Crocadon, Cornwall

Great restaurants often involve a great journey, and the journey to Crocadon, for everyone involved, staff and guests, is greater than most. Dan Cox was head chef at Fera at Claridges when I last sampled his cooking, and although the restaurant eventually turned out to be a bit too cutting-edge for the traditionalists at this grand old dame of London hotels, it sat extremely well with me, an ideal combination of strictly seasonal ingredients treated to an impressive variety of high-end techniques. When I learned he was leaving London to set up a restaurant-farm in Cornwall, I suspected it would be exactly the kind of place I would be interested in. Little did I know that the new venture would take a full five years to open to the public, a lead time more appropriate to the erection of a city skyscraper than a restaurant.

Alongside the metaphorical and temporal journeys, the actual physical journey to Crocadon - this being Cornwall - is also quite demanding. We'd booked the very closest AirBnB to the farm, which although only a few minutes drive away was still too far to walk (in the dark, drunk) so necessitated the booking of a taxi. The full 8 minutes we spent in the cab (four minutes there, four minutes back) cost £50, so if there are any lawyers or orthopedic surgeons out there feeling overworked and underpaid I can thoroughly recommend switching careers to taxi driving in Saltash.

That said, once sat down in the pretty courtyard at Crocadon, all such stresses began to fade. I don't care how jaded you might be about hyperlocality and seasonality and fine dining in general, but there will always be something extremely correct and pleasing about tucking into a fig leaf negroni right next to the fig tree said leaves came from. It's that sense of immediacy and connection with where your food comes from you rarely find in London, and exactly the reason it's worth the trip out of town.

Aperitifs - and a brief tour of the Crocadon gardens - over, we were reseated indoors. At only about 25 covers or so, the Crocadon dining space is pretty small, most of the converted barn taken up by a giant open kitchen in which chefs can be seen studiously tweezering micro herbs into charmingly handmade pottery (often crafted by the head chef himself!) throughout the evening. Lampshades are made from what looks like recycled cardboard, and seats are each covered in sheepskin rugs, another nod to the local environment. Essentially, think Noma-on-Tamar (I'm sure they won't mind me saying) with added Cornish charm.

But what of the food? The first morsel to arrive was a shiso leaf topped with a kind of chutney made with plum and beetroot. And to be clear, it was perfectly pleasant, in the way that a chutney made out of plum and beetroot has every right to be. Whether you consider it a worthwhile addition to a £95 tasting menu rather hinges on how much value you place on hyperlocality and seasonality versus, well, something you'd ordinarily want to eat. It would have gone nicely with a sausage roll.

The next snack had a far more robust flavour profile - mashed potato, buttery and smooth and nicely seasoned, dressed with a bright green celtuce (a kind of lettuce) oil, and topped with probably my favourite thing to do with a potato, matchstick fries. The combination of mash and vegetable oil worked well, and our whole table happily devoured this in record time. I mean, who wouldn't want a bowl of nice buttery mash?

Less successful - from my point of view at least - were these little tartlets of delica squash and lemon verbena, which looked cute enough but unless you are a real fan of squash - which I very much am not - didn't really taste that interesting. And although my personal aversion to squash definitely was a factor, I should also say I didn't detect much enthusiasm for these things from the rest of the table either.

Fortunately, the next couple of courses had far more going for them. Firstly, a padron pepper, delicately charred over coals and served with a wonderfully smooth and balanced lovage sauce. Not only was the padron full of flavour and the charring providing a nice texture, but it had a remarkable level of spice heat - something you're far more likely to find in home-grown than commercial peppers, it turns out.

And then a fantastic cuttlefish consommé, clear and brightly flavoured and with just enough infusion of lemongrass to lend a slightly East Asian feel. I admit, lovely though this was, that I did briefly wonder what a nicely grilled piece of cuttlefish steak would have been like, and which of the guests earlier in the week had been lucky enough to sample the rest of the animal, but this was still a very pleasing interlude of a course.

