Food From The Heart

It’s ten years since Justin Sharp opened Pea Porridge in Bury St Edmunds. He’s still proudly delighting customers with simple, satisfying seasonal food, brimful of flavour

- Tessa Allingham

Justin Sharp’s little black book is still – just about – ring-bound. It’s had coffee spilt on it by clumsy colleagues, been fat-spattered, no doubt lost on numerous occasions and (evidently) found again. An address in Keith, Banffshire, written in red felt-tip capitals on the inside front cover, dates it to the mid-90s when Justin was a wee young chef working in hotel kitchens around his home town near Aberdeen.

A piece of folded A4 slips out from the overflow of magazine clippings and dessert recipes. Typed on one side is a Sunday lunch menu. It proposes two courses for £19.50, three for £24, suggests that you might like to spend £4 on the house aperitif, a prosecco framboise. “Only £4! What was I thinking?” Justin huffs. “Beef for £19!” You could have started with snails, bone marrow, garlic and parsley butter, or Italian charcuterie, nocellara olives and kohlrabi remoulade. You might have followed with rump of lamb with aubergine caponata and salsa verde, or whole bream with crushed potatoes, braised fennel, leeks and saffron. Had you been there, at the first ever Sunday lunch at Pea Porridge, you could have finished with a slice of fig and almond tart, or tarte tatin with vanilla ice cream.

That was October 2009. Scroll forward ten years, and at Justin and Jurga Sharp’s little restaurant in Bury St Edmunds, you can still have snails, bone marrow, garlic and parsley (and very delicious they are too).

You can still share a whole fish, maybe turbot or brill, and it will be brought in its roasting tray with fennel and leeks, maybe some mussels and clams too. A couple of big serving spoons and you’re left to divvy it all up. And – hallelujah – there is invariably a tarte tatin on the bar, sitting with its sticky promise of buttercaramel-apple pleasure to come.