We had talked about doing it for years, but relocating  Ground Up Cookery School to Chudleigh, Devon and growing the business had become a full-time job.

Colin has more than 30 years behind him as a professional chef, including fine dining as Head Chef aboard luxury yachts, at the exclusive Treasure Beach Hotel in Barbados and at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, cooking for the rich, the famous and royalty. His relationship with food goes back much further. Growing up on a farm on the Isle of Coll in the Inner Hebrides taught him that ingredients were precious. What wasn't farmed, foraged or bartered simply wasn't available, and very little went to waste.

That thinking still sits at the heart of Ground Up today, alongside everything Colin has learned since: wild food, fermentation, preservation, sustainability and an ever-growing fascination with what we can find, grow and produce here in Devon, not simply to make use of it, but to create something genuinely exciting to eat.

Bringing those ingredients and techniques into high-end cooking isn't new to us. Through Ground Up's professional chef training and food consultancy, we've worked with chefs to explore how wild, foraged, fermented and preserved ingredients can transform their menus, including welcoming Marcus Wareing and his chef apprentices to the cookery school on several occasions. With our recipes featuring at Wimbledon Lawn Tennis, Ascot and many other exclusive events. What we hadn't done was turn the tables around and serve that food to our customers as paying guests.

We'd talked for years about opening the cookery school for occasional fine-dining evenings: giving Colin the chance to step out from behind the teaching bench and create a complete menu showcasing just how exciting these ingredients can be. On 1 August 2026, we finally did it.

Would people really want it though? We dipped our toe in the water with a quiet mention in our newsletter. No advertising, no social media. If nobody fancied it, we could quietly rethink the idea...It sold out within 24 hours! Right. No going back then.

By the time the day arrived, the cookery school looked a bit different. The teaching pods had become prep and serving stations and our dining table was simply but stylishly dressed with crisp napkins, subtle decorations and flowers picked from our garden.

Fourteen places. One long table. Five courses. In the kitchen, Colin was Head Chef with Kristi as Sous Chef. Out front, I was heading up service with the delightful Isabella, usually found in our pot wash. There was just one minor issue; Neither of us had ever waited tables before. As a lover of fine food I have been lucky enough to eat in plenty of wonderful restaurants, so I decided to draw on everything I'd noticed over the years as a fine-dining customer and work from there. Meanwhile, our 14-year-old son William was dispatched to pot wash to earn some money towards his ever-growing wish list. A true family affair.

The wine was chilled. Local Huxbear wines formed the heart of our main wine list, while Jack at Regency Wines had created a paired wine flight especially for Colin's menu. Even the non-drinkers had something more interesting than the usual alternatives, with our refreshing pineapple and strawberry tepaches. We were ready.

Guests had travelled from surprisingly far afield. Those closer to home were invited to leave cars overnight or booked taxis, others found local B&Bs, and we even matched people up to share taxi journeys.

Canapés in The Garden

Thankfully, August gave us a beautiful evening, so we started outside in the walled garden. The welcome drink was very much a Ground Up affair: a Wild Plum Royale, made with Prosecco topped with Heath & Hedge Wild Plum & Mugwort Gin, made here at the cookery school from locally picked fruit.

The canapés told their own little stories too. A nothing-goes to-waste potato skin crisp was topped with cream cheese and sloe tapenade. Although they taste like olives the "olives" weren't olives at all, but sloes we'd picked locally the previous summer and preserved to transform them into a delicious Devon alternative. Alongside it was a wonderfully summery mouthful of fermented peach, burrata and mint. One guest later described those opening drinks and canapés in the garden as “a great way to start”, while another singled out the preserved peach and burrata as “heaven.” So far, so good.

Then fourteen people, most of whom didn't know each other, came inside and sat around one table. This was the bit we'd wondered about. Would one big table actually work?

Seasonal Tomatoes

We began with a delicate Tomato and Fermented Wild Garlic: fermented tomato gel, wild garlic capers and wild garlic ash. It brought together ingredients we'd gathered and preserved at different times of year, using several techniques on one deceptively simple-looking plate. One guest who normally disliked tomatoes even complimented Colin on the dish. A tomato convert. We'll take that.

Jack's wine flight began with Fabrizio Vella Bianco Biologico, an organic Sicilian white. The food was going out, the wine was flowing and, rather reassuringly, everyone was already talking.

Nettle and Lovage Gnocchi

Then came the dish that people were still talking about afterwards. Hand-rolled nettle gnocchi with pumpkin seed pesto, nettle seed and cheese crisps, with lovage freshly picked from our garden. It was wild, seasonal, unmistakably Ground Up and absolutely delicious. Paired it with an organic Austrian Grüner Veltliner from Besas.

Several guests later described the nettle gnocchi as one of the “stand outs” of the entire meal. We'd have to agree.

Magnolia-Cured Trout

Next came another ingredient that often surprises people: magnolia. Colin's magnolia-cured trout was served with pickled magnolia flower, green apple and fermented onions.

