Tansy — Our story
Visual concept preview of the Restaurant Bistro template's Our story page: Ten years of the same idea — the people who cook and run the room, and the nine suppliers the menu is written around. The sections below are a non-interactive composition of open-registry blocks.
Tansy opened the autumn the fish market nearly closed, in a chandlery that had stood empty for years. The idea has not changed since: shop first, write second, and keep the room small enough to look after.
The name is the yellow weed that grew through the front step the first winter, when the room was six tables and the fire did not always light. The step got fixed. The name stayed, to keep us honest about where we started.
I do not write a menu and then go shopping for it. I go down to the harbour and the market, see what is good, and the menu is whatever that was. Some afternoons that takes ten minutes. Some afternoons it is a fight.
Etta Voss, chef and co-owner
Eight of us, most here long enough to argue properly. You will be looked after by someone on this page, not by a rota.
Nine suppliers, all within a morning’s drive or a ferry ride, every one of them visited before they were ever rung. The menu is theirs as much as ours.
Two day boats out of Porthmere harbour. What the sisters land by eleven decides the top half of the menu.
Beef and lamb from the hill behind the town, hung properly and delivered on Thursdays in an estate car older than the restaurant.
A walled garden two lanes inland that grows to the kitchen’s list — and past it, whenever Ada decides the kitchen’s list is boring.
Oysters and mussels from the beds across the estuary, counted in dozens on a slate that has never once matched the invoice.
Flour from the last working mill on the estuary, which becomes the seven o’clock bake and the dripping toast.
Cheese from three farms over the water, chosen by Joan on the ferry every other Tuesday.
- 9 suppliers on the book, and no brokers
- 31 miles to the farthest of them
- 11am the hour the last van leaves for the kitchen
- All of it of the menu decided by that morning
A room this size only works if the town wants it there. The fishermen eat at the counter on Sundays, the market traders take the first tables in winter, and half the Long Room’s bookings are birthdays we have watched grow up.
The room is small, the menu is tonight’s only, and Joan answers from three. That is the whole system, and it has worked for ten years.