Independent Shopper: Phillip Bishop, The Greyhound on the Test

We are an independently run boutique hotel on The River Test with a gastropub in Stockbridge, Hampshire. All around there are country pursuits including shooting and fishing on the world’s most famous fly-fishing river! We have a seasonal menu including local produce from local suppliers and from our very own fishing boat.

Guests have been warmly welcomed to the Greyhound on the Test for more than 600 years and the name of the pub and hotel dates back over 200 years when in the 1800s greyhounds were used to hunt hares. Visitors to our gastropub (which also has two AA Rosettes along with many other accolades!) really enjoy the pub’s riverside garden.

Guests often fish in the Test and leave us the fish to use for our menu. We also cater a lot for weddings, last month the groom caught his own fish and had it for his wedding breakfast! Test Trout is an amazing fish, both Brown and Rainbow trout especially as we get it so fresh.

We send some to our local butchers, Robinsons in Stockbridge, who cold smoke it and we use that on our breakfast menu. We also use it on our starters; at the moment we have an Elderflower Cured Test Trout dish using fresh local ingredients.

We use Clayton’s Eggs for our breakfast spread and in all our pastries and desserts. They are great quality local free-range eggs. For our sausages, bacon, black pudding, Sunday roast pork belly and sausage meat for our sausage rolls we use Greenfields Pork. They’re a small, family-run business supplying award-winning, free-range produce made from their own herd.

Another great one is Fundamentally Fungus, cultivated Stockbridge wild mushrooms. Again, we use them on our breakfast menu and throughout our seasonal menus on different dishes.

The Chalk Stream area is great for watercress, our veg supplier Chefs Delight sources some great Hampshire watercress which we use in our velouté and in our sandwiches for Kingfisher Hampers; our amazing made-to-order hamper business. Chefs Delight also supplies us with all the seasonal fruits and vegetables from the new forest, amazing strawberries are coming in at the moment!

Hoxton Bakehouse supplies our sourdough – they’re an amazing husband and wife team, ex-chefs that make incredible sourdough and have now expanded to seven stores too. 

We’ve worked with our local suppliers for years and forged great relations with them. They look after us, always ring and let us know when something new is coming into season or a great product they’ve got.

We love having a local special to sell and they always go down well with guests!