Circle Conversations | Jeremie Cometto

Jeremie Cometto-Lingenheim is a restaurateur who thinks in seasons, cycles and soil. As co-founder of Primeur, Westerns Laundry and Jolene, he has built spaces rooted in craftsmanship, community, regenerative farming and the quiet belief that food should honour the land it comes from. From hand-drawn architectural plans to off-grid living, his life and work reveal a deep commitment to simplicity, responsibility and the beauty of making things well.

 

primeurn5.co.uk | westernslaundry.com | jolenebakery.com

 

Images by Liz Seabrook.

 

You mentioned earlier that you’re French, though I hardly detect a French accent.

Yes, I’m French, though I’ve lived in London since 1995 - more of my life here than in France. My son Bear carries a very French name: Dagobert, an old Frankish name that hadn’t been registered anywhere in the world for four hundred years. We shortened it to Bear because not everyone can pronounce it. He’s very tall, very gentle - a giant with a soft heart - and he wears his name beautifully.

You now live in Cornwall. What took you there?

I moved to Cornwall to be closer to nature. The way our company is set up makes it possible. My business partner David Gingell looks after the kitchen and food; I look after finding the site, designing the site, doing all the architectural drawings.

 

 

So you do all the designing yourself?

I’m not trained at all, but for me drawing is painting, and technical drawing is a kind of meditation. I spend hours and hours with my ruler and pencils, completely old-school. I have stacks and stacks of drawings. Between projects there’s always a lull; the creativity is constant, but I still need to design things. And I love building sites - they’re my happiest places, especially when I’m making something.

 

 

What kind of buildings or places inspire you?

Great Dixter in Sussex is one of the most beautiful places I know - intimate, abundant, thoughtful. And I love the buildings in Marseille, the estates by Le Corbusier. Architecture inspires me constantly.

What is the thought process behind creating a restaurant?

Much like you approach cashmere: the product has to be good first. The design must feel right, natural. And behind that sits the real story - the land, the soil, the people growing and making things. We never sit down and say, “Let’s open an Italian restaurant,” or a French one. We meet people doing extraordinary things in obscurity - farmers, winemakers, growers - and the restaurants become a stage to tell their stories.

Regenerative farming is central to your work. How did that begin?

Through our friend Andy Cato. He left the music industry after reading one sentence: “If you don’t like the system, don’t depend on it.” He sold everything, bought land, and started farming without tilling, without chemicals, without machinery - following a 100-year-old roadmap from Albert Howard, a Victorian diplomat who had already warned that modern agriculture was damaging soil and animals.

Regenerative farming goes beyond organic: organic is soil-neutral; regenerative is soil-positive. It tries to recreate the logic of a forest - biodiversity, undisturbed layers, deep roots, herbivores moving through the land. Healthy soil becomes a carbon sponge. When you plough it, you destroy that sponge.

 

Jeremie by the sea, wearing the BORTE sweater and SOL hat.

 

How does that translate onto the plate?

When you plough the earth, you flip the deep, fertile layers to the surface, exposing them to sun and rain, and the soil quickly loses its nutrients. Healthy soil is meant to act like a carbon sponge - it pulls carbon down from the atmosphere - but once it’s disturbed, it can’t do its job. That’s why we work with regenerative farming. Organic is soil-neutral; regenerative is soil-positive. It tries to mimic a forest, the most efficient ecosystem we have: undisturbed layers, deep roots, fallen leaves feeding the ground, and a whole underground network of nutrients and mycelium quietly doing its work. Herbivores are part of that logic too - they graze, tug up weeds, fertilise the land - all the things intensive agriculture has pushed aside.

Our friend Andy Cato is proving this can work at scale. He grows wheat mixed with other plants, creating deep, healthy roots that don’t need constant irrigation or chemicals. He and the team at Wildfarmed are showing farmers they can step off the treadmill of fertilisers, debt and damaged soil, and shift to a system that actually repairs the land.

For us, this thinking shapes everything. We only use day-boat fishing - if the boats can’t go out because there’s a storm, then we don’t have fish that day. People are surprised, but that’s reality. Our menu is small and changes daily because we cook with what our growers have - the way your grandmother shopped: empty basket, trust, and what’s true in the moment. We try to avoid waste completely; we’re not perfect, but we’re trying.

Even flour is part of it. Freshly milled flour still has all the oils and flavour. We used to mill our own grain within twelve hours of baking - incredible results, though messy and hard to manage long-term. But the principle remains: when you mill like you grind coffee - per order - everything tastes better. It just hasn’t clicked with people yet.

None of this is about preaching. People don’t want to be told what to do. They come because the place feels good, smells good, tastes good. And if, by enjoying that, they also end up supporting a better agricultural system, then that’s the real win.

 

Jeremie with his dogs, wearing the SEKU sweater.

