What do we actually value?
We live in an age of extraordinary abundance. At almost any moment of the year we can buy ingredients from almost every corner of the world, and for many of us that has become so ordinary that we rarely stop to question it. Strawberries in December, asparagus in autumn and coffee on every street corner feel more like expectations than luxuries. So when we’re asked whether a great restaurant can exist without imported ingredients, our answer is simple: absolutely it can.
Equally, we don’t think every restaurant should. Hospitality has always evolved through curiosity, exchange and the movement of people, cultures and ideas, and the world would be immeasurably poorer without that. The conversation isn’t about whether imported ingredients are good or bad, it’s about what makes food valuable in the first place.
The older you get, the shorter history becomes. As children of the late twentieth century, many of us inherited the world as though it had always existed in its current form, without really questioning how recently that world had come into being. Global supply chains, year-round abundance and the expectation that almost anything could be anywhere within forty-eight hours are not ancient truths. They’re remarkable modern inventions.
They’ve brought extraordinary opportunities, and we wouldn’t willingly give many of them up. We can taste cultures our grandparents never encountered, learn from techniques developed thousands of miles away and enjoy ingredients that once felt unimaginably distant. Curiosity matters, and exchange matters. Hospitality has always been richer because people shared ideas across borders.
But somewhere along the way, we quietly stopped asking what all of this abundance was actually for. Choice became a virtue in itself. Convenience became synonymous with progress. We became so accustomed to asking what we could have that we almost forgot to ask what we should value.
That’s why we don’t think the conversation about imported ingredients is really a conversation about imported ingredients at all. It’s a conversation about value. Food has never simply been food. Every ingredient is the visible surface of an invisible network of weather, soil, labour, craft, economics, policy and tradition.
Every plate tells the story of thousands of decisions made by people we will probably never meet. The asparagus arrives because somebody planted it months ago, hoping the weather would be kind. The scallops exist because somebody left harbour before dawn. The wine exists because someone gambled years of their life on vines that might never have succeeded.
At Tern we’ve built our restaurant around sourcing almost entirely from within the UK. That philosophy is often mistaken for restriction, but for us it has become an exercise in paying closer attention. Every significant decision passes through the same question: does this strengthen the systems we’re trying to support, or weaken them?
Paying attention
Sometimes that means embracing abundance. Sometimes it means accepting limitation. Sometimes it means taking the longer route simply because it leaves something stronger behind. It has become our North Star, not only for what appears on the plate, but for almost every decision we make as a business.
People often assume creativity comes from unlimited choice. We’ve found almost the exact opposite. Resourcefulness is born from paying attention. When you begin with a place instead of a shopping list, you stop asking, “What do we feel like cooking?” and begin asking, “What is this landscape offering today?”
That simple shift changes your relationship with place in ways that are difficult to appreciate until you’ve lived it. A long, cold spring is no longer simply weather. It’s the difference between a small vineyard having a successful year or wondering how it will survive the next one. When growers are lighting candles beneath vines before dawn to protect a crop, you’re no longer thinking only about the wine you’ll eventually pour.
You’re thinking about the people standing in those vineyards, hoping a year’s work hasn’t been lost overnight. Suddenly the weather forecast isn’t background noise. It matters personally because you know the people whose livelihoods are tied to it. The landscape stops being scenery and becomes part of your working day.
The same is true across everything we do. We care about when the elderflower is about to bloom because we have one opportunity to gather enough for the year ahead. We preserve it not because preserving has become fashionable, but because that’s what the season asks of us. Time regains its rhythm, and the landscape begins to dictate the work instead of the other way around.
Perhaps that’s the greatest change of all. It’s not what appears on the menu. It’s what begins to matter to you.
Once you’ve experienced that, ingredients stop being products. They become the visible outcome of countless human decisions, unpredictable seasons and extraordinary acts of patience. That depth of connection changes not only how you cook, but why you cook in the first place.
One of the cocktails we’re best known for is our dirty martini. Traditionally, of course, it relies on olives, but olives don’t grow in Britain. Rather than treating that as a compromise, we’ve treated it as an opportunity to ask a different question.
