My Pub: the White Hart, Ashill, Norfolk

A little over three years later and the site is enjoying great success under the duo’s guidance who both changed careers to take on the pub full time – in an industry neither of them had any experience in when it came to operating a pub.

The White Hart has bagged a prestigious Great British Pub Awards trophy and CAMRA (The Campaign for Real Ale) Branch Pub of The Year Awards in that time, but remains true to what it always wanted to be – a pub that remains so for drinkers and diners without the title of being a gastropub.

Here’s Jonathan tells The Morning Advertiser​ about the Norfolk pub.

The pub​

It’s a freehold pub that we lease off a friend of ours who owns the premises. We are in a rural village, which is quite tucked away so we are a destination site but importantly we provide cater for our locals too.

We have a beer garden that overlooks fields at the back and we also have four B&B rooms.

The publican​

Myself and my wife Naomi run the pub and we set up and own the business. We are new to the pub trade and opened in October 2020, in the middle of the Covid pandemic. Unfortunately we only opened for 10 days and then had to shut again.

Naomi and I decided to have a complete change of what we used to do in order to give the pub a go. Neither of us had ever run a pub and we both gave up our previous careers to take on our village pub.

I grew up here and have been living in this village since 1980. We both moved here and got married in 2005.

The trade​

Our customer base is mainly from a slightly older age group and includes families, walkers and cyclists. Although we do get younger people in here, generally speaking, we are not a place where you get lots of 18-year-olds coming out for a big Friday and Saturday night out.

Our drinking customer base tends to be more local from within the village or surrounding villages - where they have a place to meet others and socialise.

In terms of the food, we are much more of a destination site and get a mix of local people and people who will travel. We’ve built a reputation for the food and people travel from further distance for this and this is similar for the rooms. 

People who are visiting people locally or who are working down here use the rooms and we’ve also had people who are holidaying or having a mini break who tend to stay for longer periods. We are just off The Peddars Way and regularly have guests staying who are doing this walk.

The team​

Myself and Naomi are hands-on and we can do every job in the pub. Naomi supports the kitchen when required and we cover anything needed, from cleaning the toilets to mopping the floors and cleaning the bedrooms.

We have about 20 members of staff but a lot of those are part time. From a front-of-house perspective, we’ve got a full-time bar manager. Then we have two or three other part-time bar staff and three or four younger people, aged about 16 or 17, who do waiting for us and help with the food service when we’re busy.

In the kitchen, we have a head chef, sous chef, a chef de partie (who we are recruiting for) and we have a trainee chef and kitchen porters who support the kitchen team. We also employ a part-time housekeeper who looks after the bedrooms.

The food​

We offer chefs a great chance to make a name for themselves here and had Tiffany Long as head chef until recently who won the Great British Pub Awards’ Best Young Chef​ award in 2022.

Tiffany decided she wanted a new challenge and she’s recently left to work in the world of private cheffing. We had a strong team and we were able to promote our sous chef into head chef role.

All of our food is freshly made in-house – home-cooked food – and that’s something we deliberately wanted to do to differentiate ourselves in the area and create ourselves a bit of a reputation for good-quality, fresh, locally sourced food.

I would steer away from calling the White Hart a gastropub and we don't really bill ourselves as that; we wanted to retain that kind of ‘pubby local feel’, with a more casual approach.

As for our food, we do a mixture of pub classics such as steaks, burgers and your fish and chips, but all home-cooked and the burgers are made in-house.

We do some more a la carte food in the evening and have regular specials, so if a customer comes out on a Friday or Saturday night, they’re going to get something a little bit different.

We’re conscious of being where we are, which is not on a main road and there isn’t any passing trade, we wanted a place where drinkers can come and feel relaxed without it being a restaurant but also if you come for food, there’s a nice atmosphere because you had a few people drinking and it wasn’t sterile like a restaurant can sometimes be.

The drink​

We’ve won some awards and are well affiliated with CAMRA, winning the West Norfolk Pub of the Year Award in 2022 while being finalists in 2021 and runners-up in 2023.

We’ve got a good selection of real ales and we've been allowed to have this range because of our regular ale drinkers. Their custom means we can have a wide selection on any one time and they’re always fresh because it’s always getting drunk.

So, if you come in for a meal and want an ale, it’s always good because it’s always turning over.

We have six casks ales on at any time, which are always different. We made a decision early on not to stick with fixed brand and to have a broad range of strengths and colours in cask.

We never have the same ale on repeat but we do get popular ones back after a while. When changing our cask ales, we are always looking to have a mix from local breweries and as well as those from further afield.

We use Moon Gazer brewery on the north Norfolk coast as an example of one of our local suppliers but there’s about a dozen local breweries we use regularly.

For wine, we use a supplier from Cambridge called Anthony Byrne. We’ve got a really good selection through them. Being a pub, we don't want a range that’s too pricey and although we have some expensive ones, generally, our wines provide a good selection in terms of value.

The events ​

We do a beer festival every year in August, over the bank holiday which runs for four days.

We have live music and really push the real ales. We have up to 30 different ales on at any one time.

Every two weeks we have charity quiz nights, steak night once a month and every month or so we do a theme night such as Italian, curry, cheese and wine, etc.

The future​

Although, it’s still early days because we’ve only been here for about 3 years, we’ve done a lot of improvements already in terms of replacing equipment in the kitchen, building a walk-in cold store because the kitchen wasn’t really equipped for the amount of food we’ve started doing. We've had a solar panel system installed and an electric vehicle charger installed.

So we’ve done quite a bit of work already but we would like to improve our outside area.

We had a marquee during Covid that we’ve taken down now. We used it quite a lot back then and we get one back for our beer festival but we are looking at maybe putting something more permanent in our beer garden/patio area.

We jumped in on solar panels two years ago because of the electricity price increases that were coming. We bit the bullet and managed to get a grant to help us with the initial purchase of the solar panels, which take quite a chunk out of the bills in the summertime. And it’s also a big tick for sustainability.