 

It resonates a lot with Mongolia and cashmere. Our goats roam freely, eating wild herbs on untouched land.

Exactly. Animals know instinctively what they need. Their diet shapes the fibre or the meat or the milk - everything begins with soil. What you have in Mongolia is extraordinary: high plateaus, undisturbed land, wild biodiversity. That purity is rare.

I bought a small place high in the Southern Alps in Italy for the same reason - far above agriculture, so the aquifers stay clean. I’m rewilding it with two growers who used to work for Hiša Franko. Rural areas in Italy are emptying out; the wool and loom industries have vanished. Small projects like ours may help spark something again. Change happens in small, isolated pockets that ripple outward.

 

Jeremie’s transporter home, where he lived with his son for five years.

 

You once lived off-grid for several years with your son. How did that shape you?

My son and I had quite an epiphany about fifteen years ago. When he was three, I took him to a farm in Suffolk. He pulled his first carrot from the ground - the look on his face was unforgettable. The cabin we stayed in was completely off-grid: if you wanted a bath, you had to fetch water from the stream, cut wood, light a fire, heat the water on the log burner, and wait for the pressure to build before the taps would run.

For him, those three days made all the connections: light doesn’t come from a switch, water doesn’t come from a tap. It isn’t magic. We came home and I sold everything - my flat, my furniture - and bought a 7.5-tonne horse transporter. We designed it together when he was four, built it over nine months, and lived in it for five years.

We had solar panels for power, rainwater harvesters, and 20 litres of water a week - drinking, cooking, washing, everything. One toilet flush is 20 litres. When he stayed with friends, he’d be told off for not flushing after every wee, and he’d explain that one flush was our whole week’s supply. He ended up teaching the adults.

Living that way re-educates you. He understands resources: solar power, water, waste. If he doesn’t want to drink something, he won’t pour it down the drain - he’ll give it to a dog or a plant. It’s just awareness. Not guilt - awareness. Whatever you can do within your circumstances.

Those five years planted seeds in him. And for me, it was a complete re-education. When you move back into a house, your attitude to everything changes.

 

Jeremie’s son in their transporter home, where they lived for five years.

 

Many of our readers live in cities. What small steps can people take to reconnect with land and support better systems?

There’s no single answer - everyone’s circumstances differ. For some, buying one good, thoughtful item is a step. For others, it might be choosing a regenerative farm or visiting growers. What matters is awareness. Not guilt - just awareness. The moment you understand resources, you use them differently. You waste less. You ask better questions. You reconnect.

 

Jeremie in the BORTE sweater and SOL hat.

 

What inspires you?

It doesn’t take much to inspire me. I’m quite childlike in the way I look at the world - everything feels like a game or a challenge. Having kids has brought that even more to the surface. My values have changed a lot. I’m a really simple person to inspire: I love architecture, I love music, I love people.

I’m not on social media anymore; I felt it distracted me from real connections. What I need is very simple - give me an ocean to swim in, a big piece of woodland, and a little patch of land to grow my food, and I’m happy. People assume that being a restaurateur means having lots of things, but we really don’t. My business partner is the same - give him a rod and a rock to fish from and he’s content.

We prefer to reinvest in people and try to create an ecosystem where they can grow - like tending a field, being as nurturing as possible. You don’t need much in life to be inspired. Look at a green leaf, the blue sky. There are so many people doing incredible things in total obscurity because they want to be left alone. They do their talking through their making - Andy through farming, craftspeople through the things they create.

I love finding those people. I’m a bit of a treasure hunter, whether at a car boot sale or digging deep to locate someone doing extraordinary work and bringing it to light. That really excites me.

 

 

Listening to you reminds me of the nomads in Mongolia.

They’re just part of the land. Andy once said something very beautiful to me: once you shift your frame of mind to someone who observes the cycle of plants - they grow for a bit, they flower for a bit, they die — and you stay connected to that for thirty or forty years, it’s something to be incredibly proud of.

Nomads understand that instinctively. There was an incredible herbalist, Juliet de Bairacli Levy, regarded by many as almost omniscient. She came from an affluent family in Manchester, trained as a vet, then left everything to travel the world with Romany gypsies — in Israel, New York, Granada, Italy - gathering knowledge from nomadic life. Her books are hard to find now, but the wisdom she carried came entirely from living close to the land.

Nomadic cultures - Romany, Apache, Navajo - always left their camp better than they found it, knowing they would return in a cycle. We, on the other hand, tend to dump everything and move on. The nomadic way of life holds a kind of simplicity and responsibility that we’ve lost.

To finish off, I have a few one word questions.

Blue?

Picasso.

Strength?

Flexibility.

Softness?

Skin.

Beauty?

Nature.

Viewing the rising sun coming up from the sea

Timeless?

No such thing.