Stosie Madi
Stosie Madi
A whirlwind of talent and skill in the kitchen (which she runs almost single-handedly), Stosie Madi has made rural inn the Parkers Arms one of the most beloved gastropubs in the country. Taking the best of local produce and adding a sprinkle of exciting international flavours into her recipes, her unbridled passion for everything culinary shines through in every single dish.
‘Passion’ is a word bandied about a lot in the chef world, and while anyone willing to spend long, unsociable hours in a kitchen for the majority of their life has to have it, sometimes you come across a chef who really encapsulates its meaning. Stosie Madi, of the beautiful Parkers Arms in rural Lancashire, is just such a chef.
Born in Senegal, raised in The Gambia, of Lebanese heritage and incredibly well-travelled, the fact that Stosie decided to settle down in Clitheroe of all places is a story in itself. She decided to leave The Gambia when her daughter was around ten years old, as the political landscape was becoming more and more fraught. ‘I’d been through three coup d’états by that time, and I didn’t want her to grow up seeing all the oppression,’ she explains. ‘They’d started to do awful things like mix cement into the food at the state schools as the government weren’t supplying enough, and protesters were getting shot right in front of us. But I didn’t want to send her away to go to boarding school like I had in Hertfordshire – you’re wrenched away from everything you know to be stuck in a strange, cold place. So I started travelling around to see where we could settle and I could start working. We went to Spain and France, but it was when I first visited Lancashire with my business partner Kathy and her brother AJ, who are both originally from Rossendale, that I fell in love with the area.’
Stosie had always wanted to cook for a living, despite her parents wanting her to take over the family hospitality business in a more managerial role. After opening three very well-respected restaurants in Africa with Kathy, when her father died the pair sold them and used the funds to open a small restaurant in Clitheroe. ‘I don’t think my friends and family understood why I’d choose to settle down in Clitheroe – they saw it as a really old-fashioned, twee little village in the cold north of England, and I’d come from a very multicultural, hot country. But I knew being part of a small community would be a great start for us, and the restaurant was doing well. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the planning permission needed to make it bigger, so we started looking for a larger site instead.’
That search eventually led Stosie and Kathy to a pub in the tiny village of Newton-in-Bowland, which they opened in 2007 and called Parkers Arms. ‘It was really tough at first,’ says Stosie. ‘We were cooking this really rustic, hearty food with a sort of French-influenced background, but locals couldn’t understand why they’d spend the money we were asking for something like a pie when they could get one for a couple of pounds elsewhere. It’s taken years to get them to appreciate the difference. Back in 2007 everywhere else was either doing bog-standard pub grub or something very international – you had Nigel Haworth’s Ribble Valley Inns, but that was about it. No one had things like pies or Scotch eggs on the menu, but now they’re everywhere.’
Being in the middle of a remote part of Lancashire also made it tough to find good staff members at the Parkers Arms, which meant Stosie had to do pretty much everything herself. ‘The only people I could get were either very young and saw it as a stopgap, or just didn’t want to put the work in to learn what I was trying to do. So I decided to go it alone. Kathy would help me roll the pies and with the desserts during high volume days, we’d get a KP or commis chef in to do all the peeling, but everything else was on me.’
These days, Stosie has an assistant in the kitchen to help with prep and starters, so she’s not completely alone, but the food is still very much her own. ‘Vlad came along a few years ago as a housekeeper and couldn’t speak a word of English – but he wanted to work here,’ she says. ‘He started as a pot wash, then a KP, then a commis, and now he’s my right-hand man. He’s so valuable because he has that unbridled passion you need to cook like this, and he’s getting better every single day.’ That, combined with her business partner Kathy, Kathy’s brother AJ doing an incredible job running front-of-house and Ben, who returned to work there after going to university, means it’s a tight-knit team who live and breathe the pub.
Running a kitchen almost single-handedly is an incredibly difficult thing to do, especially when producing food at the level Stosie reaches. That’s why, at the beginning, it was seriously disheartening to see an empty dining room. ‘I always want to use the whole animal – it’s what they do in Spain, Italy, China, India and everywhere I’d travelled. But when I put things like mutton pies with mutton fat pastry on the menu, or offal or even fish on the bone, people were horrified. I couldn’t understand it – the whole notion of not wanting to eat something because it had the head attached or because the bone hadn’t been removed was completely alien to me and everything I’d known growing up.’
With an initial lack of local support and no footfall to speak of being in a rural village, Stosie decided to turn to social media to try and get the message out. Slowly but surely, customers began arriving. ‘We weren’t in any of the guides, so people just didn’t have a clue we existed,’ she says. ‘Twitter was becoming a thing, so I just started to take pictures of what I was cooking on my phone and posting them online. I’d offer customers a ‘Tweet Treat’ if they shared photos of their meals, too, which was a free bowl of my potato scratchings. It started working really well.’
Using social media was a huge boon for Stosie and the Parkers, and once people found out about the quality of the food on offer, they began travelling from across the country to get a table (winning the locals around in the process). Stosie is still an ardent user of Twitter and Instagram (‘although Twitter has changed a lot and it’s a bit scary now – it’s full of maniacs and you can’t say anything without someone being offended!’) but the pub now gets the recognition it deserves, placing in the top ten of the Top 50 Gastropubs and held in high regard by everyone from Michelin-starred chefs to local diners after a pie and a pint. While the menu was originally Lancastrian through and through (everything was sourced within thirty miles of the pub to keep costs down), it’s now got exciting flecks of international flavour throughout – think Lebanese-spiced partridge with pickles and flatbreads, curried mutton pasties and Texan-style brisket.
The Parkers Arms is like nowhere else – a prime example of a country inn creating incredible plates of food that feel both hyper-local and international at the same time. You can really feel the work that’s gone into building it into what it is today the moment you enter through the front door, and by the time you’ve eaten Stosie’s food, you’re already planning your return. ‘I didn’t get into cooking because I had nothing else to do or any other options – I chose to do it because I love it,’ says Stosie. ‘Taking a fillet or a lamb chop or a prime piece of fish and serving it with some sauce is easy – using the things that nobody wants and doing something great with them is the difficult bit. But that’s the style of cooking I love.’
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