Bing Cao and Cara Ou are the innovators behind Wabi Sabi, the Ambleside restaurant that brought sushi and ramen to our Services.

“Nothing is perfect; nothing is complete, nothing is permanent.”

There are many translations of the Japanese phrase wabi-sabi, but for Cara Ou, this is the one that sums it up best. 

“It is a beautiful concept,” says Cara, co-owner with her husband, Bing Cao, of Wabi Sabi restaurant in Ambleside. For Bing, whom she describes as a “crazy chef”, the name perfectly encapsulates the philosophy that underpins his food.

“It means: I keep improving; I look for new things; the menu is always changing,” he says. “We chose this name for the restaurant because it represents me and the things I want to cook.”

Before the Covid pandemic, the things that Bing wanted to cook were becoming things that more and more people wanted to eat. His tiny restaurant was a word-of-mouth hit, a favourite of Cumbria’s Michelin-star chefs for the creative, idiosyncratic dishes that seemed to jump straight out of his imagination onto the plate. 

But then came lockdown and the overnight closure of the restaurant industry. “When the pandemic hit, I had enough money to pay my rent for three months,” Bing says. “I needed to find a way of surviving.”

Bing and Cara got in touch with our Farmshop Buyer, Alexander Evans, with an idea to sell fresh sushi and ramen kits made in the restaurant kitchen. Alex was immediately intrigued, spotting an opportunity to bring something new and fresh to Tebay’s customers while supporting a small local business to survive and thrive.

At stake was a dream that first took shape when Bing was a student at Lancaster University, where he and Cara had both arrived from China to study business. “I rang my mum in China and asked her to send me money to buy a car,” Bing remembers. “She said: find a job and earn the money.”

He took a job washing pots at Jade Gardens, a Chinese restaurant in Ambleside. As he was graduating from Lancaster, his boss was looking to retire. So – after another phone call to his mother – he bought the restaurant. Five years later, he changed its name to Wabi Sabi, gradually transforming it into a unique destination restaurant with an inventive tasting menu inspired by Lakeland landscapes and local ingredients.

“I like to experience this environment: on the boat, in the woods, on hikes with Cara and our dog,” he says. “By getting to know the environment where local ingredients are growing, I get the inspiration for the dish.”

He explains that buying meat, such as Herdwick mutton, from local farmers and foraging for wild plants and mushrooms in the forests near their home is a vital part of his process.

“To recreate a dish from my mind and make it into reality I have to use local ingredients, because otherwise it won’t taste right. For me, taste is the meaning. When you taste something good, it becomes a new memory. A good memory.”

The clear passion and commitment with which Bing and Cara approach their craft were the magic ingredients that our buyer Alex Evans is always on the lookout for.

“I’ve always bought into the person that’s producing a food rather than needing to find this product or that product,” Alex says. “You need to leave yourself open to people coming along and taking you in a direction you hadn’t thought of. Bing and Cara are those people. They just make you happy.”

As a self-taught chef who had never sold through a shop before, Bing deeply valued the support he received from Alex and his buying team. “Every time we had a small problem, Alex would say: ‘We can sort it for you.’ I feel it is so easy to talk to him, ask him for feedback and adapt to make things better. Those little details: they made me feel I was back on track.”

The first products they launched in our Farmshop were boxes of ready-to-eat sushi, handmade in Wabi Sabi’s tiny kitchen and delivered by Bing and Cara in a refrigerated van they bought specially. The maki rolls and nigiri sushi in both vegetarian and non-vegetarian selections showcased Bing’s use of locally sourced ingredients and imaginative flavour pairings: beetroot-cured salmon; charred hispi cabbage with charcoal oil; tempura courgette and miso egg yolk sauce made using eggs from their own woodland chickens.

Next, Bing and Cara launched their ramen kits in the Farmshop: viewers of the recent Channel 4 Series A Lake District Farmshop watched the couple put their hearts and souls into preparing ramen bowls to impress Alex and his colleague, Emily, featuring slow-cooked Herdwick mutton, flavourful handmade broth and perfectly elastic handmade ramen noodles.

Crucial to their success was persuading Alex that the dish would be easy for customers to recreate at home from a kit. Cara’s hand-illustrated instructions added a sincerely personal touch. “We created these kits during a pandemic when everyone was stuck at home,” Bing says. “If I was the customer and I saw a hand-drawn message, it would make me feel happy.”

Wabi Sabi restaurant is now open again, and Bing is once again creating elaborate tasting menus inspired by his dreams and foraging trips around his beloved Lake District home. But so successful have been their ramen kits and sushi boxes that the couple have opened a permanent takeaway shop next to the restaurant.

The growing range of Asia-inspired ready-to-eat foods they now deliver to Tebay Services includes gyoza (filled dumplings) and bao buns. We can’t wait to see what Bing dreams up next.

“With Bing, you can see he thinks really deeply about things and he likes coming up with solutions,” Alex says. “You get the sense there’s more to explore, more opportunities and more ideas that we’re going to come up with together that neither of us knows about yet.”

wabisabirestaurant.co.uk

Chef Jake Winter is the new face of Wild & Fruitful, the West Cumbrian jam-making business behind our Farmshop preserves and seasonal fruit compotes.

