The modern tasting menu has become an established part of eating out in Britain over the last 25 years or so, and they range from belt-busting banquets that leave you straining against your own perimeter like a bowling ball in a sock, to exquisite torments that light diners up with a ravenous inferno before turfing them out to hunt for chips on the way home.
They are always interesting though, and always special, I reflected, driving through the perfect blackness of a December night along the stunning lane that winds its way west from Devil’s Dyke along low ground. The Truleigh Hill massif to the left, silhouetted by the moon on a night like this, rises up 700ft above. Scenically, this is peak South Downs, a slice of England that, thanks to a booming wine revolution, is today having a gastronomic awakening that is perhaps unrivalled in Britain. The landscape, and the drive (or walk) there can’t have changed much in centuries.
It’s all part of the experience of Terra restaurant, which was only set up in 2023 by co-owners Helen and Steve, who bought Tottington Manor, the home of Terra, in March 2021, at the tail end of Lockdown Two. And there it was, twinkling in the distance, a beacon in the darkness, the house and gardens lit up in Christmas decorations.
The 17th-century house bears the marks of the centuries, from an original priest hole to a secret bunker and escape tunnel installed in the war, when it was a base for one of Churchill’s Secret Auxiliary Units. On a night like this, it’s like wandering into the set of a Richard Curtis film.
The bar and restaurant, set in a cosy ramble of rooms, thrums to the syncopated beat of assorted chatter, and down a short corridor is one of the two tasting rooms, with a table for 12, softly lit with wooden beams above us.
We’re lucky enough to sit on a table of British food royalty: wine growers, chefs, food critics and, best of all, the delightful founding couple: Helen (“I’m the gobby one!”) and chatty Steve, her legal husband. “I have three” she jokes, mentioning two others, staff on the team.
Terra restaurant, launched in 2023, was an instant success, voted second best restaurant in Sussex in the Bravo Awards in 2025, but the team, under the creative development chef Jordan Sarvaar, has been quietly working on something even better – the seven-course menu – over the last year. And now, the winter tasting menu is ready to meet the world. It started with a light, very clever, savoury beetroot cheesecake with walnut and local soft goat’s cheese, ingredients that have bumped heads often before – but not like this – and ended with a cheese plate of Brighton Blue and Seven Sisters (hard) goat’s cheese.
Everything that lay between was marked by the same emphasis on locality.
This has been par for the course in high-end British dining for some time now, but the bounty of the South Downs makes it possible to serve up world-class food all sourced within a few miles (thank God no one takes it to an extreme, or we’d be eating kale all winter).
Steve tells me that tasting menus like this appeal to those for whom eating out in good restaurants has become normalised. Diners like this will be seeking magic, and there’s nothing more magical than a dish that leaves even experienced diners wondering what, precisely, they’ve just eaten: the sea bass on an aniseed tartlet that followed the beetroot cheesecake had that ring of mystery and was my (legal) wife’s highlight of the evening.
My own moment came straight after: roast breasts of mallard and duck with cauliflower and chestnut purée and confit leek. I love to see duck on a menu: it’s a real survivor of British dining, seeing out the 60s and 70s in – often very sweet – duck a l’orange, and popular to this day as Peking duck. Here, the game old campaigner was served confidently rare, entirely lacking in mystery, and sublime.
The mildly Thai-inspired loin of cod after that was an imaginative breather, before the last of the big guns: venison with potato and celeriac presse, parsnip puree, baby carrot, wild, foraged mushrooms (winter chanterelles, last of the season in the South Downs and pretty much unparalleled) and Bordelaisee jus. That’s a rather long menu description, but I list them all so you can see that it’s basically a very sophisticated roast dinner in miniature; witty, and perfectly executed. This was followed by a stunning honey tart and two-cheese selection (Sussex blue and Seven Sisters goat’s cheese). One of the biggest pleasures of a tasting menu is the lack of choice. For the unfussy eater, it is infinitely more enjoyable to sit back, relax, and let the chef, who knows his skills and ingredients better than anyone, take the wheel.
There is an optional wine ‘flight’ that pairs each of the seven dishes with a local wine (all from West Sussex). It’s well established by now that English wines, particularly sparkling and white, are world class; rosés and reds are catching up, and one of the wines on the list was a rarity: cold, sparkling dry red (Bolney Sparkling Cuvée Noir).
The whole thing was a flight really, the certification flight after the test pilots have discovered the limits of the craft, and it’s a flight not of fantasy, but of experimentation, persistence and most of all, of place and time. The experience felt like a crie de coeur for Terra, so firmly rooted to the landscape as their name implies, and for every grower, farmer and wine-maker working with them. It was a flight fuelled entirely by the earth directly below it, and we were sorry when we had to return our tables to their upright position and land. For the record, we didn’t stop for chips on the way home.
The Terra tasting menu is available for groups of between two and twelve.
