Fable opens at Crazy Bear Beaconsfield after a quick reset
Pete Gray, formerly of Heston Blumenthal's Hinds Head, leads the kitchen eight months after the hotel's last restaurant closed in three.
Fable has opened at Crazy Bear Beaconsfield, a British menu with a contemporary twist replacing a chef's table that lasted barely three months.
The Buckinghamshire hotel's previous restaurant, Bear by Carlo Scotto, was a 14-cover chef's table that closed last year. Fable arrives eight months later with a different brief: fewer flourishes, a wider menu and a head chef, Pete Gray, who spent years at a restaurant built on technique rather than spectacle.
Gray was formerly executive chef at the Hinds Head in Bray, Heston Blumenthal's Michelin-starred pub. At Fable, the opening dishes include grilled octopus with a sweet, smoky chorizo jam, saffron aïoli and sourdough, and a kilogram tomahawk steak to share, served with peppercorn sauce, chips and baby watercress for £110.
We're proud of our history, but we're not interested in living off it.
A group rebuilt after administration
Crazy Bear's current owners, directors Richard Booth and Tom Etridge, bought the group out of pre-pack administration for £6.5m in a deal that completed on 13 January. It covered both the Stadhampton and Beaconsfield hotels and kept all 147 employees on. Fable is the clearest sign yet of what they plan to do with the Beaconsfield site, alongside its existing Hom Thai restaurant and the Cabin private dining room.
Down-to-earth, not nostalgic
General manager Shane Turner-Hill is blunt about the balance the group is trying to strike. 'We're proud of our history, but we're not interested in living off it,' he said, describing the new restaurant as 'down-to-earth and fun, with just the right amount of eccentricity and rebellion.' He credits the kitchen team with 'creative talent and skill,' language that reads as a deliberate contrast with the short-lived tasting menu it replaces.
Fable's opening lands in a month when British hospitality groups are watching costs closely, much as Rocket Room's first standalone bar in Leicester tests a simpler format elsewhere in the country. Whether Fable's wider menu outlasts its predecessor's tighter one will likely be clear well before its first anniversary.
