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At Restaurant St. Barts, Johnnie Crowe Celebrates Britain’s Culinary Bounty

The Michelin-starred chef has spent years building a tasting menu around the depth, range and surprises of British produce.

It’s a warm summer day in late July in London, and the bounty of the British Isles is on display at Restaurant St. Barts. A rich bite of raw Belted Galloway beef on toast; a pot of English peas on a Japanese-inspired chawanmushi custard; slices of St. Bride’s duck served with a sunflower satay sauce and chunks of Cornish lobster tail laced with sansho pepper. The dishes showcase a broad range of culinary inspirations, but every ingredient on the menu comes from within the U.K.

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It was that local ethos that chef Johnnie Crowe wanted to cultivate when he, Luke Wasserman and Toby Neill opened Restaurant St. Barts in 2022. The trio already operated Nest, a small Hackney-based restaurant with a seasonal menu. But Crowe felt he could take the concept further in a larger, fine-dining space. They found an empty site in Clerkenwell overlooking St. Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest parish church. 

The space is large and bright, but it also feels hidden away. “If you’re coming here, it feels a little bit secret and special,” Crowe tells Observer, sitting at Restaurant St. Barts. “This is a real passion project, and we want to make every little part of someone’s evening as special as it can be.”

When Nest opened at the end of 2017, Crowe had already begun immersing himself in the possibilities of local ingredients. He had previously worked at Michelin-starred pub the Harwood Arms and at Farringdon restaurant Anglo, both of which focused on British cuisine. But Nest was an opportunity to go further. Crowe soon found himself obsessed with finding local suppliers who specialized in different types of meat, rather than relying on a single butcher for lamb, beef, duck or whatever was currently on the menu. 

“That took me down the road of meeting these suppliers who are really focused on what their product is,” he says. “After we found all these amazing meat suppliers, I moved on to fish, and then it was vegetables, and then it was flowers, and then beans and grains. I really went down the rabbit hole.”

After applying those learnings to Nest, which relaunched earlier this year as........

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