Restaurants in Lincolnshire: Mountain’s Farm Shop
This month we champion the great Lincolnshire sausage with a visit to one of the area’s most successful farm shops, an ideal place to visit for brunch, lunch or to stock up before your barbecue
Of all the things for which Lincolnshire is renowned, our commitment to growing and producing food is its most obvious and enduring gift to the rest of Britain. Last month in our sister magazine (covering Rutland and Stamford) we visited the world’s largest producer of Stilton cheese, a product that enjoys both Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status.
The former provides a higher level of protection and is granted to just 32 UK foods. In addition to geographical protection it also specifies a method of production or some degree of control over which ingredients are permitted to be used in their creation.
Against our 32 PGO and 94 PGI products, France and Italy have 758 and 882 products that enjoy such protection. It’s a shame that among those, the Lincolnshire Sausage doesn’t enjoy a degree of protection, because it’s a thing of beauty and versatility. A heavenly constituent of Saturday morning’s cooked breakfast; smashing with mash and brilliant barbecued, served in a baguette with caramelised onions; essential too on Christmas Day, as pigs in blankets with slimmer chipolatas snuggled up in thick, floppy smoked bacon.
Walk into any supermarket, and you’ll see pale imitations (pale both in appearance and in terms of quality), as all British supermarkets are allowed to sell ostensibly ‘Lincolnshire’ sausages that have never set a trotter in the county. It’s a sin before god that the Lincolnshire sausage isn’t better protected, but all is not lost, for it does have its champions, not least Mountain’s.
The Boston butchers shop was established in 1852, but 40 years ago, the company supplemented its name with Boston Sausage, in recognition of the product for which is is justifiably most well-recognised.
In 2015 the company moved into an additional premises on the A17 at East Heckington, establishing a butchery there and eventually changing its name from Abbey Parks to Mountain’s Farm Shop where it stands out as a bistro, butchery, farm shop, and more generally, as a champion for good local food with most of Lincolnshire’s top food producers and our best examples represented.
The company’s ethos is underwritten by the presence of the fourth generation of the Mountain family, brothers Dan and Sam, alongside Scott Palmer who is a director in the business and has been with Mountain’s so long he’s practically family too.
The business currently makes a whopping 70,000 Boston Sausages each week, with over 100 wholesale customers as well as retail customers shopping in Boston and at the Farm Shop. In addition to their flagship product, which only uses pork reared in Lincolnshire, the company provides minimum 28-day dry-aged beef, local spring lamb and a host of other products from traditional hand-raised pork pies and haslets to chine, bacon and sausage rolls.
The team is gearing up for a busy few months. For a start there’s nowhere better during barbecue season to stock up on staples like bangers and burgers as well as marinated or stuffed products from the company’s gourmet range.
In addition though, the traffic streaming past Mountain’s Farm Shop on their way to the Lincolnshire Coast or to Norfolk has come to recognise that the place is the ideal stop for a stretch of the legs, something to eat and somewhere to exercise the kids and dogs – there are two respective play areas for them. Holidaymakers often pick up a few provisions for their break and continue on their way well-rested and with full tummies.
To satisfy this demand, the farm shop has a 50-seater bistro serving food from 8am to 5pm, as well as its outdoor terrace. As Pride goes to press, work is also anticipated to begin on a new garden room which will provide more space for both the bistro and retail. There’s also an outdoor kiosk, Feast, for those who want to grab and go, which is useful as it helps to mitigate how busy the bistro is.
And it is busy, thanks to a great daytime menu including a plus brunch menu whose flagship offering is a phenomenal full English, with other recommendations including Eggs Benedict. There are sandwiches too, plus eight main courses and a few specials on the blackboard which allow head chef Scott Brackenbury and the team to trial new dishes and offer diners dishes based on their suppliers’ daily recommendations.
The place itself is timber-clad and rustic from the outside, with a comfortable and well-designed bistro which, when the Garden Room has been completed, will overlook some of Britain’s best farmland.
That very same farmland, too, yields some rather spectacular ingredients, and suppliers to Mountain’s Farm Shop include various local farms, plus A Wright & Son who have been rearing their livestock since 1870.
Fresh free-range eggs are sourced from Spalding’s Rowbottom whilst fruit and veg is from Sutterton’s Jonathan Hull, who source produce from Lincolnshire’s fields whenever it’s practical to do so.
Just over the border, Southwell’s Gadsby Bakers provide bread and fish is delivered fresh each day via Grimsby by Moorcroft. Other local suppliers represented both on the menus of the bistro and with a permanent presence within the farm shop include Lincolnshire’s trio of cheesemakers, FW Read (Lincolnshire Poacher), Cote Hill Cheese and Lymn Bank, among 40 or so other artisan cheese varieties.
A mention too for Mountain’s Farm Shop’s Sunday Lunch offering, roast sirloin of beef (£16.95), lamb, chicken or pork loin £14.95), the former served pink with roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and the usual trimmings, booking for Sunday lunch is very much recommended because, for obvious reasons, the place is rather busy.
And speaking of busy, the team will also be out and about this summer at the usual big outdoor events from the Lincolnshire Show to Heckington and Spilsby’s country shows.
Don’t wait until then though… get the barbecue out, or visit the butchery for some Lincolnshire sausages and a really decent joint of meat for a great Sunday lunch… whether your preference is spring lamb, aged-sirloin of beef, or pork with crackling, it all comes highly recommended!
To view the full feature, see the May edition of Lincolnshire Pride at https://www.pridemagazines.co.uk/lincolnshire/view-magazines?magazine=May-2025