Magnolia has a wonderful ginger-like quality, think of those delicate slices of pickled ginger served with sushi and here Colin used it both to cure the trout and as a pickle. It was paired with one of our favourite wines, an Albariño from O Rosal in Galicia.

The trout joined the gnocchi on our guests' list of favourites, described afterwards as “delicate” and another standout course. By now, the room was really starting to buzz.

Beef, Girolles and a Little Seaweed

The main course was beef fillet and slow-cooked short rib finished on the BBQ, with celeriac purée, honey-fermented girolles and smoked seaweed fondant potato. Perhaps the most classically fine-dining plate of the evening, but still threaded through with the wild ingredients and preservation techniques that have become such an important part of Colin's cooking.. Jack paired it with Château L'Ermitage 'Auzan' Rouge from Costières de Nîmes.

By now, though, our carefully planned introductions to each dish and wine were becoming increasingly difficult. We couldn't get a word in! People who hadn't known one another a couple of hours earlier were chatting across the table, comparing dishes and wines and generally having a very good time. Which, as problems go, was a pretty lovely one to have.

And Then Came The "oooh"!

Dessert was a meadowsweet panna cotta topped with strawberries marinated in meadowsweet and gin. Jack had paired it with something rather unexpected: Alasia Brachetto d'Acqui, a sparkling Italian red. Glasses were poured. It sat beautifully with the delicate British strawberries. Everyone tasted and almost in chorus, right around the table:

“Oooh!”

One of our favourite moments of the night.There's something wonderfully satisfying about hearing an entire table react to a wine before anybody has had the chance to tell them what they're supposed to think about it. Jack had nailed it.

... And to End

Of course, we couldn't just serve ordinary petit fours. Coffee or foraged herbal tea came with a small glass of Recioto della Valpolicella and three very Ground Up petit fours. There was lemon and elderflower drizzle cake, using the rehydrated remains of the elderflowers from last year's elderflower wine, blended into the sugar to create a beautifully zingy little cake. Honey-preserved girolles dipped in white chocolate, there aren't many places that you will find a mushroom in your petit fours! Colin's brownie topped with cherry and hawthorn ketchup.

Nothing wasted. Nothing there just for novelty. Simply interesting ingredients turned into something delicious.

Had the big table worked? We needn't have worried. People lingered and conversations carried on. The strangers who had arrived a few hours earlier felt remarkably like one big group of friends. One review afterwards summed it up better than we could “It felt like having dinner with friends.”. Another described the atmosphere as “warm and welcoming”, and “a complete treat from start to finish.”

And, to our great relief, our novice front-of-house team apparently pulled it off too. One guest described the service as “perfectly judged.” We'll take that as a win.

Perhaps most importantly, people understood what we were trying to do. One guest who has already booked again, described the food as “absolutely delicious” and loved learning more about the foraging and fermentation behind it, while another gave us a particularly welcome “big thumbs up” for making the experience gluten-free for her.

We'd taken a bit of a gamble. It had worked.

There was another part of the evening that we particularly loved. Ground Up Cookery School, Regency Wines and Huxbear Vineyard are all Food Drink Devon members. Huxbear couldn't be much more local, we can almost see the vines from the cookery school, while our relationship with Jack at Regency Wines allowed us to add something completely different through the specially created wine flight.

It's a lovely example of what can happen when Devon food and drink businesses connect. Conversations turn into relationships, relationships into collaborations and, occasionally, those collaborations result in fourteen people going “oooh” around a dinner table.

So, are we doing it again?

Absolutely! Our plan is to hold one Seasonal Fine Dining experience each season, allowing Colin's menu to change completely according to what's growing, being foraged and available locally, alongside the ingredients we've fermented, cured and preserved in the months beforehand. After the first evening, we have made just one change for October... this autumn, we're doing two nights.

Our next Seasonal Fine Dining Evenings take place on Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd October 2026, doubling the number of available places. Within 24 hours of releasing the dates to our newsletter, three quarters of the places across both evenings had sold, with many guests from our first dinner already booking to come back. We can't really ask for a better review than that.

Autumn is going to be a very different affair. Summer gave us tomatoes and wild garlic, nettles and lovage, magnolia, girolles, strawberries and meadowsweet. Autumn is bringing venison and hawthorn, spruce, wild mushrooms, pheasant, elderberries, apples and pears.

Exactly the same idea. A completely different dinner. We can't wait.

Jack has already been back to Ground Up to taste some of the key flavours and has started creating the next wine flight to match.

Ground Up Cookery School's Seasonal Fine Dining Evenings take place in Chudleigh, Devon, with just 14 guests around one table and a five-course menu created by chef Colin Wheeler-James using seasonal, local, wild, foraged, fermented and preserved ingredients. Next dinners: Friday 2nd & Saturday 3rd October 2026.

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