Osip restaurant

Merlin Labron-Johnson at the country pass

The daily menu starts with what the farms give up. Merlin Labron-Johnson works as chef-owner at Osip restaurant in Hardway, near Bruton, setting the kitchen around produce before the room fills. His path to this pass runs through Michelin-starred kitchens in Switzerland and France, and through In de Wulf in Belgium under Kobe Desramaults, before the return to the UK and the London years that shaped his appetite for restraint. At Portland, opened in 2014, he earned a Michelin star within nine months, at 24. Clipstone followed in 2016. Osip came into focus in 2019, and received a Michelin star in the 2021 guide. The present house is not the original town-centre site. In 2024, Osip moved out to 25 Kingsettle Hill, into a renovated former 16th/17th-century coaching inn on the lanes outside Bruton. The shift matters to the cooking: the restaurant now sits closer to the fields that supply it, with the chef’s station, the room, and the farming logic held in one visible circuit.

A menu written by the farms

Osip’s method is farm-to-table without the phrase doing the work for it. Between 70% and 90% of the ingredients come from its two organic farms, and the kitchen writes the tasting menu around that yield rather than around a fixed à la carte structure. A largely vegetable-led sequence may still make room for fish, game, or dairy when the season argues for it. The register of the food is precise and produce-first: fermented potato brioche with kefir cream and leek tapenade, chilled tomato consommé with fig oil, Orkney scallop with elderflower sabayon and charred white asparagus, venison and quail pithivier. Elsewhere the bench has sent out beetroot taco, grilled maitake with cep marmalade, fried parsnip with black garlic and togarashi, celeriac and scallop gateau, Bath soft cheese with toasted malt loaf. Dessert keeps the same discipline, whether chocolate sorbet with labneh and cherries, pistachio Paris-Brest with rocket ice cream, or lemon sea buckthorn tart. The wine program leans toward organic and biodynamic bottles; the alcohol-free pairings are treated as part of the craft, not an afterthought.

The room facing the fields

The pass sits behind glass, close enough for the dining room to read the work without turning service into theatre. White-washed brick columns, stone tones, beamed ceilings, locally felled oak, and a butter-hued palette keep the house quiet around the food. The old inn gives the room its bones; the renovation leaves enough air for the kitchen to feel current. Through the glass, cow-grazed fields hold the eye between courses. In warmer weather, a meadow garden extends the room outward, while the sitting room works as the first pause before the table. Above the restaurant are four farmhouse-style bedrooms named after Somerset rivers, a detail that keeps the house rooted in its county rather than in a hotel language. The close texture is rural, but not rustic. It is the field, the counter, the pass, and the plate held in sequence.

What the move made possible

The Michelin star belongs to Osip, awarded in the 2021 guide and carried into the restaurant’s next chapter. The move to Kingsettle Hill gave Labron-Johnson a house built for the long way: farms close by, a glass-walled kitchen, a meadow garden, and a former coaching inn that can hold dinner, sleep, breakfast, and return. The menu changes with the crop, and the method is durable. End the meal on the craft itself: a farm yield becoming fermented potato brioche, fig oil, or a venison and quail pithivier at 25 Kingsettle Hill.