Richard Vaughan, Huntsham Farm, supplies Simon Rogan, L’Enclume, Fera and The French

Back in March 2009, Richard Vaughan of Huntsham Farm in Herefordshire made possibly the best decision of his professional life when he rocked up at Simon Rogan’s Cumbrian enclave, L’Enclume, hoping to sell some of his middle white pork to perhaps the most notoriously picky of all Britain’s Michelin-starred chefs. Seven years on, not only is Vaughan still selling his pigs to Rogan’s ever-expanding empire (the chef now also runs Fera in London and The French in Manchester), but the trade as a whole talks about Vaughan’s middle whites in quasi-reverential tones. “I haven’t a clue what makes our pork different from other people’s pork,” he says with a contented chuckle, “but that’s because I’ve got no idea how anyone else farms their pigs. I only know how we look after ours.”

Vaughan may claim not to know what sets his pigs apart, but Rogan certainly does: “Richard’s pork has incredible flavour and fat content and, as anyone who knows anything about cooking will tell you, the fat’s where all the good stuff is. I was aware of the British tradition for middle whites, and the quality of the meat, but they went out of fashion last century because of the rise in demand for bacon pigs, which are by necessity much leaner.”

When you’re cooking at the level Rogan is, you tend to deal only in world-class products, and he says wouldn’t hesitate to put Vaughan’s middle white in that category. “His are healthy, happy animals, and that really shows through in the end product. I’d go so far as to say he’s the blueprint for how any pig farmer should operate.”

Vaughan cheerfully admits that he doesn’t play by the pig-farming rulebook: “We slaughter our pigs at about five months, then hang them for 13 days, which is thought of as a bit wacky. ‘You don’t need to hang pork,’ they all say. Well, in my book, you do, because that’s how our customers like it. Any animals that are over-fat or over-lean go into sausages, which ensures we can deliver a very consistent pork pig. What’s kept me and Simon together so long is that, essentially, he likes what I do. I’m under no illusions that if I don’t keep my standards up, he’ll just look elsewhere.”

That doesn’t seem likely any time soon: Rogan’s attention to detail in his sourcing is such that he even has his own farm within spitting distance of L’Enclume, to supply the restaurant, and for a time they dabbled in rearing lop ears. “They were very high-maintenance,” he says, “and since the farm is run predominately by our chefs, we just can’t spare the time to manage pigs, too.”

To call Vaughan’s profession high-maintenance is a bit of an understatement, especially when you consider his latest groundbreaking wheeze, which was the happy byproduct of a failed experiment for Nuno Mendes. “A year or so ago, Nuno asked us to try hanging a carcass for him for 40 days – he was after something similar to the pigs they have in Portugal and Spain. I thought he was being daft, and told him so, but we gave it a go. As it turned out, it wasn’t quite right for him, but it got me thinking. I had an old fridge doing nothing, so decided to trial a 55-day-aged carcass. When we tasted it, everyone went “Wow!” – the meat was thicker, more unctuous. It’s not quite a ham, but it’s moving in that direction.”

The new product knocked Rogan’s socks off, too. “I’d put his dry-aged pork on a par with the best Iberico any day,” he says. “The fact that it’s British is just the icing on the cake.” He now has it on the menu at both Fera and the French.

For a small outfit that sells just 30 pigs a week in all, it’s innovations such as this that help keep Vaughan in with the serious operators such as Rogan. “I don’t get to speak with Simon as much as I used to,” he says just a little sadly. “But that’s because he’s such a big wheel these days. Mind you, for us every customer is – so long as they pay their bill on time.”

Emily and Lucy McVeigh, Kenton Hall Estate, supply Richard Turner, Turner & George

The McVeigh sisters aren’t exactly your average cattle farmers. For one thing, they’re in their early 20s (Lucy’s 21 and Emily 25); for another, they’re – shock, horror – women. By contrast, Richard Turner has the look of a man born to work in the meat trade: burly, bearded and maybe not quite as buff as he used to be. Talk about chalk and cheese – but, as it turns out, they’re kindred spirits.

“I only met them last autumn,” Turner says, “when I was judging the meat category at the Young British Foodies awards 2015. They came second, but their longhorn beef stuck in my mind. They’re only young kids, but they’re passionate about what they do, and their product is excellent.”

