The Cottage in the Wood is about as far removed from the metropolitan restaurant world as it is possible to get. Perched 1,000 feet above sea level in Whinlatter Forest in the northern Lake District, it looks across a dense conifer canopy towards Skiddaw and Bassenthwaite Lake.
Deliveries require careful planning; recruitment can be difficult and getting snowed in is a winter hazard. On one memorable occasion, the property ran out of water.
Yet the restaurant Jack and Beth Bond are creating there has a distinctly metropolitan outlook. Jack’s bold, minimalist dishes draw on a career spent at restaurants including Eleven Madison Park, its short-lived sister venture Davies and Brook, and Restaurant Gordon Ramsay.
Beth, who has also worked in some of the capital’s best-known restaurants, has developed a contemporary wine list with an emphasis on low-intervention producers. This all adds up to an experience that feels distinct from other restaurants in The Lakes.
Performing a juggling act
The couple made it clear they weren’t interested in maintaining the status quo when they took control of The Cottage in the Wood in 2024, but they have managed to make the restaurant their own without alienating locals or guests who have been visiting for decades. The remote property has been a restaurant with rooms since 2002 and has held a Michelin star since 2019.
More impressive still is that The Bonds have been getting to grips with running their first restaurant with rooms while raising a family. Their son Ruben is only a month older than the business, and when Restaurant catches up with the couple over Teams, he is unwell and watching cartoons in the small house behind the hotel where they currently live.
Jack and Beth take turns speaking, passing the conversation between them as one goes to sit with him. It is a perfect illustration of how they make their lives work (though life has become busier still since our interview, with the arrival of Ruben’s little brother earlier this month).
“In the morning I do the breakfast shift and then pass Ruben to Jack, who takes him to nursery,” says Beth. “Juggle is definitely the most appropriate word.”
“We’re learning how to run a business and how to run a hotel, which is something we underestimated,” adds Jack. “We’ve done all the things you’re not meant to do together: moved house, had a baby and bought a business. I don’t think it’s recommended for anyone’s mental health.”
A honeymoon that became a business
The Bonds did not arrive at The Cottage in the Wood with an acquisition strategy. A series of decisions and coincidences drew them from London to the Lake District and, eventually, to the restaurant.
Jack had regularly visited the area on family holidays and, when the couple became engaged during lockdown, was determined they should marry there. Beth, who had never visited the Lakes, chose Low Hall on the edge of the northern Lakes as their wedding venue.
While planning a short honeymoon, she spotted a vacancy for a food and beverage manager at hotel Another Place, The Lake on Ullswater. The couple had discussed leaving London and decided a temporary move north would let them find out whether Lake District life suited them.
Beth secured the role and Jack joined Gilpin Hotel & Lake House, where he applied to be sous chef but was offered the head chef position. They saw the move as something approaching a gap year before returning to London.
Gilpin gave Jack an early insight into the regional market. He joined shortly after Ollie Bridgwater had succeeded Hrishikesh Desai and helped develop a new menu.
“It was useful because I was able to understand the Lake District clientele and see how we could win over people who were used to eating in a certain way,” he says. “It taught me the importance of listening to the locals. That was the mindset we opened with here.”
After their wedding, the Bonds spent two nights at The Cottage in the Wood, a stay given to them by Beth’s mother. The restaurant with rooms was already on the market. With eight bedrooms, around 30 covers and a spectacular location, it seemed to embody the business they might like to run together one day.
But at that point, the idea seemed fanciful. They had neither sold their London flat nor decided to stay permanently in Cumbria, so took it no further.
The opportunity returned through an unexpected route. The Cottage’s then owners, Kath and Liam Berney, approached London-based chef and restaurateur Chantelle Nicholson, for whom Beth had previously worked, believing her sustainable ethos would make her a good fit for the property. It was too much of a commute for Nicholson, whose restaurants include Apricity in Mayfair, but she suggested the Bonds and put the two couples in touch.
“We told Kath and Liam that we had stayed here on our honeymoon, remembered it very well and had said we would like to own something like it one day,” says Beth. Liam simply said “Sold”.
The Bonds had little capital and no experience of buying a hotel. The Berneys, meanwhile, needed someone to lead the restaurant kitchen after the departure of its star-attracting chef Ben Wilkinson. The two couples agreed that Jack and Beth would begin operating the property while Kath and Liam gradually stepped back, giving the Bonds time to raise the money.
