Executive chef John Footman on the new tasting menu at The Oxford Kitchen

Glamorous, high-profile restaurant chefs who shout at staff and slam things around kitchens have not done a lot for the image of the restaurant industry.

As many appreciate, these TV scenes of angry, highly strung culinary geniuses giving everybody a hard time are not common in real life, as you’d see if you walked into our kitchen any day of the week.

The Oxford Kitchen is making heads turn, and rightly so, because in under two years, people have come to appreciate what we believe in, which is good, unpretentious food served intelligently and impeccably but without the ceremony or airs and graces you sometimes find in top-class restaurants.

In a short space of time, we’ve become much better at what we do because we have a strong team with shared values.

If we’d had to deal with the kind of overblown egos you see on the TV, we wouldn’t have got past first base.

Put simply, my team produces fantastic food, day in and day out.

Anyone who has ever done anything creative knows how satisfying it is to produce something you’re proud of.

My time working for Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, was mind-blowing in that department.

What influenced me was not just about the amazing number of ways you could combine and enhance flavours in different dishes.

It went a bit wider than that, into looking at what the French call ‘Le Terroir’. The earth, or the soil, gives us our food, and it gives us different food at different times of the year.

You don’t have to travel very far away from where we are, here in Oxford, to marvel at the produce around us right now.

This is what informed our team when we were developing our tasting menu, which I’m proud to present here.

Some ingredients are just made for each other, and that’s true of so much of what you taste here.

Cauliflower and curry, for example. Crab and grapefruit. Duck confit and cherries. With flavour combinations, you’re trying to do one of two things as a creative chef.

Firstly, if the flavours are bold and strong enough, you are trying to nudge them ever so slightly in one direction or the other.

Good beef fillet, for example, which only needs expert cooking, will be enhanced by how you design your plate, but will still pretty much speak for itself flavour-wise.

But if flavours are not so big and strong – chicken for example – you need to think creatively about how you are going to infuse different kinds of flavours into your dish.

With this new, finely-balanced tasting menu, we have unleashed superb flavours of beautifully strong seasonal ingredients, designed to take the palate on a special journey.

And then, we’ve let our expert sommelier take things to another level, with some ‘marriage made in heaven’ wine pairings.

As you can tell, we’re all very proud of this tasting menu and excited to be serving it, so please book your table at The Oxford Kitchen, come down and try it, and let me know what you think.

Tasting Menu: Available Monday to Saturday evenings £49 per person, wine pairing an extra £29

The Oxford Kitchen, 215 Banbury Rd, Oxford OX2 7HQ. 01865 511149