Interview: Luke Holder, Lime Wood Hotel

From a two-team system to learning how to simplify food, chef director Luke Holder talks to Tristan O'Hana about 12 years of leading the brigade at Lime Wood Hotel. 

Set in the heart of the New Forest in Hampshire, Lime Wood Hotel is quite something. Owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe (yes, the one from Manchester United) and overseen by chairman Robin Hutson (yes, the one who founded Hotel du Vin and The Pig Hotel group), it’s a country house hotel to rival any other, complete with forest lodges, a ‘Herb House’ spa, immediate access to the New Forest national park and a pretty decent F&B offer. 

In fact, as you may have guessed, food is a central focus at Lime Wood, with Angela Hartnett (yes, that one) and Luke Holder’s in-house restaurant Hartnett Holder & Co combining the admired signature styles of both chefs to offer an Italian twist on English seasonal cooking. I visited Lime Wood in the autumn to talk to chef director Holder about how things were going on this side of the hospitality industry. Between a busy lunch and dinner service, Holder and I sat down to discuss, among other things, the approach of the hotel’s food, how they look after their team and his love of porcini mushrooms.

DO: So, Luke, you’ve been here over 12 years now. How are things going?
LH: It took me, I think, 10 years to learn how to become a hotel chef. What I’ve learned is people come to restaurants for the restaurant and the food. Hotels are a room business, so there are different reasons why people are here. People aren’t necessarily just here because of the restaurant that we have. People might be here for the spa or they just want to get away from it all. What I started to learn at the beginning is hotel chefs have to have many different hats. You have to be able to facilitate an offering that changes much more often than you would in a restaurant, because we’ll have people staying here for 10, 12, 14 days at a time. If you just have one menu, you could read that menu and become bored on day one – you need to be able to see that menu change. We implemented an ABC menu, with menu A on a Monday, then B on a Tuesday, then C on a Wednesday, and then back to A on Thursday. 

Lime Wood in the early morning

DO: You’re from a fine dining background, is that right? Would you say that’s what Lime Wood is about?
LH: When I first started, it was much more driven to try and deliver a Michelin-star type of experience. I was a head chef for Alex Aitken at what is now The Pig in Brockenhurst, but the model of country house hotels having a Michelin-star restaurant and that being the draw to why people come, I think it’s dead. Robin could see that it was on borrowed time. 

When the moment came with the opportunity with Angela, we’d had actually three Michelin inspections that year, and I was convinced that we would have attained a star in our own right at that point. And then you come face-to-face with your own ego. Robin wanted me to stay and I’d already met Angela. We got along. She brings a lot of credibility to simplicity, and I had the opportunity to go home and decide – do I go and pursue the Michelin thing or do I stay and become the named partner within the restaurant business with somebody with the credibility of Angela Hartnett? 

Back then, our lunch covers were somewhere in the region of 12 to 15, maybe a bit bigger during the weekends. Now we average 50 to 60 for lunch, 60 to 80 for dinner. I’ve learned a great love of simplicity and to become more confident in the way that we cook and the way that we do things. Robin and Angela, in my opinion, are the leading hospitality people in this country.

"You’d be hard pushed to enjoy a better experience"

DO: What do you think the impact would be if Lime Wood were to get a Michelin star?
LH: I think it would damage us to a degree, but there’s a part of me that spent a lot of years committed to that world and it’d be nice for the recognition. But I know what we do, how we source all of it. There’s no less of an energy or commitment to  quality or technique. It’s much more about the approachability of it and having that confidence to put down a plate of porcini mushrooms with Parmesan and saying “that is it”.  

DO: Angela was in the kitchen during our visit. Is that a common occurrence? 
LH: People would be surprised how often Angela is down here. We don’t formalise it though. She comes down pretty regularly in an irregular way. She’s here doing tastings, in and among the kitchen with a knife and chopping bits and pieces. She loves the team here and has good relationships with all the senior chefs. I need her to be able to give that second opinion and say “you know, actually, that’s a bit wrong”. She’s been brilliant for saying “Take that off. You don’t need it” and building that confidence. 

DO: And the simplicity of the food here is key, is that right?
LH: It’s an amazingly liberating and confidence-building thing. When you look at the history of food, we’re essentially all trying to recreate peasant, humble food, but actually, when you see it all together, it’s a grand thing. There is a lot of technique, a lot of hard work in that. But great food starts from very humble beginnings, you know. When we do a dish, we ask where does it come from, is it relevant, can we anchor it somewhere historically? Is it right? 

