‘It felt like our last chance’: How Wilsons survived to win a Michelin star

Michelin star winners, stars of Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars, and SquareMeal’s UK Restaurant of the Year 2026: it's fair to say that 2025 has been quite a year for Wilsons. The exposure is long-deserved for what is one of the most unshowy, accomplished places to eat in Britain. Few restaurants in the country do as much with so little: just a 30-cover room, a tiny kitchen, a fiercely seasonal menu, and a two-acre farm supplying much of what ends up on the plate.

When we meet founders Jan Ostle and Mary Wilson on a crisp Monday morning, they are already in motion. Jan is bustling around folding napkins and setting tables, breaking off to chat to passers-by outside. Mary emerges from a phone call to hand us a couple of coffees, and takes over the napkins without missing a beat.

‘We’re making plans to move our farm,’ she explains, taking a seat and pushing the cups across the table. Since the Michelin star and the television exposure, Wilsons has been full to bursting, and the extra trade has stretched their Barrow Gurney plot to its limits.

‘The show and the star have been huge,’ Jan says, as he returns through the door. ‘That’s just the truth. We have full lunches and full dinners. People are happy. Problems come from busyness, but those are the best problems to have.’

It’s easy, amid the glow of awards and attention, to forget how close this restaurant came to the edge. Roll back a couple of years and the picture was very different - like many restaurants up and down the country, Wilsons was fighting for survival.

Wilsons serves a tasting menu, featuring produce from its own farm, for just £78 a head. Photography: Laurie Fletcher

‘The year we won the star really felt like our last chance,’ Mary says. ‘I remember thinking: if it doesn’t happen now, it’s never going to happen.’ The restaurant was quiet, she says. There was talk of ‘looking for a way out’. They still had cards to play - a menu change, a rethink - but the sense of jeopardy was real.

‘We weren’t making decisions from a position of strength,’ Jan says. ‘It was really tough. But then Knife Edge came along.’

The Knife Edge gamble

The opportunity seemed almost too good to be true. Backed by Apple's substantial coffers, Gordon Ramsay’s TV series Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars followed a small group of restaurants chasing Michelin recognition. Of all the hopefuls worldwide, Wilsons was chosen as one of just two UK participants, alongside Emily Roux’s Caractere.

‘I didn’t want to do it,’ Mary admits flatly. ‘I was worried about how we’d come across. You don’t have any control over the story, or how you’re perceived.’

Jan nods in agreement. ‘It’s completely exposing. The cameras are here the whole time, for two months solid. You can’t put a mask on. But something in our gut said we should do it.’

For Jan, who cut his teeth in kitchens like Restaurant Gordon Ramsay and The Square, a Michelin star carried a deeper weight. ‘You’re always measuring yourself against this bar,’ he says. ‘I’d speak to mates who had stars and they’d say it doesn’t mean anything. And you think: how can it not? Of course it means something.’

Putting fear aside, they took the risk. The cameras rolled, the pressure mounted, and then, the stars aligned. Wilsons won its first Michelin star. But in the end, the award wasn’t about prestige or validation. ‘We have a busy restaurant,’ says Jan. ‘Our staff’s jobs are safe. That’s what matters.’

'We’re still here - still creating cool jobs, still able to do the right things.'

When Jan and Mary found the site on Chandos Road in 2016, no-one imagined that this neighbourhood restaurant would one day be streamed around the world via on-demand television. The space was a slightly dilapidated old pizza restaurant, which they whipped into shape with ambition, elbow grease, and a shoestring budget.

‘I don’t think you could open a restaurant the way we did now,’ says Mary. ‘We borrowed some money from Jan’s parents and a bit from a finance provider. We didn’t have to put down a deposit - we just walked in.’ They hired an extra member of staff for support, and between the three of them, they cooked, cleaned, ran front of house, and washed up, whilst Jan and Mary raised a one-year-old. The landlord, so convinced the venture would fail, lent them a workman free of charge to paint the entire restaurant.

‘I didn’t know what VAT was when we opened,’ Jan says, laughing. ‘I was so clueless. We opened with nothing, but we just added to it everytime we could - a little bit here, a little bit there.

'We’ve come a long way. When we opened, we were in the EU, in a growing economy. Then Brexit happened. Then a pandemic. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and sent grain and energy prices through the roof. Now there’s a psycho in charge of the White House. But we’re still here - still creating cool jobs, still able to do the right things. That’s amazing.’

Surviving, and thriving

More impressive still is that Wilsons has survived, and thrived, without abandoning its founding ideals. The restaurant is bound to the land, most visibly through its two-acre market garden in nearby Barrow Gurney, which supplies the bulk of its produce. Aside from a handful of stock vegetables, almost everything on the menu is grown by the restaurant itself. They'll occasionally go further afield for great produce - Wye Valley asparagus for example - but the vast majority of the menu comes direct from the farm. If a vegetable has a bad season, there's no shopping around with suppliers for more - they have to adapt. Likewise, when the farm recently delivered a glut of cabbages, Ostle's only option was to dry them all to preserve them. 

