Snowboarding chef journeyed from Alps to Sidford for love

Tom Entwisle, new chef at The Rising Sun, Sidford, is pictured with landlords Andy and Lisa Downham. (Image: Archant)

A snowboarding chef, who journeyed from the Alps to Sidford for love, is now looking forward to making his mark at The Rising Sun pub.

Tom Entwistle honed his trade cooking three-course meals for guests in the ski resorts of France and Switzerland – but returned to join his fiancée, Beth Roberts, who he will wed next month.

On his new role, Tom said: “It was just the job I was looking for – I found this little advert and the rest is history.

“My fiancée was born and raised in Exmouth. When I first returned to the UK, I was living in my home town of Nottingham and we made a pact that the first of us to get a full-time job would stay put. That was her, so I moved down.”

Tom met Beth when they were both working on opposite sides of the same Swiss town – they now live in Sidford and are set to wed near Dartmoor on February 4.

Tom said of his new role: “I really want to focus on producing everything we send out ourselves, so we do not have anything frozen and it’s all fresh food, produced on site.

“All the cooking I have done in places like the Alps, I have had to produce things from fresh because a lot of things were not available. We will be producing our own dough for pizzas as well.”

The popular pub was taken on by landlords Lisa and Andy Downham in the summer.

Lisa is overjoyed to have appointed Tom as the new pub chef and, although she will still be doing things in the kitchen, said it is nice to be able to do more in the front of house.

Andy said: “Tom shares our passion for producing fresh pub food. From our point of view, we feel very privileged to have attracted someone of Tom’s quality.”