The Gunton Arms

Venison held to the fire

The rib of beef meets the heat in the Elk Room at The Gunton Arms in Thorpe Market, a pub built around flame, game and a steady pass. Stuart Tattersall is the executive chef, brought in for the October 2011 launch from Mark Hix’s London restaurants, and Hix’s ethos arrived with him: local, seasonal, vigorous, ingredient-led. The house cooking is direct. Venison from the surrounding deer park, beef from the Blickling herd, Cromer crab, mussels, pies and produce from the kitchen garden are set close enough to the open fire for the room to understand the method before the plate arrives. The food does not ask for decoration. It asks for timing, heat, carving, resting, and the discipline to leave a good ingredient alone when the fire has already done the necessary work.

A park kitchen measured by flame

The Gunton Arms sits in a 1,000-acre deer park, and the kitchen takes that setting literally. Estate venison is not a motif here; it is part of the supply line, moving from the land into a traditional British pub menu shaped around open-fire cooking. Rib of beef, venison and pies form the spine of the place, with a farm-to-table approach that reads through the grill rather than through explanation. The Elk Room gives the method its theatre, but the practical work stays old-fashioned: fuel, iron, meat, salt, judgement. The building itself carries older layers, having been acquired in 2009 and opened in October 2011 as a pub with 16 bedrooms. That restoration matters because the kitchen was not placed in a neutral room. It was put into a country house with fires, flagstones, art, and parkland at the windows, so the cooking had to hold its ground against a setting with a strong voice of its own.

The room around the pass

The room has the feel of a pub that learned restraint from use rather than polish. Flagstone floors take the sound of service; candlelit tables soften the edges; the fires do more than warm the corners. Modern art hangs against dark wood and antique furniture, giving the house a lived-in charge without turning dinner into a gallery exercise. In the Elk Room, the large open hearth keeps the pass visible in spirit even when the cook’s hand is hidden by smoke and distance. The appetite of the place is rural, but not sleepy. Deer move outside in the park, while inside the counter, the bar and the dining room hold a conversational level of noise, the kind that lets a knife on a plate and a log shifting in the grate stay audible.

What remains in the hand

The house carries a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and inside the room the beef is cut, the venison rests, and a pie reaches the table with its heat still held under the crust. This is a kitchen with little cover for panic, because a fire gives no second attempt at a rib of beef. The final memory is often the simplest one, the rib of beef from the Elk Room fire.