food we want to be bringing to the table; there’s a fantastic appetite for our kind of cooking here in the Cotswolds, and we look forward to welcoming everyone from near and far to trying our new dishes.”
Clisby is one of a number of chefs to have taken over the stoves at The Rectory in recent years. Previous head chefs have included former La Trompette chef Rob Weston, who led the kitchen from October 2022, and Jake Simpson, former managing director and head chef at Bocca di Lupo, who took over the running of the kitchen in January last year.
The Rectory is a Georgian manor house hotel that was bought by Alex Payne in 2016 and reopened in summer 2017 after an extensive refurbishment. Payne also owns The Potting Shed pub that sits across the road from the hotel and a part-share in recently restored pub The Salusbury.