Neil Rusbridger will be cooking Stansted Venison loin with porcini mushrooms and red wine sauce, while at the same time discussing how to prepare and cook with local game.

The venison is wild fallow deer from the estate and is culled as part of the forestry management to ensure healthy woodland and a viable deer population. It is the leanest, healthiest red meat which has zero food miles and a varied diet. Venison is as versatile as beef to cook with, but tastes better.

Neil will also be discussing other game preparation and cooking techniques, including pheasant, partridge, rabbit and wood pigeon. These are all sourced locally and are a delicious and healthy alternative to supermarket meats, while often being cheaper.

Neil Rusbridger has spent a lifetime in the restaurant and catering industry and is a qualified chef and restaurateur having cooked for Royalty, the rich and the famous.

After qualifying at Highbury College in Portsmouth, his early career was spent working at the Chewton Glen Hotel, in New Milton and at The Waterside Inn, Bray for the Roux brothers. Neil also worked for a few years helping to run a country house hotel in Nantwich, where he looked after guests such as Abba and the PM, Margaret Thatcher.

Returning to Sussex, Neil opened his first restaurant in Chichester in 1985, soon followed by a second. In 1988 he sold up and formed a partnership with his mentor Barry Phillips and his wife, at The White Horse Inn at Chilgrove, where the business blossomed over the next 11 years, earning the restaurant two AA rosettes. He opened a small, award-winning hotel next door, where he moved after they sold just before the millennium.

A few years later he got the restaurant bug again opening The Dining Room at Purchase’s, a restaurant and cocktail bar in North Street, Chichester, finally closing the doors in early 2011.

Neil now works part-time, at Highbury College, various local restaurants and doing outside catering.