Emily remembers the meeting rather differently. “It was terrifying,” she says. “The other judges were James George [Turner’s business partner in rare-breed butcher’s Turner & George] and Neil Rankin, there were six finalists, and we had to cook them a steak. We were the only girls, too; meat farming is still very male-dominated.”

She can say that again, but for your product to catch Turner’s eye is a rare achievement no matter your age or gender. “Their longhorn is bloody gorgeous,” says Britain’s Mr Meat, “but the other thing about them is that they clearly love cattle farming, from ageing and husbandry to new techniques, the whole shebang.”

Lucy runs the farming side, while Emily is the marketeer; it helps that their father is behind the scenes, too. “Dad’s still involved, but he more or less handed over the day-to-day business to us about two years ago,” Emily explains. “He’s in his 50s now and wanted to take a bit of a back seat. It was Dad who started our longhorn herd with seven cattle back in 2007; now we’ve got 50. We started selling it commercially only two years ago – before that, it was just for friends and family.”

It’s still a relatively small-scale operation, but Turner has plans for Kenton Hall’s beef. “At the moment it’s a question of supply – there’s no way I could take their stuff for Hawksmoor, for instance, because they simply don’t have that kind of capacity.”

That said, he’s now counting the days until the herd is big enough for Turner & George’s purposes, and he’s already got the McVeighs lined up to supply “a couple of things I’m working on right now”. Turner is one of those restaurateurs who has always got a project or five on the go: as well as the Hawksmoor empire, he’s also involved with Pitt Cue and various street food events, and is currently helping set up Bastien, a duck-themed joint scheduled to open in London later this year.

Turner sees the sisters as the vanguard of the new wave of farmers who care deeply about working ethically and sustainably. “Lots of farmers pretend to be like that,” he says with a snort of derision, “but they’re just jumping on the bandwagon because it makes them look cool.”

The McVeighs, however, both talk the talk and walk the walk. “Ethical farming and delicious meat go hand in hand,” Emily insists. “Most beef cattle are slaughtered at 18 months – we keep ours to 30 months, then hang them for another month after that. It’s an old-fashioned approach, sure, but the older the animal, the better the taste. Richard feels exactly the same way.”

Turner has also helped broaden Kenton Hall’s horizons, Emily says. “We’re doing a pop-up at the Vault Festival in London at the moment – just our burgers, hotpot, that kind of thing. Richard helped us feel our way into the London market, which is a massive deal for us.”

The sisters have time on their side, and not just because they’re still so ridiculously young. “It’s very early days,” Emily says, “but we’re in no mega-rush.” And anyway, it’s not as if they’re going anywhere else: “Our family’s been farming since the 1640s, so it’s in our bones.”

Guy Grieve, the Ethical Shellfish Company, supplies Tim Hughes, J Sheekey

Six years ago, Guy Grieve seemed to be heading down a very different career path. He had lived solo for a year in the wilds of Alaska, taken his young sons out of school to sail from Venezuela to Scotland and had two TV series under his belt (2007’s The Wild Gourmets and A Cook’s Tour Of Spain three years later); not to put too fine a point on it, he seemed well on his way to becoming a kind of prototype Bear Grylls. But in 2010 he dropped everything, upped sticks with his family to the Isle of Mull – “the edge of the world, more or less,” he says with a grin – and set out on a new adventure as a scallop diver.

It would be a whole year later that Grieve’s new business, the Ethical Shellfish Company, got its big break when Tim Hughes started buying his scallops for J Sheekey. “It was our first real sense of hope,” Grieve says. “If someone of Tim’s calibre thinks you can come up with the goods, everyone else takes note.” Having Hughes on board didn’t just mean Sheekey’s, either: he’s chef director across Caprice Holdings, so also holds the purse strings at Scott’s and The Ivy, among a host of others. It helps, also, that Hughes is a proper, old-fashioned no-nonsense chef, the kind who just gets on with the job, rather than pining to show off on the telly.

“We used to get our scallops from all over the place,” Hughes says. “Wherever our buyers could find them, basically – some were hand-dived, but a fair few were dredged. Then Roy Brett at Ondine in Edinburgh called up out of the blue to tell me about this fantastic new operation on Mull. When I tried Guy’s scallops for the first time, I was totally blown away. They had it all: fantastic quality plus provable sustainability is about as good as it gets in this game. So I immediately told Guy that if he could get the delivery systems right, I was totally up for doing business.”