They eventually bought the business while renting the building from the Berneys, an arrangement that made the deal achievable. The restaurant performed strongly enough for them to buy the property too.
“We have a mortgage, but we own the whole thing now,” says Beth. “Kath and Liam are fully retired.”
A different flavour of the Lakes
The Lake District has one of the UK’s densest collections of ambitious restaurants – it has more stars than any other area in the UK outside London - many shaped directly or indirectly by L’Enclume chef Simon Rogan. Jack’s background gives The Cottage in the Wood a different set of reference points.
The seven-course dinner menu, priced at £130, uses sparse descriptions that leave much of the experience to be discovered at the table. Dishes include tomato, shiso and strawberry; monkfish with courgette and marigold; and lamb with artichoke and almond. The restaurant also offers a five-course lunch menu for £80.
“I want to be different from everyone else in the Lakes,” Jack says. “There’s a lot of criticism of menus written with very few words, but I like the minimalist approach.
“I want people to be able to taste things. If an ingredient is written on the menu but you can’t taste it, what’s the point? The dishes can look dramatic, although I want them to retain a natural quality on the plate. At the end of the day, it has to taste of something.”
“Jack has a background working in big cities. Many chefs in the Lake District have inevitably come through Simon Rogan’s restaurants, so that brings a different influence,” Beth adds.
Her wine list leans towards natural and low-intervention producers, less familiar appellations and grape varieties.
“A lot of people are excited to try something different,” she says. “I like to offer wines or appellations they might not have encountered before, but there should also be something they recognise. I don’t want to alienate anybody.
“Wine, food and going to a restaurant should be enjoyable rather than intimidating. Somebody might say they like New Zealand sauvignon blanc, so I can say: ‘You can have that, or you could try this. I think it’s a better alternative and it won’t scare you.’”
The matched wines give Beth more freedom because diners have placed themselves in her hands, although she remains alert to what they actually enjoy.
“There have been wines on the pairing that people simply haven’t liked, and you have to listen to that. It isn’t about me or my ego or what I think is best. If the Lake District isn’t ready for my crazy natural riesling, we have to find something else.”
The same balance shapes the dining room. Led by Beth and recently appointed GM Neil Rivington, service is knowledgeable but informal, and chefs regularly deliver dishes. Jack’s record collection lives in the lounge, where guests are encouraged to put something on the turntable.
“Paul Leonard from Forest Side came in and said he was envious because the restaurant felt real and felt like Beth and me,” says Jack. “That meant a lot. You can aim to create that feeling, but you can never be certain that is what people experience.”
Baptism by Michelin
Taking over an established Michelin-starred restaurant brought pressure. The Bonds could hardly have expected their cooking to be assessed so quickly.
The Cottage reopened on 17 January after little more than a week of preparation. The new team had not cooked the entire menu from beginning to end and had deliberately avoided anything overly elaborate. Snow surrounded the property and Beth was heavily pregnant. Kath greeted diners, Liam oversaw the wine service and the kitchen consisted of Jack and one other chef, who is now his head chef.
There was one booking: a table for one.
“We thought it was a bit funny and wondered whether it might be Michelin,” says Jack. “It was a few weeks before the Guide announcement, so it made sense that they might want to check us out.”
Any remaining doubt disappeared when the diner arrived.
“Liam came into the kitchen and said: ‘Just so you’re aware, Michelin is sitting on table eight.’ I asked him how he knew and he said it was the same inspector who had given Ben his first star at The Cottage. So, no pressure.”
No invitation to the Michelin ceremony followed, leaving the couple convinced the star had been lost. They watched the announcement on a phone in a pub before discovering The Cottage in the Wood was among the restaurants that had retained their awards.
“We were made up,” says Jack. “I think Michelin simply had the wrong email address.”
The star gave their new business a valuable platform, although losing it would have allowed them to rebuild without the expectations attached to an existing award. They were also keen to show that retaining it reflected their own work.
“When we were invited to the following ceremony in Scotland with our names on the invitation, that was the really proud moment. We had retained it for a full year. It wasn’t six months of somebody else’s work that we had taken over.”
Lessons from bigger kitchens
Each stage of Jack’s career has informed how he approaches The Cottage in the Wood. He spent around nine years within Marcus Wareing’s restaurant group, which gave him a grounding in discipline, consistency and the realities of professional cooking.
Eleven Madison Park changed his understanding of hospitality more fundamentally. Then led by Daniel Humm and Will Guidara, the New York restaurant was known as much for its culture and approach to service as for its food.
