The Farmer's Dog.
A fifteenth-century barn on five acres near Burford, bought in 2024 for a reported less than a million pounds and opened that August to hundreds of people queuing. Everything on the menu is British. There is no telephone.
The rules, and why there are so many of them.
Everything served here is British. Not mostly British, not British where practical — British. No Coca-Cola. No avocado. No coffee. No black pepper. At launch, no ketchup at all, which caused a genuine national argument.
The birthday cakes have to be British-sourced. So does the cooking oil. So does the butter, the milk, the eggs and every single piece of meat. It is an absurd standard to hold yourself to and it is the entire reason the pub exists.
The other rules exist because five hundred people wanted a table designed for eighty. Tables release on the first of the month for the following month and are gone within minutes. A no-show costs thirty-five pounds a head. We hold a table fifteen minutes. There is no telephone, no email booking, no DM booking, no carrier pigeon. The bar and the garden are always walk-in, and that is genuinely where the best of it happens anyway.
- 100%
- British
- £35
- no-show fee
- 15 min
- table held
Six ways to eat here.
The restaurant is one of six things happening on this site, and it is the hardest one to get into. The other five need no booking at all.
An outdoor kitchen built inside the old Grand Tour marquee, doing whole-carcass butchery and cooking over fire. No…
All-British pizza — the dough, the cheese, the toppings. To make them even more British we might start…
Fire has been helping humans cook food for roughly four hundred thousand years. It seemed a shame to…
A whole-carcass butcher and a bottle shop in one room. Take the meat home, take the Hawkstone home,…
Walk-in, always. When the restaurant is full — which is most of the time — this is where…
The Grand Tour marquee, now housing the Farmer’s Puppy, Hops & Chops and a Diddly Squat farm shop…
What is on.
Mains from £15 to £28. The prices went up between 2024 and 2026 and we would rather explain that than bury it.
The Menu
Everything on it is British. Mains run from fifteen pounds to twenty-eight. Food is served Tuesday to Saturday, noon until…
Sunday Roast
Sunday roast, served noon until half past six. Tables release on the first of the month for the whole of…
The Drinks List
From the Knollbury Fort wines to the Hawkstone beer, cider and spirits. There is no well-known American soft drink and…
Knollbury Fort
It was time for Hawkstone to have a sister. Or a cousin. I have not quite worked out the grain…
There is no telephone.
We do not take bookings by email, social media direct message, postcard, telegram, carrier pigeon or by phone. In fact we do not even have a phone number.
This is not an affectation. A pub with eighty covers and a national television audience receives more calls in a day than it can serve customers in a month. A telephone would mean one person doing nothing but disappointing people, all day, for ever.
Pub news, and when tables release.
Tables go on the first of the month and disappear in minutes. Subscribers get the reminder the day before, which is the single most useful email we send.
- A reminder the day before tables release
- New menus, new outlets, the occasional disaster
- Jeremy's disastrous idea to launch a Farmer's Dog airship, and so on
