FROM sticky toffee pudding to the UK’s best restaurant, the village of Cartmel has an international reputation for its food and drink. Michaela Robinson-Tate finds out how gastro Cartmel was born

The figures speak for themselves: two million puddings made by the Sticky Toffee team each year; 30,000 diners at L’Enclume and its sister restaurant Rogan & Company annually; a high end wine shop, a popular brewery and one of the region’s best cheese shops.

Cartmel also has four pubs, tearooms and a chocolate shop - an impressive list for a village with a population of only about 450.

Of course, tourists and visitors aren’t new to Cartmel - and its 12th-century Priory and scenic racecourse both draw tens of thousands of people each year.

But the village’s profile has been boosted by its renowned food and drink. Howard and Jean Johns started the trend when they bought Cartmel Village Shop in 1989 and began selling their sticky toffee pudding in foil trays that people could reheat at home.

Today their team produces two million puddings a year and people make special journeys to Cartmel to visit the shop.

The pace of change accelerated when Simon Rogan and his partner, Penny Tapsell, opened L’Enclume 15 years ago and the village was quickly catapulted up the list of places with a destination restaurant.

Just one year after opening, The Good Food Guide reported that L’Enclume had made “quite a splash in the Lakes”.

It has now been listed as the Guide’s best restaurant in the UK for four consecutive years.

Simon - the current AA Chef of the Year - has two Michelin stars for L’Enclume and his businesses in Cartmel employ about 80 people and include a second restaurant called Rogan and Company, 16 guest bedrooms, a farm and a newly-opened shop in Cartmel Priory Gatehouse Cottage, where shoppers can pick up a L’Enclume branded pen or a reed diffuser scented with herbs grown on the farm.

A tasting menu at L’Enclume will set you back £130 plus wine but that doesn’t deter diners.

Peter Unsworth, whose grandfather, Ernest, started a garage business in Cartmel in 1922, has watched the village grow.

He and his brother, David, developed Unsworth’s Yard on the former garage site and it’s now a food lovers’ destination in its own right.

David runs Hot Wines, where he stocks high end wines, spirits and liqueurs and Peter and his brother-in-law Mark Grunnill are kept flat out producing ales, such as the best-selling Last Wolf, at Unsworth’s Yard Brewery.

Unsworth’s Yard is also home to Cartmel Cheeses while David and Peter’s sister, Alison, runs The Mallard Tea Shop.

Peter, 51, can track the village’s development from when Howard and Jean Johns and Simon Rogan started their businesses.

“Sticky toffee and L’Enclume underpin all this because they had already changed the direction of Cartmel from antiques, antiques and antiques," he says.

"There’s nothing wrong with antiques but high quality food and drink is the way forward.

“Cartmel’s pubs, like a lot of village pubs, have had ups and downs but what Rogan and sticky toffee and now us are bringing to the village has enabled them all to up the quality so they’re all at the top of their game."

We find Simon Rogan in the middle of giving instructions to one of his chefs to sort through a box of crow garlic - a variation of wild garlic - that he’s picked that morning from the only uncultivated supply he’s ever found.

Simon has recently pulled out of running Fera, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Mayfair’s Claridge’s hotel.

But he has plans to open his own Roganic restaurant in Marylebone - close to the site of his former pop-up restaurant of the same name - is in the middle of writing a recipe book for home chefs and has recently opened his first shop in the centre of Cartmel.

His impact on the village is sometimes compared to that of TV chef Rick Stein on Padstow in Cornwall.

I wonder how he feels about the comparison:

“I try not to think about it too much. People go on about this Rick Stein thing - are we trying to emulate him?

"I’m not trying to emulate anyone. First of all Padstow is a lot bigger than Cartmel, it’s not easy to have a big chunk of Cartmel.”

He says there’s more to Cartmel than his businesses: “Right now there’s a real team effort from team Cartmel, all working together and giving the visitor something quite unique and memorable.

"Everyone’s upped their game - it’s an amazing experience for everyone who comes to visit.”

Fran Horne was the HR manager for the renowned London-based cheese business Neal’s Yard Dairy when she met one of their suppliers, the Cumbrian cheesemaker Martin Gott.

Martin, who produces the award-winning St James sheep’s milk cheese, and his business partner Ian Robinson, had opened Cartmel Cheeses in Unsworth’s Yard in 2010.

When one of Fran’s good friends moved to Cartmel and she came to visit, she and Martin met up again and got talking about his business.

The result was that Fran bought Martin’s share in Cartmel Cheeses and moved to the village in 2015.

Fran says as a newcomer, she’s been welcomed in Cartmel and by the wider community of food producers, many of whose products she sells in the Bakery shop adjoining the cheese shop.

Diners from L’Enclume call into Unsworth’s Yard to buy bread and cheese. Fran says Cartmel is now known for its food: “We get customers from all over the place, all over the country, all over the world,” said Fran.

For many, gastronomic Cartmel started with Jean and Howard Johns. It was 1989 when the couple bought a shop in the centre of the village and started to make ready meals in foil containers for campers, caravanners and self-catering holidaymakers.

Jean says: “The one thing we sold most of was sticky toffee pudding because we did it in containers and nobody else was making it in a take-home way. That’s how it started.

"Then we got a phone call, it was in the winter, and somebody phoned up and said we have a caravan in Cartmel and buy your puddings. We put them in the freezer and we’ve run out. Can we buy them anywhere else?”

Howard and Jean realised if they could make the puddings during the winter when the shop was quiet and sell them elsewhere, it would boost the business year-round.

Howard went off in his car with samples and the business took off. Production expanded and was moved first to a purpose-built kitchen at Howard and Jean’s home at Cartmel and then to a new unit up the road at Flookburgh.

The range now includes flavours such as sticky banana and chocolate, they make two million puddings a year and employ 30 people.

Their son, Simon, is MD and their daughter, Sarah Holliday, runs the village shop with her husband, David.

Jean says that Cartmel today is much busier and the season is longer, which has helped encourage new businesses.

Their own business is known around the world and wherever they go on holiday, they find people have heard of the village.

“When people say where do you come from and we say Cartmel in Cumbria, they will either say sticky toffee pudding, the racecourse or the Priory or all three but more often than not it’s sticky toffee pudding,” says Jean.

“When we say that’s what we do they’re completely gobsmacked. They think it’s wonderful."