“They were massively inspirational people who spoke a lot about building a good culture but also followed through on it,” says Jack. “They made time to do things and that opened my eyes.”
He returned to London to join Eleven Madison Park’s Claridge’s outpost Davies and Brook, working under chef Dmitri Magi. There he learnt how to open a restaurant, recruit a large team and apply elements of American hospitality within one of London’s best-known hotels.
Davies and Brook operated seven days a week while attempting to limit employees to 48-hour working weeks. Separate morning and evening teams were supported by eight sous chefs. The structure was complicated and arguably overstaffed, but it showed Jack that a high-level restaurant could run without excessive hours.
Its closure, after Humm and Claridge’s disagreed over his plans for a fully plant-based menu, left Jack questioning whether he wanted to remain in the industry. He applied to teach at a Waitrose cookery school but was rejected for being too cheffy and going into too much detail.
Instead, he joined Restaurant Gordon Ramsay as executive development sous chef, working alongside Matt Abé and Kim Ratcharoen. The role combined dish development with service: Jack might help on the pass at lunch, present new dishes to Abé in the afternoon and move between pastry and the main kitchen at dinner.
“You learnt discipline and why everything had to be ready at a certain time,” he says. “It was hard work, but I learnt a lot from Matt.”
Those lessons are now being applied in very different circumstances. The Cottage’s kitchen team numbers five, including an apprentice. Fish arrives once a week rather than daily, ingredients cannot always be ordered at short notice, and menu development has to fit around service.
“Last week we didn’t even have a gas stove because it had been cut off,” says Jack. “I get frustrated because I can’t get ingredients on demand as I could in London. You need to plan and, if you want to change the menu, you have to think on your feet. That’s where the foraging and preserves came in.”
Recruitment has largely relied on personal connections. One chef worked with Jack at Marcus before moving to kitchens in Copenhagen and Berlin; another worked at Casamia before returning to the north west. The youngest member of the brigade approached The Cottage for a stage shortly after the Bonds arrived and impressed them enough that they created a role they had not budgeted for.
A small team gives each person more responsibility and a closer connection to the dining room. Chefs serve courses themselves and speak to guests even when a dish has not been well received.
“It’s too easy for chefs to hide in the kitchen, particularly when something has gone wrong,” says Jack. “Our chefs still go out and serve the next course. They might have an awkward conversation about why a guest didn’t like something or why we made it that way, but I think it makes them better chefs.”
Staffing the dining room is harder still. Beth says the Lake District’s small permanent population, considerable second-home ownership and pockets of deprivation in West Cumbria narrow the pool of people with experience of ambitious restaurants.
Front of house can also be a harder career to sell than the kitchen. The Bonds put team members through WSET qualifications and give them ownership of areas such as the wine list, creating reasons to stay and develop.
“We’ve tried to create a culture based on the best of what we wanted when we were coming through restaurants,” says Beth. “Our management style is influenced by what we felt was lacking when we were learning in London and New York.”
Cottage industry?
The Bonds have barely had time to settle in but are already considering how the property might evolve.
First come the “less exciting jobs”: upgrading the water supply and making the hot water and heating more reliable and energy efficient. For now, signs in the bedrooms warn guests that a shower immediately before dinner may be rather chilly.
The kitchen Jack inherited is also holding the restaurant back. “The workflow could be a lot better,” he says. “At the moment, we’re at capacity in terms of what we can offer from the space.”
Once it has been improved, the couple may look to push for a second Michelin star by elevating the experience. That could mean fewer dining room covers and a more theatrical approach.
“It is achievable should we want to do that, but we need to build up to it,” says Jack. “We’ve attacked lots of things head-on, but that step requires meticulous planning.”
They also intend to make more of The Cottage’s grounds, expanding the garden and creating walking routes for guests. A fermentation room is planned, while the nearby house in which they currently live could eventually become a chef’s table or more intimate dining space.
Before too long, they hope to establish something in Keswick.
“It’s a very busy place, but when we go there to eat, we sometimes get frustrated by the options,” says Beth. “Ambleside has a Michelin-starred restaurant, good coffee shops and places to get decent sandwiches. Keswick could have more going on.”
One possibility is fulfilling their longstanding ambition to run a “really good” pub. Whatever they do next, Beth wants them to remember how they approached their first business.
“We didn’t initially shout about who we were when we took over. Winning over the locals first was important. We wanted the reputation to radiate outwards rather than shouting and trying to grab everything at once.”