🔒 Jeremy Clarkson’s Farmer’s Dog pub draws 400-strong queue

The Farmer’s Dog, Jeremy Clarkson’s latest venture in Burford, England, attracted a massive queue of over 400 people for its opening. While the pub’s decor and menu offer typical British fare, its real draw is Clarkson himself. Despite the long wait and some service hiccups, fans were thrilled to visit.

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By Helen Chandler-Wilde

Driving through the Cotswolds in southwest England, you pass a pub every few minutes. Plenty have award-winning menus. Some are hundreds of years old or in the most picturesque locations. But only one has a queue of more than 400 people waiting outside: the Farmer’s Dog. It’s the latest project from Jeremy Clarkson, and it opened on Friday in Burford, Oxfordshire. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

It’s another frenzied event in a summer that’s generated booking hysteria in multiple areas—whether for a ticket to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour or a table for the 30th anniversary celebrations at St John restaurant. (Along with dishes from their original menu, the operators are bringing back their 1994 prices; seats sold out immediately.)

The Queue

Swifties notwithstanding, Clarkson has a hardcore fan base. Bethany Ailing, 28, stood in the queue for hours before the pub opened, in the hope of getting more than a pint and a sausage roll. She was desperate to catch a glimpse of Clarkson. “I just love him,” says Ailing, who’d driven more than two hours from Peterborough. “I even had a Jeremy Clarkson-themed birthday party.”

After becoming internationally famous as a presenter for BBC’s Top Gear for over a decade, the 64-year-old hit new levels of visibility through the series Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon UK Prime, which follows his attempts to run a profitable farm in the Cotswolds. Clarkson’s TV persona has always been bombastic, the public fell for the humbled version they saw on the farm show, where he struggles with the hard labor of agriculture and the difficulties of making ends meet.

“He’s done so much for farmers by showing how hard the job is,” says Chelsea Wills-Lock, a 32-year-old finance manager from Somerset who drove three hours to get to the pub.

No Coke, No Coffee

The Farmer’s Dog is the latest in a string of Clarkson’s expanding Cotswolds businesses; three seasons of Clarkson’s Farm have chronicled the business, including the launch of Diddly Squat Farm shop.

The pub was scheduled for a noon opening; by 9 a.m. a few dozen people had lined up. An hour later, the queue had stretched as far as the eye could see.

Rather using resources for a well-organized launch—it’s been reported that the presenter’s been paid £200 million for Clarkson’s Farm—the team followed a strategy similar to his other projects: opening with little notice before things are fully ready. Which, of course, makes for better television. While we waited, I watched T-shirts and other merchandise be unpacked and signs being painted and hung.

Clarkson himself arrived about an hour and a half before the pub opened (in a white Jaguar F-Type, for those taking notes). He emerged with his land agent Charlie Ireland (a co-star on the show), each carrying a box of mushrooms and tailed by TV camera crews.

At noon on the dot, Clarkson threw open the door and declared the pub open. Flanked by other cast members—Ireland, Clarkson’s partner Lisa Hogan, farm manager Kaleb Cooper and dry stone wall specialist Gerald Cooper, whose incomprehensible Oxfordshire accent provides much fun on the show—he made an impromptu speech about the importance of supporting farmers.

Much of the food at the pub was grown on the farm, we learned, and everything is made from entirely British ingredients. If they can’t get it here, they simply don’t sell it—so there’s no Coca-Cola, no orange juice and no coffee. The only exception Clarkson allows is tonic water, given the essential ingredient quinine can’t be grown in the UK, and Clarkson deemed it beyond the pale to run a pub that can’t serve a gin and tonic.

So, What’s It Like to Eat There?

I got a table on the large terrace overlooking the Cotswold hills. It’s scenic, but the peace is slightly spoiled by background traffic; perhaps that’s appropriate given Clarkson’s love of the internal combustion engine. Inside, the dining room decor feels like an afterthought; there’s none of the richness or character typical for a traditional Cotswolds pub. There are only a few show references, like a corner painted with farm animals.

The menu — currently limited to four options for starters and five for mains — sticks to safe British pub classics like bangers and mash and steak pies.

We snacked on a sausage roll and pickled egg, washed down with Hawkstone ale—another Clarkson business. The sausage roll was excellent: a huge, thick hunk of meat, presumably farm-raised, encased in prettily scored flaky pastry. Then came the starters, or at least, one did: a nice but unremarkable chicken liver pâté. The other never arrived.

Main courses were steak pie, made with similarly brilliant pastry, though rolled too thick, and a very rich cheddar and root vegetable savory crumble. For dessert, we ordered apple crumble with custard and a slice of blackberry cheesecake. What we got was cheesecake with custard and unadorned crumble. (They were both still good.) All in all the check was around £100, a now standard price for a pub lunch.

It’s a decent pub lunch, with a few standout dishes, namely the sausage roll. The rest was no better than you could get at a dozen other pubs in the area.

But the food is beside the point for a majority of people, who were there for the opening and proximity to Clarkson. Dutifully, the show’s star and Hogan walked around, shaking hands. Despite the queue, that seemed enough to make the superfans happy. If the ongoing success of the Diddly Squat Farm shop—and the bumper viewing figures for the Amazon show—is anything to go by, the pub will be busy.

After lunch, I went back to the pub where I stayed the night before, the Old Swan Inn, in the beautiful thatch-roofed village of Minster Lovell. It’s over half a millennium old, cozy with exposed fireplaces and traditional dried hops and copper pots for decor. The food is excellent, and it even serves Clarkson’s Hawkstone beer. Instead of a busy road, all you can hear is the trickle of the River Windrush. Most important, there was no queue. I know where I’ll eat next time I’m in the area.

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