The kitchen’s approach to waste is equally rigorous. ‘We don’t look at vegetables as single-use,’ Ostle says. ‘We’re always thinking about second and third uses.’ The bulk of a celeriac can go towards terrines, or purees, or pressed celeriac - all delicious things, but what the team really gets excited about it celeriac dashi, or ice cream, made using the peelings: multiple different expressions of the same ingredient on the same menu.

‘Wilsons was born out of everything that we didn’t like in restaurants,' says Jan about the founding of the restaurant. 

In that sense, the menu is always telling a story - of the land, the seasons, but also the people behind it. In 2025, Wilsons’ head baker, Ben Martin, passed away suddenly. The restaurant closed for a week to mourn, so Ostle cured his remaining Mangalitza pork to keep it from spoiling. The Mangalitza continued to appear on the menu for months afterwards - a quiet tribute to a colleague and friend.

In many ways, the restaurant’s journey mirrors Ostle’s own. He came up through some of London’s most intense kitchens: a gifted cook, but hampered for a time by drink and drugs. It was only after meeting Wilson at The Shed in Notting Hill that his direction began to shift. ‘Basically, Mary and I love having a good bitch,’ Jan laughs. ‘Wilsons was born out of everything that we didn’t like in restaurants.’ A few months later, the pair left the UK for Spain to work on a farm, before returning to Bristol with a baby and a plan.

‘When we opened, I didn’t give a fuck about sustainability,’ he says. ‘That was Mary’s thing. When I think back to when we first started, I was so wrong in so many of my assumptions, and Mary was so right. This partnership, for me, has been an incredible learning curve. Letting go of what I thought success looked like - what I'd been told it looked like - and listening to the people around me.

'Proper cooking comes from investing in the people that grow things properly, and listening to them. You can’t just decide when you want something - ask the farmer when it’s ready, and that’s when you take it. Don’t send them out to get things they can’t get - that creates unnecessary bullshit.’

Growing people, not just food

That philosophy has turned Jan into one of the country’s most resourceful, inventive chefs, even if he would never describe himself that way. Wilsons’ kitchen is barely 10 square metres, but Jan uses every inch to its utmost. Terrine moulds filled with garlic oil are balanced above a konro grill to gently confit small cuts of fish. Down the road, in the basement of the Wilsons Bread Shop, two old fridges have been converted into dry-ageing cabinets for fish and charcuterie. With just a small charcoal grill, a Rational oven, and an induction hob, Wilsons constantly manages to come up with new, exciting ways to cook. Jan's latest fascination is matsukasa yaki - a Japanese technique in which hot oil is poured over fish to make the scales flare and crisp. At Wilsons, even the scales have a purpose.

Wilsons' 2026 SquareMeal UK Restaurant of the Year Award. Photography: Laurie Fletcher

The spirit of experimentation is infectious, and the team is encouraged to bring ideas of their own. ‘The best thing we can do is stay open to other people’s input,’ says Jan. ‘Don’t tell people their ideas aren’t welcome, because if you crush creativity, then no-one wants to do the job. People need to be heard and given a chance to try things - that’s why we’re all here, right?’

‘Some of the best things at Wilson’s come from collaboration. Everyone is pushing the same boulder up the hill - that’s the part of the job that excites me. If it’s just me wheeling out my own dishes, it becomes boring.’

'We want Wilsons to stand the test of time.'

That team's commitment to finding ways to use even the most seemingly useless waste products, and the ever-productive farm, has been crucial in making Wilsons arguably the best value Michelin star restaurant in the country. At time of writing, the full tasting menu is just £78 - an almost unfathomable price given what’s hitting the table. A midweek lunch menu is also available for just £39 - for context, that’s less than the price of a main course in swathes of London restaurants.

‘We’re in Bristol, not London,’ says Mary. ‘Pricing out our local community would feel terrible. These are the people that have championed us - our regulars are our bread and butter. Pushing our prices up would be the biggest mistake.’

Ultimately, that's what it's all about for them. The awards, the television exposure and the national recognition, it's all nice, but Jan and Mary are building something slower and more durable. They are committed to people, not just produce. They take particular pleasure in seeing Wilsons team members fly the nest, carrying what they have learned in Bristol elsewhere. And it all leads back to this small but resolute restaurant, that is inexorably tied to the community and the land around it.

‘Banking on constant press coverage isn’t sustainable,' says Jan. 'Right now it’s great - we’re having our moment in the sun. But we know times change. We want Wilsons to stand the test of time.’

Want to read more about previous SquareMeal Restaurant of the Year winners? Check out more interviews here, including our chats with Sat Bains at Restaurant Sat Bains, Merlin Labron-Johnson at Osip, David Taylor at Grace & Savour, Rafael Cagali at Da Terra, and David Carter, founder of AGORA, OMA, Smokestak and Manteca.