Golden Goose

Some Michelin-starred chef-proprietors are flamboyant personalities with a big media presence. Others just quietly get on with their cooking, happy to keep a low profile. Stephen Shore, co-owner with his wife, Victoria, of Bath's one-Michelin-starred Moody Goose restaurant, is in the latter category.

Reserved and quietly spoken, with a soft West Country burr, he takes a while to relax in new company, but it is nevertheless quickly apparent that he has a clear understanding of who he is, where he is going and how he fits in to the wider culinary scene.

"I enjoyed cooking at school and from then on it was all I wanted to do. Simple as that. Right from the word go I always knew I wanted my own restaurant," explains Shore, who gained his Michelin star in January 2000. "We closed for two weeks this January, and by the time we opened again I was itching to get back in the kitchen. It's the challenge of using your imagination to create dishes, the buzz of service."

The foundations of Shore's culinary prowess are firmly in country house hotel cooking - his formative years as a chef were exclusively in top provincial establishments like Hunstrete House, Bristol; Charlton House, Shepton Mallet; Ston Easton Park, Bath; Homewood Park, Hinton Charterhouse; and Mallory Court, Leamington Spa. "I love the feel of country house hotels, the fact that they aren't conveyor belts banging out food. The places I worked in always had about five or six chefs cooking around 40 covers, and they were always craft environments. Perfect."

One of the major legacies that Shore took away with him from his career in country house kitchens was a love of working with game, and he has established a reputation for serving it at the 30-seat Moody Goose since the restaurant opened in the basement of a Georgian house in Bath in October 1996. Rabbit, venison, guinea fowl, pheasant and partridge are all used extensively, with the last being a particular favourite. Shore often matches partridge with blueberries, which enhance the bird's taste without overwhelming it.

For Shore, the partnering of blueberries and partridge springs from the birds' natural diet in the wild in Scotland. "They feed on the native blueberries so much that their flesh is actually tinted purple," he reveals.

His style is to keep things simple and direct on the palate, to enhance rather than submerge the qualities of fresh, seasonal ingredients.

A healthy respect for his produce doesn't mean that Shore is stuck in a culinary time warp, though. He is as likely as the next chef to give his dishes an innovative modern element, by adding a sweet-and-sour dimension, say, to a classic offering. For instance, a recent menu carried a tian of duck confit and artichokes with a pineapple and chilli vinaigrette. He is not averse, either, to incorporating one of the flavours of the moment, liquorice, into a vanilla bavarois, which he serves with a compote of blackberries.

He clearly likes the challenge of matching fruit and savoury elements in a dish, as well as the opportunity to employ a gamut of culinary techniques by using different elements of the same main ingredient. A recent rabbit dish, for example, comprised a boudin of wild rabbit and apricots with tarragon served with a leg confit. The rabbit leg, after being confited down, is wrapped in Parma ham and then poached before service, while the saddle is served whole but coated in a mousseline made with the livers and kidney, shallots, garlic and apricots. Some liver is retained to serve as a garnish, too.

Like many highly ranked chefs, Shore cooks with roe deer meat, but he also uses fallow and, more unusually, sika venison. "Roe is more tender, but then I usually marinate venison with the usual ingredients - juniper, red wine, celery heads, and coarse herbs like rosemary and thyme. I just rest the sika and fallow a little longer because they're thicker meats."

Shore may derive great satisfaction from crafting game dishes, but it's a shrewd move, too, to gain a name for serving game, chiefly because his regular diners are often of the hunting, shooting and fishing fraternity in the 35-plus age group.

"As soon as the game season begins, in September and October, I know the big spenders are in the restaurant," he says with relish. In fact, monthly takings can be up by £5,000 to £10,000 on the summer's slower months (to about £20,000-£25,000). This is a situation of immense satisfaction to the Shores, who opened the restaurant on a tight budget four years ago using a combination of money that Victoria had inherited on her father's death and a bank loan of £20,000.

"I was very nervous about Victoria putting her father's money into the business, but everything's gone better than we forecast. We're financially 20-30% up on what we predicted. The last year since getting the Michelin star has been very busy - people were definitely trying us out - but, in general, people come because they've been recommended by word of mouth."

The Michelin recognition is something that Shore treasures, but it doesn't deflect him from placing business before vanity. "You've always got to bear in mind what the customer wants," he stresses. Luckily, his customers now trust his judgement and are willing to be adventurous, so he can regularly spread his culinary wings.

A perfect opportunity to do so came at Christmas, when he decided to put a cannelloni of pike on the menu. It sold surprisingly well and, being a game fish, slotted easily into the restaurant's speciality of serving wild meat. "Living at the bottom of murky rivers, it does retain a very earthy taste," explains Shore.

Desserts are ideal for showing a little flamboyance. As the finale of the meal, they beg for a little theatricality, a touch of, in Shore's word, "wackiness". Fortunately, he is prevented from going over the top by sous chef Jeremy Medley - an ex-Ston Easton and Mallory Court colleague - with whom he draws up the Moody Goose's puds menu. Typical of their output is a teardrop of bitter chocolate with a griottine cherry and white chocolate mousse, pierced with a chocolate spike and served with a vibrant cassis syrup; and an iced passion fruit parfait layered with marshmallow, served with candied limes.

"That was a dish that I thought up purely because passion fruit can be strong and quite bitter and I wanted to offset it by the texture of the marshmallow. The candied lime offers a different dimension again. Overall, you get a lovely, spongy parfait with a sharp taste - sweet and sour, almost."

Innovative combinations may be on the menu, but realistically Shore knows that he has taken the Moody Goose as far as it can go in its present incarnation. "I don't think I can do anything else with the space. I can't expand. I can't make the kitchen larger and this is probably as busy as I'm ever going to get. Maybe relocation will be the next step. I'd certainly like a more salubrious-looking entrance. Watch this space."