Meet the man behind a soil-centric farm and its Michelin restaurant
Chef Dan Cox is showing me a palmful of “magic” beans. We’re standing in the veg beds at Crocadon Farm in a remote corner of the Tamar Valley in Cornwall.
It seems an appropriate crop for a man who has mastered the alchemy of melding fine dining with farming. The beans – pink-speckled ‘Scarlet Emperor’ – are destined for the kitchen, where the cooks will conjure up an exquisite organic salad.
But magic is only a small part of Crocadon’s success story: it’s hard graft and strong vision that has really shaped this soil-centric farm and its renowned Michelin-starred restaurant.
If kitchen gardens are now commonplace, Crocadon’s scale and ambition set it apart. Largely self-sufficient in meat and veg, the restaurant is supplied by the surrounding 120-acre farm and a clutch of symbiotic businesses based there.
“The intention was to build a complete experience,” says Dan, showing me around. “The bakery, café, micro-brewery and events allow us to find different streams for the products we grow and rear. There is a lot of cross-pollination, too – people might come for the restaurant and return for the café or bakery.”
Dan took on Crocadon seven years ago and lives in a farmhouse on site with his gentle Border collie, Flash. Born and brought up in London, he won The Roux Scholarship in 2008 and, through it, spent time at three-Michelin-starred Can Fabes in Catalonia, before joining chef Simon Rogan at L’Enclume in Cumbria, where he helped establish the restaurant’s farm, and Fera in Claridge’s.
The idea of starting his own farm-based restaurant took root at Can Fabes: “All the produce they used came directly from local farms and the boats whereas, as a chef in the UK, I was ordering everything from suppliers. I wanted to get closer to the produce.” When one of his suppliers asked if he’d like to see a farm that had come up in Cornwall, he jumped at the chance. For the first six years, Dan honed his farming skills, before opening the restaurant last year. Within 13 months, it had won both green and red Michelin stars.
The Tamar Valley has a long history of market gardening, but Dan dreamed of running Crocadon differently.
“There are two ways of getting flavour onto the plate,” he explains, picking a leaf from a lemon pepper plant and crushing it so I can smell its spicy citrus scent. “One is to choose varieties that have more flavour and the other is to increase soil health. The more you support the soil rather than destroying it with chemicals and tillage, the more nutrient uptake there is by the plants and the better they taste.”
Dan’s take on regenerative farming – or soil-centric farming, as he likes to call it – involves trying to leave the land in a better state than you found it.
“If you continually plough and exploit the soil, it washes away. If you put in really diverse covers, you can still extract, but you need to do the work to keep it stable in between.” Borrowing from organic, biodynamic Korean natural farming (which uses microorganisms like fungi) and permaculture methods, Dan and his team aim to emulate nature. “Doing things like putting deep-rooting trees back in fields is good for pasture. So, too, are grazing ruminants and the mycorrhizal [fungus] networks that trees bring.”
Those ruminants are a mainstay of Crocadon’s menus. “People are put off by mutton, so we call it sheep but if you have a good animal, living a good life, building good fat, then well-aged, it’s as tender as lamb, if not more so,” Dan says.
Believing that heritage breeds taste better than fast-growing commercial ones, he first experimented with crosses and numbers, but has now settled on a “manageable” 65, a mix of Zwartbles and Greyface Dartmoor-Dorset crosses.
When Dan talks about building his flock, he isn’t just talking about sheep. Crocadon is a collective enterprise that changes and adapts as partnerships evolve. Its current line-up includes growers Amber Blundell and Megan Waghorn, baker and pastry chef Theo Fontaine and micro-brewer James Rylance of Ideal Day. Michael Thompson heads up the kitchen, supported by chef and forager Charlie D’Lima.
“I’m in the restaurant every day but, with Michael leading the kitchen, my mind can take on the other stuff,” Dan says, pausing from picking produce for the evening’s service to point out the farm’s modernist hen house.
That “other stuff ” includes managing the ripples of land that stretch away from the polytunnels, plus the horseshoe of buildings at the farm’s core. Dan is helped in this by farmers Jess and Will Jeans, who graze their cattle at Crocadon and help with reseeding pastures and managing hedgerows and fencing.
The Crocadon community shares a signature blend of practicality and creativity, whether it’s Dan building the bakery’s counter, Michael and Dan making ceramics glazed with the ashes of sheep bones or Amber fulfilling Dan’s vision of striving for perfection within the bounds of nature’s foibles. Everyone is committed. “If lots of plants need to go out, the kitchen team help,” Dan says. “We all work together.”
To book a table, head to crocadon.farm
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