Hughes’s decision had a profound impact. “At the time, I did all the fishing myself,” Grieve says. “And all the deliveries, too – you could say I have a sadomasochistic inclination.” It helps that he’s a walking, talking Duracell bunny of a human being, with apparently boundless energy and enthusiasm. “I was fishing out of a six-metre inflatable rib because it was all we could afford, and afterwards I’d rush off to catch the 7pm ferry from Mull, drive straight to Birmingham to make the first deliveries at 4am, then carry on down to Tim in London. It was knackering, but without Tim taking a punt on us, I doubt we’d be where we are now.”

These days, Grieve operates out of a 10-tonne larchwood boat, complete with galley and berth, unheard of luxuries five years ago – “I can actually have a proper sleep,” he says, clearly still bowled over by the very thought – and employs 12 divers, as well as four full-time and two part-time staff. “That’s a big deal for somewhere like Mull: it brings about £30,000 into the island economy.”

“I basically take whatever Guy can get us now,” Hughes says. “We’re at something like 1,000 a week across the whole group. The thing about Guy’s scallops is, they last, which is an invaluable commodity. They’re caught the day before they come to us, and we can have them on the table by lunchtime. To be able to work with something this fresh is a real privilege for a chef. Plus they’re delivered alive, so they don’t go off; there’s very little wasteage.”

The dreaded “w” word gets Grieve’s goat, too. “We fish all our scallops in areas that haven’t been dredged for the simple reason that, if it’s been bottom-trawled, there’s nothing there,” he says matter-of-factly. “Chefs are a bit like heads of state in that respect, because their buying decisions have an immediate impact on the environment.

“Tim was the first cook I came across who realises there’s no such thing as cheap seafood,” says Grieve. “The cost to the environment has to be factored in, too.”

Hughes couldn’t agree more: “The sooner people realise what really goes into catching the fish we put on our plates, the better off we’ll all be.”

Jane Scotter and Harry Astley, Fern Verrow, supply Skye Gyngell, Spring

When Skye Gyngell swapped Petersham Nurseries Cafe in leafy west London for the altogether swankier affair that is Spring in Somerset House, the move was more than one of location and scale. “The vegetable garden at Petersham was a constant inspiration,” the chef says, “but in the West End that source of creativity just isn’t possible. That’s where Fern Verrow came in – I knew a bit about them, and in early 2014 I cold-called Jane, to ask if they’d be interested in supplying us. Frankly, I was expecting a no.”

Gyngell’s timing couldn’t have been better. “We were in the middle of writing a book and already thinking about how to get out of doing the market in London every week,” Jane Scotter says. At the time, her and Harry Astley’s main source of income was their stall at Spa Terminus, where they sold the biodynamic fruits and veg of their labours in the Black Mountains.

For the next six months, while Gyngell was finessing her menus before Spring’s grand opening in autumn 2014, they’d drop off the pick of their wares on their way to market each week: “It was a trial run,” Astley says. “And now, instead of coming up to market, we make two deliveries a week to Spring.”

But this is no normal chef-supplier relationship. “We’re involved every step of the way,” Gyngell says. “We do the planting and growing hand in hand, and we stipulate what we’d like them to grow for us. About 95% of all our fruit and veg comes from Jane and Harry.” It’s a different way of doing things, Scotter says: “She’s the artist and we provide the natural ‘paints’. It’s not the normal chef’s 12.30am phone call to their wholesaler. This is a marriage, of sorts.”

Like any marriage, it relies on hard work to keep things on an even keel, though this one involves an awful lot of spreadsheets. “We have to sow six months in advance,” Astley explains, “so there’s loads of planning.” Gyngell has to let Fern Verrow know roughly how much of any one product she thinks she’s going to need way down the line, though in some cases they can make an educated guess. “As much raw food as possible for salads,” Scotter laughs. “And Skye gets through ridiculous amounts of spinach.”

The partnership was a leap of faith for both parties, “but the trust issue was biggest for them,” Gyngell insists, “because I can always pick up the phone and order from someone else. I feel a huge sense of responsibility for them. I see Spring as a patron of the farm, rather than a customer.”

The attention to detail is such that Fern Verrow even package the produce to suit Spring’s walk-in fridges. “We’re incredibly selective on Skye’s behalf,” Astley says. “Everything is still in the ground when her order comes in.”

