Born in Pitt near Winchester into a farming family, Tom was building pits and smokers to make the most of his own pigs from the age of 16. With experience working at The Ledbury, Neal's Yard Dairy and under Jeremy Lee at The Blueprint Café, Tom formed Pitt Cue Co in 2011 at the age of 22 as a food truck on London's South Bank. Pitt Cue Co quickly gained a significant cult following. After the initial summer trading on the South Bank, by which point the operation was greeted with hundred-deep queues hours before opening, the opportunity arose to open a bricks-and-mortar restaurant in Soho. The restaurant opened in January 2012 to widespread critical acclaim.
In the year that followed Tom began to work harder and harder on the supply chain that formed the bedrock of the restaurant, and began to rear rare breed pigs on his family farm in Winchester. As this grew and word spread of the pork being produced he teamed up with farmer Charlie Hart, in Launceston, to scale up his rearing of Mangalitza pigs and focus on producing the best pork possible. In line with an ethos based upon a direct and seamless relationship between farmer and chef, Tom has taken this one step further and opened the acclaimed Coombeshead restaurant and guesthouse in East Cornwall. Everything there is grown, reared and made on site. His business partner is April Bloomfield, ‘restaurant queen of the Big Apple’.
Website: combesheadfarm.co.uk
Twitter: @CoombesheadF