When the porcini start arriving through the back door at this time of year, for me, a porcini risotto is right up there, but I actually think I prefer a porcini soup, as I’m addicted to bread and I can’t eat risotto and bread. We’ve had an unbelievable porcini season. 

DO: Can somewhere as grand as Lime Wood attract casual restaurant bookings?
LH: One of the biggest changes from going away from that Michelin thing, one of the key things that we wanted to achieve was a stronger lunch trade, which meant you had to dovetail into the community more. We wanted to be able to say “you can pop in, have a bowl of pasta and glass of wine and leave”. One of the big drivers of the increase in covers was that accessibility.

There’s a nervousness about coming to a five-star hotel that’s already an inhibitor if you’re making a decision of where you want to go out. Keeping the food humble and the restaurant branding humble and trying to keep the approachability of the food, that’s been a huge driver in the covers. We could be a destination, but I’d rather see us as being an off-the-cuff choice when someone decides to nip out for lunch. If you’re sat on the veranda at the front of the hotel and you order a bowl of lobster linguini and a green salad and a glass of white wine, you’d be hard pushed to enjoy a better experience. 

Drinks before dinner at the Lime Wood bar

DO: Given its grand scale and grand backing, does Lime Wood feel the pressures of the industry as much as other restaurants?
LH: After Brexit and Covid, the wage inflation that took place in London meant that we couldn’t compete with what was being offered in independent restaurants. I had sous chefs saying “Look, I’ve got restaurants in London offering me chef de partie for more money than you’re offering us as sous chef”. I took the approach of, well, that’s fine. If you want to go, you’ve got to go. Everybody was over-promoting everybody. We’re all guilty of that, but I still think that could potentially be an issue for the industry when it comes to head chefs in the next five to 10 years, because I don’t think people are going to be ready for it.

Here, you’re on a three-and-a-half-day working week, then your days off are in one go. Aligning the two-team system really has been such a huge game-changer to our turnover.

DO: Two-team system? Can you tell us more?
LH: We have the two-team system, where the front- and back-of-house teams on those three-and-a-half days are always working together, so we’re trying to make sure you build a bond with people. You feel part of a team. Team A will work their days, then Team B will come in. Nobody works a full weekend, which was a really difficult commitment, but I was convinced that this was going to be so important to us – aligning the front-of-house and the back-of-house in the same rotation. Every three months that changes, with rotas planned three months in advance so people can plan their lives. 

Another thing that I think chefs have been awful at, particularly when I was a young chef, was holiday management. I’ve already started the holiday calendar for next year and I’ll get 90% commitment from 90% of the team of what their holidays will be. I’m an absolute advocate of making sure they are on holiday every three months, so they have time to rest and recuperate. We always say you get two long holidays and two short holidays.

DO: We’ve heard your staff lunches and dinners are pretty decent. Can you explain how that came about?
LH: There’s a cultural thing here that is set by Robin and Angela, and that is about how you make your people feel. It’s ‘people, products, profit’, not ‘profit, products, people’. You need to get that the right way around. 

I learned the hard way that staff food is important. I’ve served a lot of appalling, shameful staff food in my life. There is a culture of chefs who think staff are second-class citizens to the guests. We had an incident here where the staff food was served and it was shameful. In no uncertain terms, I was reminded how important that is and if I couldn’t get on board with it, then I’d need to look elsewhere for employment. 

So we then had a very humbling experience of having to serve the food to the staff every day for three weeks. We take it very seriously now. All of our people have different expectations, so we put in place a menu three months at a time and it is all brilliant quality. We know good gut health has an effect on mental health. We went down the rabbit hole of that quite deeply, and we started a fermentation programme downstairs, and some of that ends up in the staff food. Let’s not give everybody lasagne chips and garlic bread before a long shift, as everybody feels like crap. 

DO: Sounds like a pretty good place to work…
LH: That is just one reason why it’s nice to work at Lime Wood. If the statistics are it costs £7,500 to start a new employee here, that’s a lot of money. We have 220 staff here, right? So if you’ve got a high turnover of staff, that’s a lot of money you’re burning through consistently. So we look after people. It’s a bit more transparent when you see it out front in terms of how they are. But, with chefs, we provide people with Birkenstocks, full chef uniforms, if you haven’t got knives then we’ll provide you with knives, we do enrichment programmes, we encourage you to go out and eat out. It goes on. It’s a great place to work.  

You may also be interested in…