Of course, there’s not so much for Gyngell to choose from at this time of year. “We’ve only got about 15 things on the go right now,” Scotter says, “but that’ll rise to 30 or 40 in April/May and around 80 by August, at the peak of the growing season.”

Perversely, that bounty turns up at exactly the wrong time for a restaurant in the West End. “I hadn’t a clue how dead summer was in central London,” Gyngell says. “We never experienced that lull at Petersham. For instance, we’d planned on getting 30 kilos of strawberries a week from Jane and Harry, and ended up with more like 70 – there’s only so much you can do with a strawberry, you know.”

The summer downturn was a shock for Scotter and Astley, too. “It hadn’t crossed any of our minds,” Scotter admits, “but we’ll be ready this summer: we’ve already made plans for Spring’s staff to come to help out on the farm, and the chefs will use the down time to make jams, pickles and cordials for the restaurant.” It’s a farm-to-fork relationship that’s all too rare in the UK, and more in keeping with the American model trailblazed by the likes of Chez Panisse. “Somehow, the one just makes the other better,” Gyngell says. “Fern Verrow’s produce defines Spring as a restaurant.”

Ian Perkes and Nigel Ward, Brixham Seafish, supply Mitch Tonks, The Seahorse and Rockfish

Cooks and their suppliers often operate under an uneasy truce: on the chef’s part, they’re forever griping about the product not meeting the standards they require, while the supplier faces a constant struggle to get the chef to pay up on time. But not when it comes to Mitch Tonks and his fish guys, Ian Perkes and Nigel Ward of Brixham Seafish. “I’ve known them since I opened my first ever place, Green Street Seafood Cafe in Bath, in 1995,” says the accountant turned seafood guru. “They were running an outfit called Channel Fisheries, and got in touch wanting to send me a sample box of their fish. It was bloody good gear, too. One thing led to another, and we’ve now been working together for more than 20 years. They’re less suppliers than mates, and you can’t beat that – it means we can iron out any differences over a brandy or two.”

The phrase “I’ve been Tonksed” is code in certain circles of the restaurant world for the most horrific hangover imaginable, and Ward and Perkes have been victims more than most over the years, but that doesn’t seem to have put them off. “When I first met Mitch, he didn’t know all that much about fish, to be perfectly honest,” Ward says with a laugh, “but the thing that really struck you was his sheer enthusiasm. He hasn’t changed much on that score, but he now ‘gets’ fish the way we do.”

Perkes sees the secret of the relationship in more personal terms: “I’ve been in this game too long to bother with chefs who think they’re something special, or that it’s OK to scream and shout at you about not getting them this and that,” he says. “We’re nice people, and we want to work with nice people.”

Not that it’s all plain sailing, Perkes admits: “We’re at Tonksy’s beck and call for what feels like 396 days a year, which is exhausting – he’s knackering to be around at the best of times. Don’t tell him this, but I actually wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Ward concurs: “We’re a small bespoke outfit, with only 40-50 customers, so we try to deal with people we like – that’s our bottom line.”

Tonks allows his fish buyers unusual freedom. “They do everything for us,” the chef says, “and we rarely put in a specific order. Fishing’s such an up-and-down business, you can never be certain what’s going to be available on any given day. Most of the time, Nige will just pick up what’s good at the market and we’ll work with whatever he sends us. That just adds to the fun and excitement of cooking, though, because we often don’t know what’s going to come through the door. It’s a unique supply chain, really.”

Ward doesn’t have things completely his own way, though: “When the weather’s bad, there can be next to nothing at the market,” he says, “but I still have to find stuff Mitch can work with: he’s got four Rockfishes now, plus the Seahorse, and they can’t just not open because I haven’t got them the raw materials.” Ignore the trademark full-length black leather coat, and Ward has about him more than a touch of the Terry-Thomases, but the louche exterior hides a consummate fish operator: “Nigel’s my eyes in the market,” Tonks says, “and I trust him 100%.”

Perkes, meanwhile, is the guy who makes the contacts and smooths the wheels. “Top-quality fish costs,” he says. “And so it should when you consider what goes into getting hold of it. I started out in this business in 1976, and should have had my gold watch for long service by now. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll ask Mitch to buy me one.”