Our story
Rooted in
flavour and
memory.
Chef Elara Voss opened Olea in 2017 with a single conviction: the best meal you'll ever eat starts with the best ingredient in the room.
Elara Voss spent her childhood summers in a white-washed village on the Aegean coast, watching her grandmother Yiayia Phoebe turn whatever the garden gave into something transcendent. A fistful of herbs. An aubergine at its absolute peak. Oil pressed the week before. No recipe, just attention.
She trained classically — first at the Culinary Institute in Lyon, then under Antoine Marchand in Marseille and a formative two years in Istanbul where she discovered that Ottoman cuisine was Mediterranean cooking at its most evolved: spice as perfume, technique as restraint. By thirty she was running a Michelin-starred kitchen in Edinburgh, but something felt misaligned.
“The food was technically correct. It just wasn't true.”
In 2017 she leased a former ironmonger's on Grovemont Lane in the Meridian Quarter — forty-eight seats, a wood-burning hearth, and a kitchen with a direct line to six farm partners within fifty miles. The menu would change not by season but by week. By day. By what arrived before breakfast.
Olea takes its name from the Latin for olive — Olea europaea — a tree that survives on rocky soil, salt air, and patience, and gives the most generous oil when it has least to prove. That felt right.
The provenance
Six farms, fifty miles
We buy direct. No middlemen, no import substitutes. Each partner is invited to dine with us so they understand what becomes of what they grow.
Kemble Hill Farm
Weshire Downs · 22 mi
Heritage vegetables, herbs, edible flowers
Alderton Saltings
North Coast · 38 mi
Hand-dived scallops, seasonal fish
Thorn & Field
Ravensdale · 14 mi
Blackface lamb, free-range poultry
Greystone Dairy
Felton Moor · 28 mi
Labneh, cultured butter, aged cheeses
The Ferment House
Meridian Quarter · 1 mi
Sourdough, misos, vinegars
Solaris Orchards
Severn Vale · 47 mi
Heirloom fruit, quince, dried plums
The chef
Elara Voss
Head chef and co-founder. Trained in Lyon and Marseille. Two years in Istanbul studying Ottoman technique. Previously head chef at The Quarry (Edinburgh, 1 star).
Elara cooks with her senses before her notes — she will touch a celeriac to know if it's ready, smell a sauce to judge its reduction. Her kitchen is calm and exacting. Waste is a moral failing; creativity is how you use everything.
When not at Olea she is usually in her allotment, or on the phone to a farmer.