The next course consisted of turnip cut into thick ribbons like pappardelle pasta, in a rather astringent anise hyssop sauce. There wasn't quite enough of the advertised saddleback pork for my liking, and what there was was cold and rather tasteless, but any disappointment regarding vinegary turnip and cold pork was more than offset by a completely brilliant brioche bun glazed with pork fat, which pulled apart most satisfyingly into soft, moist halves, and some fantastic whipped butter topped with pork scratchings.

Fish course was a fillet of mackerel topped with radish, tomatillo and shiso, and although I very much enjoyed the nice vinegar/herb sauce it came with I'm afraid the mackerel itself was a bit mushy and lifeless. Maybe I've been spoiled with restaurant mackerel recently but I think if you have access to a proper charcoal grill you should be able to get a nice crisp skin on your fish while keeping a plump, firm flesh.

The "main" meat course was divided into two parts. Mutton from the farm's own flock arrived first as a rib piece topped with rosehip and white currant - yet more pretty sharp flavours but at least here the fattiness of the aged meat was able to offset it and produce a very pleasing effect overall. I also appreciated the way the meat slipped off the bone in one piece, which was fun.

Then finally, last of the savoury courses was more of the sheep, this time a neat piece of pink loin alongside a swoop of beetroot (I think) purée, a lovely slice of sausage made with leg meat topped with chilli, and what I assume was a mutton stock sauce studded with capers - again rather sharp but working well with the meat elements.

Desserts came in a number of stages, my favourite turning out to be the first - a kind of super smooth apple sorbet topped with marigold leaves which had a perfect balance of sweet and sour and full of summer flavour.

I also enjoyed the other dessert of steeped blackberries and sweetcorn cake, and the delicate tuiles of berry and corn layered on top, although I should point out I was in the minority on this as the others found it not sweet enough and yearned for something a bit more, well, conventional.

It's probably worth repeating at this point that you either value strict seasonality and hyperlocality above all other aspects of the restaurant experience, in which case Crocadon will be your very nirvana, or you end your dinner wishing they'd let their hair down and use a bit of chocolate or truffle or something just to provide a bit more colour. I understand completely what Crocadon is trying to achieve with their fanatically strict attitudes to super-low food miles and commitment to use only what they can grow themselves at the appropriate time of year, and normally I'd be completely on board with it, but the fact is I did feel like there was something missing from some of the courses - not always anything obvious, but something, perhaps some veal stock to enliven a sauce, or some fancy pastry work to zhuzh up a dessert - that would have made for a more satisfying end result.

Also, and I know I have a soft spot for game and go a bit giddy when I see it on a menu so this might just be a personal thing, but our taxi literally had to slow down to a crawl on the Crocadon driveway because giant flocks of pheasant and partridge were threatening to throw themselves under the wheels of the car. We were slap in the middle of game season, and the food "miles" could have been measured in steps, so why did none of these birds - sustainable, local and tasty - find their way onto the menu?

But I don't want to end on a moan, and it's worth stressing that we did have a lovely time at Crocadon, enjoying interesting natural wines and local ciders and whiskies, and service by everyone concerned was absolutely note-perfect. And although it's my "job" (such as it is) to point out faults where I find them, overall Crocadon are doing far more things right than wrong, and nobody left that beautiful building at the end of the night less than satisfied. At least, until it came time to pay for the taxi.

With a couple of final sets of petits fours - a summer berry meringue thing, and a little tartlet containing a purée of some other kind of citrussy fruit - the bill, with plenty of booze shared between the three of us drinking that evening - came to just under £140 a head, which to me looks like pretty good value considering the amount of effort that had gone into it all. There's no doubt that the Crocadon approach is the cutting edge of sustainable hospitality, and no amount of whining from a jaded Londoner about missing chocolate is about to change that - this is, like it or not, the future of British fine dining. And I suppose the sooner I get used to it the better.

