Peter Prescott has swapped the hustle of London’s restaurant scene for something rather slower paced: fermentation. It is an unexpected next chapter for someone who helped create and run some of the capital’s best-known restaurants.
For 18 years, Prescott was Terence Conran’s right-hand man and latterly his business partner. He went from running the influential designer and restaurateur’s Chelsea restaurant Bluebird to overseeing operations across the group, before joining forces with Conran on ventures including Boundary, Albion and Lutyens.
Though he retains a sideline in restaurant consultancy – recent projects include Mayfair’s Silva – more and more of his energy is going into CultJAR. The rapidly growing Somerset business produces ferments, pickles and condiments, having started as a way to preserve a pandemic surplus from his Victorian kitchen garden.
Its seasonal range now extends to around 45 products, sold through delis, farm shops and its own website. It also collaborates with restaurants including London’s Koya and, closer to home, The Newt and Root.
How did you get into the world of fermentation?
It was probably around the time when Terence Conran and I were launching Albion in Shoreditch. People have obviously been pickling things for thousands of years, but fermented foods were big in East London among trendy types in the early 2010s, more as a health food thing than a restaurant thing. I got into making pickles at home. Then, a few years before the pandemic, I was consulting on a London Nordic restaurant, Eldr at The Pantechnicon, and that took me to Copenhagen.
I’m guessing the Noma Fermentation Lab was part of your itinerary?
It was, but it wasn’t just Noma doing fascinating things. The Scandinavians are necessarily fermentation experts due to the very short growing season. A lot of the innovative, high-end places were growing their own produce and preserving it, including Barr, Manfreds and Relæ. I remember a fermented carrot dish at the latter that looked really austere, but the layers of flavour blew my mind.
Was a fermentation business part of the plan when you moved to Somerset?
Not really, but I knew I wanted to do some sort of food production. The farm we bought had an old Victorian kitchen garden, so I started by reinstating that and growing unusual vegetables and herbs, supplying restaurants including Osip. Then the pandemic hit and restaurants closed. We had a surfeit of produce, so fermentation was the obvious solution. Natoora was one of our first stockists, and from there we started supplying independent delis and farm shops. After about two years we launched a direct-to-consumer business, and that has really taken off.
And you work with restaurants too…
We work with quite a few, including Root, The Newt and Koya. We don’t do white label. A lot of our projects are done on a collaboration basis. We have six products developed with Shuko Oda, the executive chef at Koya, including soy-pickled cucumber and an umami oil, which are served and sold in the restaurants but also available online.
Do you still make any of those early recipes?
Yes. One of the very first ones is now one of our bestsellers: essentially a take on celeriac remoulade without the mayonnaise. One of the founding principles of CultJAR is that we avoid the obvious: we don’t do sauerkraut or kimchi, or at least not kimchi made with cabbage. We like to be creative and, I suppose, a bit cheffy. We’re up to 45 products now, which most consultants would say is far too many. But it’s because we work seasonally with lots of different produce.
Do you only use your own produce?
That was initially the plan, but it wasn’t practical due to how unreliable farming can be. We can’t grow anything like what we need now. We do still grow some things, though: we harvested two tonnes of baby cucumbers this year, for example. We buy from like-minded producers and make sure it’s fresh when we ferment it. You can prolong the life of poor vegetables by fermenting and pickling, but it’s hard to bring their flavour profile back to life. With pickling, it’s influenced heavily by the vinegar and sugar. With fermentation, it’s 98% vegetables, so you have to have good produce.
I suppose cleanliness is key…
The cleaning has to be scrupulous: the jars, the barrels, the equipment, all of it. If you’re going to allow things to decompose, everything else around it has to be pristine. But in terms of the product itself, you’re not killing bacteria off; you’re encouraging the good bacteria. It’s a fine balance between encouraging and controlling. What we’re doing is essentially managed decomposition. The vegetable is evolving and becoming a new product.
And you still work as a restaurant consultant?
Yes. My current project is Silva in Mayfair. I worked with Daria Grebenyuk ahead of the launch, looking at locations and developing the concept, and continue to work with them. I’m doing less consultancy these days. I still enjoy it and think I’ve got a lot to offer, but it’s a very tough market. Last year I did five feasibilities for one client on different concepts. Each was quite a lot of work: the cost plan, site selection. Not a single one is going ahead. Back in my Conran days, we opened so many restaurants. I’m not saying it was cheap, but the cost now has shot up dramatically. It’s way more than inflation. It wasn’t planned, but I’m very pleased I diversified.
Where did you start with Terence Conran?
At Bluebird in the early 2000s. We had four restaurants and a juice bar, a cheese shop and 10,000 square feet of fresh-food retail, modelled on La Grande Épicerie in Paris. A members’ club, an outside catering division. It was a food lover’s heaven. We had something like 100 different types of olive oil. But all of that was probably ahead of its time.
It was later scaled back…
Everything was doing phenomenal numbers, but it was extremely hard to make money. We had a florist, a chef’s shop, a knife shop. If you loved food, I don’t think London has seen anything like it since. But it wasn’t viable. One by one, we had to dismantle it: stop doing this, outsource this, change the model of that.
What was Conran like to work with?
He had a mischievous character. If it hadn’t been done before, he wanted to do it. If it had been done before, he didn’t want to. He wanted to be groundbreaking, new and different. He had this vision of great food in unpretentious, well-designed environments. It was every single detail: the height of the banquette, the height of the tables, the materials. Everything had to be coherent. The weight of the cutlery was relevant to the concept.
It sounds like he was quite demanding…
Yes, but always extremely polite. I worked with him for 18 years. Soon after starting at Bluebird, I became operations director for the whole group. After the group became D&D London, I became his business partner. What struck me the most about him was that he was interested in every single aspect of the business. He’d be interested in how the kitchen porter would work, how goods receiving would work. When we looked at a new site, he’d be looking at whether we had enough space for the pots in the kitchen. He would always oversee the design of the cooking suite because he knew the menu. He had the menu in his mind. With Conran, there was always something more to achieve, always another restaurant to open, another idea.