The Middlewick in Glastonbury has overhauled its café menu format, replacing a traditional seasonal offering with a culinary calendar that turns eight times a year in alignment with the ancient pagan sabbats and the kitchen forages for many of its own ingredients to make it happen
The award-winning farm café, spa and holiday destination at the foot of Glastonbury Tor in Somerset, has launched what is believed to be a UK first in café menu programming: a full annual calendar structured around the eight sabbats of the pagan Wheel of the Year.
Head Chef Elliott Leigh has redesigned the café’s all-day brunch format around eight distinct seasonal menus, each launching in alignment with a sabbat -Yule, Imbolc, Ostara, Beltane, Litha, Lughnasadh, Mabon and Samhain. Every menu is built around what the surrounding Somerset landscape is producing at that precise moment, with owner Jill Barker foraging many of the ingredients herself from the woodland and hedgerows surrounding the farm.
The current Ostara menu features wild garlic, young hawthorn leaves and wood sorrel alongside produce from neighbouring farms including grass-fed Aberdeen Angus beef from White’s of Wick and organic salad from Paddington Farm next door. As the wheel turns through the year, the kitchen will work with elderflower at Beltane, soft fruit and meadow herbs at Litha, and sloe, rosehip and hedgerow at Samhain.
The move to an all-day brunch format which replaced the previous split breakfast and lunch service, has also eliminated the kitchen’s peak-pressure changeover at 11:30am, streamlining service and improving the dining experience across the board.
“This format has given our kitchen genuine creative freedom,” says Jill Barker. “Elliott and the team are cooking with what the land around us is actually offering rather than working to a conventional seasonal template. It changes how you think about a menu entirely.”
The Middlewick Café holds Gold at the 2024 Somerset Tourism Awards and Silver at the South West Tourism Awards. The café seats 140 covers across indoor and outdoor terraces and is open seven days a week, 8:30am–3:00pm for food, with coffee and cake until 4:00pm. Find out more at themiddlewick.co.uk.
