“How Does a County Taste?”: A conversation with Chef-Owner James Sherwin, Wild Shropshire
- James Massoud
- Jul 15
- 7 min read
At Wild Shropshire, there is no menu, no unnecessary fanfare, and no lemons – unless chef James Sherwin has managed to coax one into life in his polytunnel. This Michelin Green Star restaurant in rural North Shropshire is doing something rare in British dining: creating a hyper-seasonal, ultra-terroir experience that genuinely begins in the soil. Self-taught and once a paediatric nurse, Sherwin is now quietly leading a regenerative dining revolution, one fermented elderflower vinegar and local potato dish at a time.
You describe Wild Shropshire as “ultra-terroir.” What does that term mean to you when it comes to shaping a dish, or even a full service?
For me it's the idea of great taste because of the environmental conditions and transposing that across all the things we use. For example, we know the best asparagus is from the Wye Valley and the best rhubarb is from Yorkshire. So it's just taking that local thing to the nth degree and really looking at how a county tastes. My father-in-law's a retired dairy farmer and he will say that our county creates such good cheese and milk because the grass is really good. And the grass is really good because of the weather. So it's the term to use when asking, how does our county taste? How does the immediate vicinity taste around me? Why do things taste the way they do? That was the big idea behind the farm.
You’ve built Wild Shropshire on a regenerative farm — can you talk us through a recent dish that began with the soil and ended on the plate?
We've got our our potato dish at the moment that's really good. We're using our own little potatoes, dicing them while they're raw, washing all of the starch out of them, then cooking them very, very gently with lots of butter. Then about 300 metres down the road from me is all the wild garlic, so we've made wild garlic vinegar, wild garlic oil, wild garlic powder. And the dish is essentially just a mixture of potatoes, egg yolk and different forms of wild garlic – even the eggs come from two miles away, so everything is very close.
What’s something you’ve grown, foraged or preserved recently that surprised you in how it transformed a dish?
It's probably quite broad, but vinegars. Before I had my midlife crisis and became a chef, I was cooking out of lots of Jamie Oliver books and all of his recipes have a squeeze of lemon. Now, we don't grow a lot of lemons around here, funnily enough, although we are trying; we're trying in our little polytunnel. But we've started using lots and lots of infused vinegars. At the moment, we've got elderflower vinegar on, we've got rose vinegar, we've got a woodruff vinegar, things like that. I think the vinegars have made a huge, huge difference to our cooking. And then when it comes to foraging, pineapple weed is a brilliant example. Pineapple weed tastes like mangoes and pineapples, funnily enough. It's got that tropical, exotic flavour in grey, rural North Shropshire and all over the country. Nobody knows what it tastes like. No one's really tried it. But pineapples from thousands of miles away and mangoes from thousands of miles away, everyone's tried. I think that's been a big revelation to me early on in my career that we've got all these really interesting flavours here that we don't think about and we don't use. That whole discovery process was massive – what is it that tastes like vanilla? What tastes like cloves? What tastes like cinnamon? And what tastes like ginger? We've got all these, quote-unquote, exotic flavours, not in the form that we usually see them in.
With no fixed menu and ingredients changing daily, how do you approach storytelling through your food service to keep guests grounded in the experience?
For the most part, guests won't have any idea what they're eating. Then when we do give them the menu afterwards, we'll go and have a chat with them. Some people want to know every single ingredient and every element and how we've done it – and that's really cool – other people have had a few glasses of wine, they've had something to eat and they're happy, and they go home. But there's something really nice and connecting with a conversation at the end of the meal. I've given you something I'm really proud of, you can now ask me about it and interact with me as much as you want about it.
How do you balance technique and elegance with Wild Shropshire’s very naturalistic style?
