Tom Sellers to run five restaurants at Stoke Park

Tom Sellers will oversee five restaurants at Stoke Park, the 300-acre estate in Buckinghamshire, with all of them due to open in October.

The flagship is The Penn, 48 covers plus an eight-seat private room, serving a la carte British cooking built on classical French technique, seasonality and produce from the estate. The kitchen garden is run by Kate Mannery, formerly head gardener at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, which is the detail that decides whether "estate produce" means a menu or a herb pot.

Around it sit four more rooms. The Piano Bar works classic cocktails, a martini list, English sparkling and American wine. The Terrace & Glasshouse is the informal end, with flatbreads, salads and fish, pizza and barbecue outside, running spring and summer and available for private hire year-round. The Tea Room does teas, coffees, viennoiserie, a tart of the day and scones. The Clubhouse serves pub classics and Indian food.

Five restaurants on one date is a staffing plan pretending to be a menu.

What Tom Sellers is taking on

Sellers runs the two-starred Restaurant Story in Bermondsey and works here through HiStory Hospitality, with chefs Dom Robinson and Tom Phillips alongside him. Stoke Park was bought by Reliance Industries in 2021 and has been under renovation since; the golf and hotel estate is reopening its hospitality in one go rather than in stages.

Five openings on one date is a staffing problem before it is a cooking problem. A tasting-menu chef moving to a country estate has to fill a tea room at four o'clock and a clubhouse at nine, which is a different discipline from a twenty-seat counter, and the concept list reads like a chef who knows it.

Country estates as the new expansion route

London chefs going out of town is the growth story of this year, because the capital's rents and closures leave little room to add covers. This week alone Incipio put 265 covers into Olympia, while closures nationally ran at about 20 a day this spring. An estate with rooms, golf and a captive audience spreads the risk differently.

No opening dates within October have been published for the individual rooms. The number that will matter by spring is how many of the five are still open in their announced form.