Stage, 31 Magdalen Road, Exeter EX2 4TA (01392 496700). Four-course lunch £30, six-course dinner £55, wine from £26
Smart, creative people tend towards the ambitious. They know what they’re doing right now is good, but hope that at some point in the future they will do it better. They are forever striving towards a goal which is just out of reach. The risk is that, with their eyes on that future, they fail to clock what they have in the present. The coolly talented young team at Stage in Exeter are clearly ambitious, but I very much hope they are able to live as deeply in the present tense as possible. It would be a crying shame if, when they move on to the bigger and greater things that doubtless await them, they only realise in retrospect the brilliance of what they had going on now; here in this tiny 20-seater restaurant, where the walls are skirted with corrugated iron, the high wooden tables are built on black steel frames and the toasted cashews come crusted with something called apple sriracha.
Stage serves exceedingly well priced, wittily crafted tasting menus, which are only announced as the dishes arrive. Six courses in the evening costs £55; four courses at lunch are £30. As they change regularly, what I’m about to describe may not quite match the pictures. No matter. Just know it’s all bloody good. The restaurant is defined by a commitment to produce or make as much of it as they can. Various fruit and veg are described as coming from “Granny’s garden”, by which they literally mean the Bodmin garden belonging to the grandmother of one of the chef-partners’ girlfriends. As well as growing produce, they have a shipping container there, where they make their own beers, cure their own meats and quite possibly knit their own yoghurt.
The charcuterie serves as the “chef’s snacks”: there are deep purple discs of a lightly spiced venison salami, with a pleasing tang of armpit. There are silky folds of 24-month-aged ham, at room temperature so the luscious fat immediately begins to melt on the tongue, as well as rolls of tense bresaola. There’s also their own jerky. There’s no point pretending. Jerky, even the good stuff, which this is, looks like scabs, harvested on day seven. Shift that image, because these are dense but soft and smoky and rich. Have all this with a boulder of their pillowy white bread, which arrives shorn of its crusts, torn and then toasted, and slicked with melted butter so it has crisp golden peaks and crenelations. Alongside is a butter whipped with a little beef fat for depth and dusted green with garlic powder for breathiness. The bread, I am told, is baked in huge table-sized loaves. The ripped-off crusts are then ground down and fermented in the jars over there on the shelves to make a kind of miso.
This might all sound unbearably cheffy, but it’s worth knowing that the team, who met while working at Cornwall’s St Enodoc Hotel in Rock, started out in 2019 as an outfit called the Taco Boys. They served filled folds of flatbread from a converted horse box on Polzeath Beach, and admitted the name was misdirection because nothing about it was Mexican. “A taco is just a holdable plate that folds,” Taco Boy Felix Craft said at the time. Now they have actual plates. The first of these arrives bearing thick, crunchy discs of kohlrabi, fermented in whey to give them a sour tang. There is a smoked chilli cream underneath and across the top, what they call a “chicken liver jus”. It is a ridiculously deep-flavoured glossy, liquid chicken-liver parfait. Bring me a mug of that and a straw.
Next up are slices of sirloin steak bathed in a miso and caper butter, as insistent and pleasing as a low note on a tuba, and laid across what they call a swede terrine. It’s a buttery, vertical dauphinoise and lifts this ugly bastard of the vegetable world up to supermodel status. Underneath, to smooth out any sharp edges, is a velvety cauliflower purée. It’s followed by a succotash: buttercup-yellow kernels of sweetcorn, which pop between the teeth, bound by a reduced sauce of cream and stock, and dotted with the intense caramel of a burnt onion relish. Three bronzed and crisped gnocchi are laid across the top. They could have stopped there; if you’re a non-meat eater assume that they will. But each of my gnocchi comes draped in a gossamer shroud of their own piggy lardo, melting lightly in the heat.
The last savoury course is a crisp-skinned fillet of grey mullet, perched on Tenderstem broccoli and smoky baba ganoush and dressed with what they call a “pinenut, cucumber and wheat berry salsa verde”. It sits in a fragrant puddle of dill oil, which I’m tempted to dab behind my ears in the hope of attracting beautiful Scandinavian people. As there’s no written menu every dish must be recited tableside, possibly quite slowly for the chap with the notebook and pen at table two. It means that at times a touch of word spaghetti becomes pronounced. Is that mess of pinenuts, wheat and cucumber really a salsa verde? Nah, but it sounds good. And the thing about the bread being “hand torn”? How else are you going to tear bread? With your feet? At one point, two tempura-ed purple beans arrive, isolated on a plate beneath a grating of cured egg yolk and gruyère. It’s probably meant to celebrate impeccable ingredients, but it ends up feeling a little performative. But if the best I can do by way of criticism is to say they are pushing at the boundaries of what they can do and sometimes tip just over the edge into silliness, it’s no criticism at all.
The first sweet course is a foamy pear cream dusted thickly with blackberry powder, enclosing a denser heart of pistachio kulfi and stewed pear. That is followed by a minor miracle of an apple tarte tatin, made with the thinnest ribbons of fruit, glazed with a “hibiscus, whisky, miso” caramel, which makes it both a little boozy and a little salty. The tart is pale yellow, rather than deep amber, and yet crisp as you like. With it is a scoop of raspberry ice-cream. By itself you might conclude it is undersweetened. But against the tart it is the essence of refreshing. And all of this, served with a twinkly eyed enthusiasm, as if they know just how fabulous everything they’re doing is and are delighted you’re experiencing it. Quite right, too. But please, people: make sure to live in the moment.
News bites
First, all too familiar news of closures. Former MasterChef winner Simon Wood has announced the end after seven years of his eponymous Manchester restaurant. As he explained on Instagram: “Sadly with Covid rent arrears now being demanded by our landlord and an increasingly difficult marketplace, energy increases, ingredient costs and soon to be spiralling business rates, we just cannot make this work.” Meanwhile in Leeds, Michael O’Hare has closed his restaurant, Psycho Sandbar, which opened as a more relaxed replacement for Man Behind the Curtain just seven months ago. His rather less clear explanation was that the decision was based on his own plans, but was also “reflective of the changing experience market in which we all live”.
Elsewhere in Manchester, there’s a slightly complicated rebranding of the Japanese-inspired Musu on Bridge Street. Steven Smith, formerly the head chef of the Freemasons at Wiswell, will head up Kaji by Musu. Diners paying £120 a head for the tasting menu will apparently be invited “to embark on a unique journey where fire and flavour come together in perfect harmony”. And so on. Next year, the basement will become home to an even more high-end 18-seat kitchen-counter restaurant called Musu Miyabi, and a second omakase operation called Musu Theatre (musumcr.com).
And finally, JD Wetherspoon’s annual revenues have passed £2bn for the first time, up 4.9% in the year to 28 July. Pre-tax profits have risen 73.5% from £46.2m to £79.3m. That’s an awful lot of beer and large breakfasts (jdwetherspoon.com).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on X @jayrayner1
