Claridge’s Goes Organic

Claridge’s is used to the best. It’s used to being the best, to serving the best and to welcoming the best into the hotel. For some years, Executive Chef, Martyn Nail has taken pride in serving the best modern British cooking, using the freshest of seasonal ingredients, locally sourced. Provenance, sustainability and free range are words much used in Claridge’s kitchens and now there is another one – Organic.

Claridge’s has introduced a full organic breakfast, along with organic cheeses, wines and regular options on the du jour menu. The organic menu is about giving choice, choice to the customer, to Claridge’s guests. As Chef Nail says, ‘Moving into organic isn’t an effort to be fashionable, it is a continuation of the way it’s always been – Claridge’s being the best and wanting the best for our guests’.

Having always worked with the best, highest quality ingredients, Chef Nail needed to find the best of the best in the organic market for Claridge’s - a recognised name with an excellent reputation, in which he could trust. Step up Daylesford Organic. Lady Bamford’s award winning organic farms in Staffordshire and the Cotswolds now supply Claridge’s with much of its organic produce, such as Poll Dorset lamb, Aberdeen Angus steak, smoked salmon, butter, jams and bread.

An organic breakfast at Claridge’s could begin with that healthiest of healthy drinks, a shot of organic wheatgrass. For the more feint-hearted perhaps an organic juice - grape, apple & prune, apple & bilberry – presents a fresher and more flavourful start to the day.

Bread, delivered daily (and exclusively) from Daylesford, includes a toasted, brioche-like white pain de mie, pumpernickel loaf and a dark, nutty fruit bread packed with healthy seeds.

The eggs are yellower, the smoked salmon paler, the bacon and sausages more meaty and concentrated in flavour. The yoghurt is clean yet creamy, the butter pale and light but creamy too and the jams……! The jams taste like jam used to do. The flavours, greengage, plum, damson, blueberry, when first tasted transport you for an instant to the dappled orchard or sun-drenched garden in the heart of the English countryside where the fruit was grown.

Chef Nail now includes an organic starter and main course on his daily menu, for both lunch and dinner, as a matter of course. He has also recently introduced organic British cheeses. He chooses a cheese of the week – always organic and always British – an idea which has proved immensely popular.

So the best of organic has become a part of Claridge’s best – as always it’s a matter of choice.

For further information, visit Claridges.co.uk.