Instead of importing olives, we pickle British ingredients. Sometimes it’s radishes. Sometimes samphire. The garnish changes because the landscape changes, and the drink has become one of our signatures not despite the limitation, but because of it.
The same is true of our Cornish lemons. For a few precious weeks each year we receive the harvest, then they’re gone again. Rather than searching elsewhere, we preserve them, ferment them and carry that fleeting season through the rest of the year. The limitation doesn’t make the food poorer; it asks us to become more creative, more resourceful and ultimately more attentive.
Consequence vs provenance
That relationship with place changes far more than the food itself. It changes what success looks like, what responsibility feels like and ultimately what kind of business you’re trying to build. Once every decision is rooted in a landscape, you begin to realise that every purchase has consequences that extend far beyond the plate. Every supplier, every grower and every maker becomes part of the same story.
None of this is about purity. We drink coffee, and we recognise the realities of modern hospitality just as much as everyone else. We also recognise that the world is richer because ingredients, cultures and ideas have travelled. The point isn’t to retreat from that exchange, but to make the best decisions we can where meaningful choices genuinely exist.
For us, provenance has never been about romance. In many ways, we’re concerned by the degree to which provenance has become another marketing word, printed on menus because we’ve learned that people like the sound of it. Sustainability, authenticity, seasonal and local have all become language that’s remarkably easy to perform. It’s far easier to appear values-led than it is to build an entire business around those values every single day.
It’s the idea of consequence which guides us. It’s understanding that every decision has a shape beyond the immediate transaction. When we buy from a grower, we aren’t simply buying vegetables; we’re helping make next year’s harvest possible. When we commission a local maker, we aren’t simply buying furniture; we’re helping keep a craft alive.
That philosophy doesn’t stop with ingredients. When we rebuilt our restaurant, we invested £100,000 of our crowdfunding back into local independent makers, craftspeople and businesses. Our tables and light shades came from a single elm tree felled less than twenty miles away, transformed into something that continues to serve people every single day. Those decisions weren’t decorative; they were expressions of exactly the same philosophy that guides what appears on the plate.
Every link in that chain becomes a vote for the systems we hope will still exist tomorrow. It asks where our money goes once it leaves us, whose livelihoods it supports and which skills survive because somebody continues to value them. Money doesn’t simply disappear after a transaction. It continues its own journey, shaping the places we live in long after the meal has finished.
What are we trying to build?
Success in hospitality is often measured by expansion. More sites. More products. More reach. More choice. Yet not everything becomes better by becoming bigger.
Some relationships only exist because they’re small enough to remain personal. Some crafts only survive because somebody continues to commission them. Some growers only survive because restaurants are willing to absorb the uncertainty that comes with farming rather than demanding absolute consistency. Practice only survives if somebody decides it’s worth passing on.
Our ambition has never been to build the biggest restaurant we could. It has always been to become more deeply connected to the place we’re already in. To know our producers better this year than we did last year. To become more useful to our local economy rather than simply extracting value from it.
Perhaps that’s also why the conversation about imported ingredients can become so polarised. It’s presented as though there are only two positions: import everything because that’s where the best produce comes from, or import nothing because local is morally superior. We don’t recognise either of those positions.
The world is wonderfully interconnected, and we’d be poorer without that. There are extraordinary restaurants whose identity depends on faithfully representing the cuisines and ingredients of other places, and the richness of British hospitality depends on those voices being part of it. Our approach isn’t a blueprint for everybody else. It’s simply the framework we’ve chosen because it asks the questions we want our own work to answer.
Can a great restaurant exist without imported ingredients? Absolutely. Our constraints have taught us to pay closer attention, and paying closer attention has changed the way we understand food, creativity and purpose.
Perhaps that’s ultimately what this debate is really about. Not imports or exports, not purity or perfection, but the quiet accumulation of thousands of everyday decisions. Every menu. Every supplier. Every purchase. Every service.
The hospitality industry can’t solve every environmental, economic or social challenge on its own. But every one of us chooses which systems our work strengthens, which relationships we invest in and which traditions we help carry into the future. Those choices matter far more than they sometimes appear to.
So perhaps the most interesting question we can ask is ‘What kind of food system do we want to leave behind?’
Because the question isn’t simply where something comes from. It’s what continues because we choose it.
