Our artisan food shop draws food connoisseurs from far and wide; they come to buy quality products and dishes made with the freshest, local ingredients, and handcrafted in our kitchens upstairs. We’re busy all day long, selling delicious food as fast as our chefs can prepare it; delightful cakes and cookies, tasty lunchtime snacks, ready meals to go and so much more. By popular demand, our catering service takes the
experience further afield, making the same high quality products available for all types of private and business events.
is more than just a business, it’s a food philosophy; with our own kitchens and a team of highly creative, artisan chefs, we produce most of our food ourselves so that quality, freshness and provenance are assured. For the few products we buy in, we use handpicked, local producers who share our values and our commitment to good food. The result is food of exceptional quality and taste.
, and has responsibility for all aspects of food; his key skills include creative culinary flair, cooking to exacting standards, and food product innovation.
With more than 26 years' experience working in both the retail and production sides of the food industry, Tony’s pedigree is impressive. After a successful early career as a Senior Buying Manager at Safeway, he left the corporate world to fulfil his entrepreneurial ambitions. He founded the Italian delicatessen in Thame - now Umberto's - as well as niche businesses in the UK and overseas, producing and importing marinated olives, oven-dried tomatoes and chargrilled vegetables, which he supplied to major British supermarket chains and top delicatessens in London and the Home Counties. It was whilst Tony was visiting artisan food producers in France in 2001 that the seeds for what would become
Tony’s entrepreneurial drive, pioneering spirit, and his ability to identify emerging trends and niche opportunities help ensure
stays at the forefront of artisan food, always delivering the freshest concepts and most exciting products to customers.
went from strength to strength, broadening the range of products offered and responding to customer calls for a catering service. More at home planning menus, overseeing production and maintaining quality, Tony was in need of a new team member to take responsibility for the practical day to day management of the business. He didn’t have to look too far - partner Sally fitted the bill exactly, sharing his love of all things culinary and with excellent organisational and business planning skills, she was the perfect choice. Today, Sally is an indispensible part of
We all want to eat fresh, eat local and eat well. We all want to know where our food comes from, how it’s grown, farmed and prepared. While these are values that most of us share, finding food of unquestionable quality and provenance is not as easy as it once was; supermarkets, intensive farming, convenience food and the race for high volume production have changed much about the way we shop and eat today.
, we are proud to be at the forefront of the exciting renaissance in artisan food, helping more and more people to rediscover and celebrate the delights of delicious, handcrafted foods that have been prepared using traditional skills, and made with ingredients grown and farmed locally. We believe that preparing food should be more about art than science, more about intuition and imagination than rote and rules. The changing seasons, vagaries of nature and the handmade processes we employ, ensure that everything we create in our kitchens is unique, a one-off masterpiece that will never be replicated exactly.