7/10

Wynyard Hall, Teesside

Strolling through the vast walled gardens attached to Wynyard Hall, with its acres and acres of bedding groaning with all kinds of very healthy looking fruit and veg stretching almost as far as the eye could see, I naturally assumed that a large proportion of the produce would be offered in the garden shop or sold to a number of local restaurants. There seemed to be enough growing to singlehandedly feed most of Darlington - I mean just look at the scale of the place from space - and even though the hotel itself is hardly a small operation - everything about Wynyard is exaggeratedly grand and imposing - it seemed unlikely they'd need quite this amount of onions, kale, carrots etc. just for themselves.

So that night, settling down for dinner in a dining room so vast the ceiling seemed to be above the cloud layer, I brought up the subject with one of the very affable front of house. What happens to all the fruit and veg the restaurant doesn't use?

"Oh, we use pretty much all of it," came the reply, "there's very few bits left over for the shop."

Which, when you think about it, is quite extraordinary in what it implies for any other restaurant with the ambition of growing all of their grocery needs on-site. Wynyard Hall's dining area isn't tiny, but it's not exactly stuffed full of covers - the tables are nicely spaced out and there's plenty of room to move about - but even this medium-sized operation requires a kitchen garden the size of a football pitch to keep it stocked. It's great for them, obviously, that they have the space and the gardening expertise to do it, but I certainly came away with a newfound appreciation for anywhere attempting such an ambitious control of their ingredient offering.

And speaking of which, as you might hope, the ingredients at Wynyard Hall are absolutely blinding. The first bite to eat is this, a little potato that had been in the ground mere hours before, soaked in butter and topped with what I think was a lovage purée. I can honestly say I've hardly eaten a better potato in my life, it was that good, and so from the very first morsel served that evening, it became very clear that all the trouble and effort of the kitchen garden had been absolutely worth it.

In fact the next dish was not just supplied by the garden, it was actively inspired by it. The "Walled Garden Salad" contained a bewildering number of flowers, vegetables and herbs, each treated according to maximising their potential (fennel bulb was braised, I think, while a mini courgette was lightly grilled) and artfully presented. What's the point in having a vast walled garden if you can't show off the results of it, and though it's probably fair to say the kitchen's intervention here was deliberately minimal, the odd blob of clever sorrel mayonnaise and some kind of (quince?) jam added a few reminders that they can be serious and cheffy when they need to be.

Smoked eel had a meaty texture and strong, salty flavour, and came in a lovely subtle fresh pea and milk "soup" which complimented it very well. There's not much else to say about this really - it wasn't uninteresting, but just uncomplicated, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Next came a scallop, with another tasty little morsel from the garden (a tiny young shoot of baby gem lettuce) topped with bacon. Bacon and scallop is of course a time-honoured match, but this bit of seafood had been topped with a fiercely sharp citrus glaze, which took a bit of getting used to. Once all the flavours settled down in the mouth, though, it worked rather well. And what a good strong dark crust on the scallop, too, which I always like to see.

The last of the savouries was a lamb chop, meltingly tender and blushed pink, with a number of elements lamb should always come with, namely a mashed potato consisting of mainly butter, some glossy vegetables and herbs, and most importantly of all a thick, dark, glossy sauce to bind it all together. Needless to say, this dish ticked every single one of my personal pleasure points and I completely demolished it - it's essentially all of the reasons I go to restaurants, on one plate. There was even a bonus piece of sweetbread in there, and although I wasn't completely in love with the "molasses butter" it was cooked with, I still ate it quite happily because hey, sweetbread.

"Toffee Apple Parfait" was a delicate little thing, sweet and summery and laced with just enough salt on the pastry to make the tastebuds tingle. In a grand old hotel such as this, afternoon tea is obviously a major part of the experience - most tables on the terrace overlooking the lake were occupied by families tucking into cakes and scones on the Saturday we arrived, and there are fully two (huge, naturally) other rooms inside serving the same - so it's probably no surprise the pastry section know what they're doing.

Finally, a strawberry tart - colourful, seasonal, flatteringly accessible and yet, with its blob of slickly-Pacojetted marscapone ice cream and swoops of gorgeous strawberry jus, clearly the work of a kitchen that has produced many such elegant offerings before. Have you got the picture by now? Wynyard Hall is good.

