Ideal for farm-to-table sharing plates from a chef who learned his trade under Heston Blumenthal…
Berkhamsted has waited a long time for a restaurant like this. WILD opened on the High Street in October 2025, the work of chef patron Matt Larcombe, previously head chef at The Crown at Bray under Heston Blumenthal, and the whole operation runs off the restaurant’s own farm project in nearby Radlett. Most of the vegetables, herbs and honey arrive from there, with a network of British suppliers covering everything the Hertfordshire soil can’t provide.
Head Chef Charlie Hitchcock, who has cooked at the much-mourned Hedone and Roux at Parliament Square, works alongside him, and the menu shifts with whatever the farm has delivered that week, which means the dish you loved in June may well have disappeared by September. Bread is baked in-house, sauces come from bones, trimmings and devoted simmering, and pickles and ferments carry the harvest through the leaner months.
Order across the small plates and the kitchen’s precision comes into focus, fast. Cucumber from the farm with crispy shallots is clean and summery, about as direct an argument for the Radlett project as you’ll get. It’s presented like a little finger snack you’d get at a children’s party. Novel, sure, but the playfulness is welcome against all the earnest provenance talk.
The two iterations of hash brown are where things get dangerous: one topped with crab and apple, one with beef tartare. Each is barely two bites, but you’ll spend the rest of the meal negotiating with yourself about ordering more. And succumbing several times, as it happened.
Mushroom parfait with puffed rice is smooth and rich without weight, the puffed rice supplying the crunch that stops it getting cloying. Sea bass crudo stays light and restrained, jalapeño offering a gentle heat, grapefruit doing the lifting, the whole thing looking decidedly psychedelic when it catches the early evening light. Agnolotti with pea and ricotta is early summer on a plate, the pasta beautifully made, the whole thing foamy and fresh.
Shout out to the hispi cabbage. Hispi is on every menu in the country at the moment and most of it is chewy and forgettable, but this one is sweet without being sickly, enthusiastically charred rather than just getting a suggestion of the grill, and crunchy where it counts. From the larger sharing dishes, the troncon of wild halibut with fennel is bloody massive, a bone-in cross-section that stays pearlescent from the outer edge to the sweet meat hard up against the bone, which isn’t easy with a portion of this size.
Save room, though, because desserts hold the line. Dark chocolate with white chocolate and hazelnuts is textured and rich, its bitter-sweet symphony nicely judged. Lemon curd with miso caramel, pumpkin granola and meringue is gooey, crunchy and tart all at once, the miso leaving a satisfying savoury edge behind long after the plate has gone. If you’d rather lose all sense of autonomy, there’s a feasting menu at £85 a head, chef-led and dictated by the season, for tables of two or more.
Then there’s the wine. Rémi Cousin spent eight years at The Fat Duck and six as head sommelier at Le Gavroche before taking over the list here, and he now judges at the Decanter World Wine Awards. Tell him what you’re eating, hand over the decision, and you’ll drink better than you would have done if you vaguely waved your hand at the second cheapest bottle. There are monthly Wine Club evenings too, pairing a secret seasonal menu with matched bottles.
If you’d rather start with a cocktail, the limoncello martini is pert and puckering, exactly what you want when the weather turns muggy. The gimlet is balanced enough that you could drink ten of them, and only realise you’d got carried away when you wake up on the turf of the Berkhamsted Lawn Tennis Club the next morning, no clue how you got there.
Ambient house plays early in the evening before mellowing as service goes on, staff are warm and attentive without hovering, and the room handles a date night, a birthday and a long catch-up with friends with equal ease. What an addition to Berkhamsted WILD is proving to be.
By Vicky Clifford Sanghad
July 10, 2026
