ROSI — From Horse Trailer to Broadway

Broadway is not short of places to eat. It is one of the most visited villages in the Cotswolds, and the High Street reflects that — handsome, busy and priced accordingly.

ROSI is on Kennel Lane, behind the butchers.

The Trailer

Before there was a shop, there was a Rice horse trailer with a wood-fired oven in it.

ROSI spent its early years touring: weddings, parties, corporate events and pop-ups across the North Cotswolds. By the summer of 2025, the enquiries had reached the point where the obvious next step became unavoidable — which the owners announced in characteristically flat terms. Having seen the appetite grow and the inbox fill up, they decided to make the obvious choice: take on some extra overheads.

The trailer was retired. Not kept running alongside the shop, not held back for summer events — finished, with the remaining bookings honoured and the trailer itself offered to anyone who fancied taking on that side of the business.

The permanent site opened on Sunday 3 August 2025.

What the Shop Changed

A trailer imposes limits. A permanent kitchen provides rather more room to manoeuvre.

The menu could grow: lunch options, small plates, charcuterie and desserts alongside local beers, ciders and wines. The new site also gave Sian and Roman more scope to work directly with local growers, brewers, farmers and makers.

The pizza itself is Roman-style. The dough is made by hand from five ingredients: flour, water, extra virgin olive oil, Adriatic sea salt and yeast. The flour is milled from British, single-estate wheat, stone-ground locally in the Cotswolds.

That last detail is the one worth pausing on. Plenty of restaurants talk about provenance through the ingredients people can see. ROSI puts it into the base of every pizza. Using locally milled British wheat rather than treating imported Italian flour as an essential marker of authenticity makes its version of "local" considerably more interesting.

Italy hasn't disappeared from the equation. San Marzano DOP tomatoes, fior di latte, Grana Padano and basil form the foundation of the Margherita, while the wider menu moves between Italian ingredients and produce sourced closer to home.

It isn't Cotswolds pizza pretending not to be Italian. It's Italian pizza that knows where it is.

How It Works

Walk-ins only. No bookings.

The room is small and simple. Opening hours were, by the owners' own admission, something of a work in progress when they started.

That tone runs through the way ROSI presents itself, and it's a fair guide to the place. This is a small family business that got good at one thing in a horse trailer and then took a deep breath and signed a lease.

The move to Broadway could easily have produced something more polished and self-conscious. Instead, the basic proposition remains recognisable: make the dough properly, use good ingredients, light the oven and serve pizza.

Why It Earns Its Place

Because it's the opposite of how many Cotswolds food businesses are presented.

There's no origin story about a chef leaving London, no reclaimed-barn conversion and no elaborate farm-to-table manifesto. There's a couple, a wood-fired oven, flour milled from British wheat locally in the Cotswolds and a small shop behind the butchers.

The trailer did its job and stopped. What replaced it is more ambitious without becoming grander — and still doesn't take itself too seriously.

The rest of this edit keeps to the same ground — twenty minutes away, Dumbleton Hall tells a parallel story of a building that found its second life, and Edit No.28 made a similar case for Starling in Esher, another kitchen that earned its star without becoming grander because of it.