It may not be as glamorous as Dinner by Heston Blumenthal. It may not be an attempt to define the culinary zeitgeist like Pollen Street Social. Foodies, it's safe to say, will be too busy drooling over the forthcoming St John hotel to even notice it. But, in terms of scale and investment, Haskins will be one of the biggest restaurant openings of the year. A £2.3m, 460 cover gastrodome, it also stands out in another significant way - it's in a garden centre, in Southampton.
Haskin's Garden Centres has already spent £2.5m on a restaurant at another of its sites, which now generates 19% of that centre's turnover. Its Southampton West End gig, meanwhile, is not so much a launch as wholesale revamp and expansion of an existing 250 cover venue.
They're not alone. A new cafe-restaurant will be launched at Batsford Arboretum and garden centre at Easter as part of a £2m redevelopment, while food retail - in the shape of cafes, restaurants, farm shops and food halls - has become a central part of the offer at garden centres nationwide, from Whitehall's in Wiltshire to Bent's in Warrington. The latter is home to a 750 (!) seater restaurant, Fresh Approach, which was crowned the nation's best at the 2010 Garden Centre Association awards.
It's not difficult to see why this happening. What were at one time humble plant nurseries have now evolved into multifaceted retail and leisure hubs, pursuing all sorts of complementary business opportunities in everything from furniture to food. Bents describes itself, tellingly, as an "award-winning lifestyle destination". One which, I imagine, attracts an older clientele who, if they already have money, will remain relatively cushioned from the economic turmoil which much of the country is about to endure.
Recently - in the process of researching another article - I visited Poplar Tree garden centre, just outside Durham, to have a look at its Brambles restaurant and (its distinctly underwhelming) food hall. Mid-afternoon on a Tuesday, the restaurant was doing a brisk trade. It was probably the busiest place I visited that day. The average age of the customers? Around 60.
Whether this growth in eating at garden centres is a good thing or not is a moot point. I used to assume that when friends - friends with children, generally - told me that garden centre cafe X or Y did good food, they were just putting a brave face on it. Once-discerning people, I find, become a lot more tolerant of bad food when they have kids. Suddenly, McDonald's and supermarket cafes become acceptable places to hang out, on the basis that "it's cheap, and it keeps the kids quiet".
However, there's no objective reason why garden centre food outlets should be bad. Haskins' Southampton development may sound like it will be a very mixed bag - freshly baked cakes (yay!), Costa coffee (boo!); traditional stone pizza oven (promising); daily carvery (less so) - and, obviously, the sheer scale of many of these operations seems to conflict with their being any good. But, at the same time, from Skye Gyngell's celebrated cafe at Petersham Nurseries to the generous, tasty home cooking dished up at Perry's Plants, near Whitby, even I - no Percy Thrower, a man who has never even planted so much as a daffodil bulb - know that there are some garden centres that serve good food. Logically, given the natural overlap between growing your own and eating well, there should be many more. Potentially, garden centres offer a unique opportunity to demonstrate field-to-fork seasonal cooking at its vibrant best.
But is anywhere doing that? Gardeners, it's question time. We need your help. Which garden centres are cultivating a taste for good food? Which are just exploiting their captive audience?