I think I'm a slightly older chef now in that I've been doing it a wee while. Some of the dishes are very, very technical. Some of them are not at all. I think it's just balancing what's right for the dish. It's like I always say, it's like songwriting. I don't like a lot of restaurant plating, it's overly elaborate. It's things for the sake of it, if I see gold leaf on something it pisses me off. The current trend of putting truffles and caviar on everything is just fucking boring. If we were plating 14 plates at once, there isn't the space to put in the odd little petal here and the odd little petal there, and all that kind of stuff. So plating here is purposely kept very simple, clean, and minimalist.
From paediatric nurse to self-taught chef, how has your previous career shaped your approach to hospitality, resilience, or even plating?
I've never been asked that question before. Thinking about it now, I think I'm very good at reading people. I would imagine that comes from looking after people, just in a very different way. I've learned to treat different guests in different ways. Joe [Stark], my sommelier is very good at that as well.
How do you make limitation – be it climate, crop failure, or seasonality – work for you in the kitchen?
Firstly, we've got to be able to turn on our heels and change duration very quickly. Fortunately, we've got the lab and in there we ferment and pickle, so we have this library of flavours that we can call back on if needs be. Over time and with experience, you get used to the weather destroying ingredients or the polytunnels blowing away, and stuff like that.
What role does fermentation play in extending your hyper-seasonal model?
Fermentation is brilliant. All the best things in the world fermented, aren't they? Certainly in the summer leading into the autumn, we don't use so many ferments so much because there's just so much stuff to use, it's almost a battle trying to get everything onto the menu before it all comes and goes. We take the excess stuff in the summer and then use it later on in different ways, which makes sure our menu stays hyper seasonal. Fermenting gets us through those months when there's not so much around.
How important is your dialogue with local growers, foragers, and your own team in evolving the Wild Shropshire offering? Does collaboration shape the food?
I've got my set idea of what the restaurant is and that box of ideas I have, everybody else brings something brilliant to it. Whether that be Rachel, my butcher, or again, Joe our sommelier who loves restaurants and eats in all the restaurants he can. Everyone wears different hats and everyone contributes in creativity in different ways, it's very a refreshing approach. I'd like to do this for the rest of my life, but that means it has to keep changing. It can't be that rigid thing that 10 years down the line is exactly the same because that's not who I am as a person. I think if we were cooking the same menu in two years time, I'd just be fucking bored. It's with any aspect of your life – you get bored, you change your car or you change your phone. Luckily I've found a couple of people who are in the same mindset as me.
Do you think there’s space in British dining right now for food that asks questions?
I think so. You know, my restaurant's not massive. We're never gonna do 40 seats a night or a hundred seats a night. But I think it's experiential dining, isn't it? And everyone wants experience. This is our take on that. The Fat Duck's still huge – it's these kinds of restaurants that are challenging to some degree. And while I don't think our flavour profiles are challenging, that initial hurdle of, I'm not telling you anything, is massive for some people. When you think of food, most people, when they tell you food stories, it's things they've eaten in really culturally different countries. Maybe that's what we're playing on a little bit. Trying to create memory and excitement.
You’ve earned a Michelin Green Star for your sustainability ethos. Do you ever feel pressure to maintain a certain standard or does the recognition simply reaffirm what you were doing already?
Yes, essentially. There's always that pressure to maintain the standard. We are not the standard I want to be at though, so actually the pressure comes from being better than we were. There's always that pressure to keep getting better and maintain the Green Star. There's always that pressure to convince our suppliers to change the way they transport things or something like that. There's always that internal pressure from myself.
What do you think the future of rural dining in the UK looks like? Can restaurants like yours help shape a more regenerative food culture beyond the plate?
I think one of the things we've got right, that I'm quite militant about, is that we are a niche little thing. I think the problem with a lot of rural dining is not having enough of a personality, because you've not got that same footfall as you have in major cities. People think it's too hard to come and see us, but it's not hard. Most people want to go to that same place they've been a hundred times and I think that's another problem. Rural dining is so special and we as an island are very lucky with the produce we have. So we need more people to be aware of that.