If you want to know where to find a Keswick Codlin cooking apple tree or help yourself to a crop of wild gooseberries, Jake Winter is a good person to know. The 22-year-old chef has been foraging for produce in the parks and hedgerows around Keswick in the Lake District since he was a boy, when his granny would take him out blackberry-picking and teach him how to cook.

“Whenever I go out for a walk, I always take a bag,” he says. “You never know what you are going to find.”

His love and knowledge of his local area, combined with the skills he learned during five years as a chef at country-house hotel Lyzzick Hall, make him a worthy custodian of a local food producer that is very close to our hearts. Together with David Seymour, owner of the Lingholm Estate and Kitchen on the banks of Derwentwater, Jake is now running Wild & Fruitful, the Cumbrian preserve maker with which we work in partnership to create our Farmshop label jams and preserves.

Wild & Fruitful was founded 20 years ago by Jane Maggs, a landscape architect and environmentalist. She started it to use up the surplus fruit going unpicked in West Cumbrian hedgerows and gardens, motivated by a determination to reduce food waste.

Our Farmshop Buyer Alexander Evans was her very first customer, first at his Made in Cumbria shop at our sister business Rheged, and then in the Farmshop at Tebay Services. In 2017 Jane and Alexander worked in partnership to launch a range of preserves under our Farmshop label featuring local fruits and wild ingredients. With her knowledge of wild plants and enthusiasm for edible ‘weeds’, Jane created unique combinations, such as blackcurrant extra jam with meadowsweet and a strawberry conserve infused with the Turkish-Delight-scented leaves of Pelargonium ‘Attar of Roses’. 

When Jane sold Wild & Fruitful in 2020, Jake inherited a binder full of hundreds of typed-out recipes. “One of my lockdown projects was converting all the recipes from pounds and ounces to grams and kilos,” he says.

While streamlining their range of jams, conserves, curds, chutneys, sauces, relishes and pickles and ensure their commercial viability, Jake and David are also determined to remain true to the ethos of Jane’s original enterprise: making jams and preserves by hand in real pans using as much locally sourced, foraged and surplus produce as possible.

Autumn will find Jake and David in the Lingholm estate orchard, picking Marjorie plums and heritage apples while peeking through the branches towards the summit of Catbells. Before that, when the blackcurrants arrive, Jake will be picking them up from his neighbours and taking delivery of carrier bags full in return for a few jars of jam.

“People are happy to give it to a good home,” says Jake, who does his best to ensure that no donation goes to waste.  “We have invested in more freezer space so when local fruits are in season we can preserve them to use later.”

While not limiting themselves to local and seasonal ingredients – recipes in their newly branded Wild & Fruitful range included mango chutney and lemon curd – Jake and David make use of as much Cumbrian produce as they can get their hands on: rhubarb from neighbours’ allotments, damsons from the Lyth Valley, strawberries and tomatoes from Cochranes Nurseries at Longtown near Carlisle, elderberries foraged from the bushes that grow metres from the back of their production kitchen in Maryport.

The Lingholm Estate itself has a vegetable garden supplying tomatoes, carrots and beans. “We’ve got loads of runner beans, which I’m planning to come up a recipe for – maybe a pickle,” Jake says. The more you pick them, the more they grow.”

As a chef he’s in his element in the production kitchen, where he directs Jane’s original team. He loves coming up with new recipes and flavour combinations, working with other local producers such as Keswick Brewery and The Lakes Distillery to create new products to add to the rebranded Wild & Fruitful range. He and David have just launched Wild & Fruitful English Lakes Honey, new in our Farmshop, which is gathered from hives at Lingholm and in the Borrowdale, Newlands and Lorton valleys.  

They’re still working closely with Alexander to make our Partnership products to Jane and Alexander’s original recipes, which include a South Indian-spiced ‘Fusion’ piccalilli, Sticky fig and rhubarb relish and cheeseboard favourite Pear & walnut chutney with port. 

“In Jake, Jane found someone who will do his best to stick to her principles, who knows the value of the provenance of the produce he is getting in,” Alexander says. “He wants to do the best by his producers, just as Jane did, and he has kept the essence of what Jane was trying to do.”

Crucial to this essence is the handmade process. “Every batch is slightly different,” Jake says, explaining how he and his team still peel and chop whole fruits and vegetables by hand to retain the character and texture of the final product. They make everything in batches of 20-30 jars at a time, using the same stovetop method you’d use at home – just with bigger pans.

“I use my eye and senses to know when things are ready,” he says. Choosing which of the Lingholm plums to put into one of the seasonal fruit compotes that he makes for our Kitchen – where it is spooned on top of porridge and sandwiched in our Victoria sponge cakes. Or knowing when the strawberry compote, made for us with Cochranes’ Cumbrian strawberries, has reached the perfect point – gently set but retaining some fleshy fruitiness. These instincts have become second nature to a chef who made and sold his first jams as a teenager in his parents’ Keswick B&B.

“I can’t explain it. I know by touching it when a plum is just ripe, but not too ripe,” he says. “That’s the perfect plum to make a compote.”