True, I was hardly likely to travel all the way up to Darlington without being pretty sure I was going to enjoy both dinner and a good night's sleep (the beds are super comfy, by the way, and they give you a little vial of "sleep aid" room spray which I can confirm really works - I slept like a log) but even so, none of this is inevitable. Hotel restaurants, ambitious hotel restaurants like this at least, have a very difficult job to do in keeping your average honeymooner or wedding guest happy whilst also serving the kind of food that gets you noticed on sites like these, and they could have very easily, under a lesser kitchen, fallen awkwardly between two competing philosophies and satisfied nobody.

Instead, Wynyard Hall is that rarest of things - a palatial country hotel set in hundreds of acres of stunning surroundings that doesn't just let the décor do the talking. For your money (and it's not even super expensive, £55 for the tasting menu) you do, admittedly, get quite a bit of jaw-dropping scenery but you also get the kind of ambitious, ingredient-led Modern British food, supported by top suppliers and a record-breaking kitchen garden, that any corner of the country would be exceedingly proud to call their own. And for aiming so high and getting so much of it so right, Wynyard Hall should be very proud indeed.

9/10

I was invited to Wynyard Hall and they wouldn't let me pay for so much as a glass of brandy (though I did offer) so many thanks to them for everything. Lovely people, lovely place.

The Wellington Arms, Baughurst

The Wellington Arms is not, in my opinion, a gastropub. Yes, I know it's number 33 on the Top 50 Gastropubs list, and is a building that looks quite a lot like a pub, and it has a pubby name. But a dealbreaker in the whole pub/not-a-pub definition, as far as I'm concerned, is whether or not you can turn up without a reservation, sit at the bar and have a pint of beer without committing to a full meal, and if you can't do that, that's not a pub, that's a restaurant.

However. Aside from that one crucial disqualifier, on most other measurable indices the Wellington Arms ticks all the boxes. The menu, for one, is absolutely solid gastropub territory, with perennial favourites like steak and fish and chips sitting beside seasonal delicacies like wood pigeon and rabbit terrine. It reminded me very strongly of the Parkers Arms menu, another exquisitely tasteful and accessible piece of menu work, and in fact despite this corner of the Hampshire/Berkshire border being somewhat more moneyed than Bowland (one couple turned up in a Tesla) the prices are just as reasonable, with starters around £8-£9 and mains largely under £20.

Of course it's one thing writing a pretty menu, quite another delivering on it. Fortunately, the kitchens at the Wellington have more than enough of a grasp of British pub aesthetic and French technique to make good on their promises. Potted crab was pretty much perfect, a teacup filled with spiced crab meat (white and brown) and plenty of butter, with a generous amount of the house sourdough to spread it on.

Westcombe cheddar soufflé was an absolute beauty, a cloud of salty, fluffy dairy that dissolved in the mouth like savoury candy floss. But even more impressive than the soufflé itself was a layer of thin discs of courgette underneath, soaked in a delicate cheese sauce, that added just enough salad to prevent all that dairy becoming overwhelming. It was a seriously good soufflé.

The beer batter on these courgette flowers had a good crunch and a pleasing hoppy flavour of its own, and stands as a good indicator that the Wellington Arms fish and chips would have had plenty to recommend it. Here, though, it was holding in a filling of ricotta and mozzarella, and made a very enjoyable vegetarian starter. I've seen more tempura-like, thinner batters on other courgette flower dishes, but I quite liked the continuity of using the same batter as the fish and chips. Because why not?

The problem with serving pies in 2018 you are now automatically pitched against the work of Calum Franklin of Holborn Dining Rooms, and Stosie Madi of the Parkers Arms, who in the last couple of years have redefined how good the humble pie can be, and brought quite dramatically higher expectations down on pies that until recently could have been considered above reproach. It's not that the Wellington Arms venison pot pie is bad, or even not worth the very reasonable £17.75 they're asking for it, it's just you can't imagine the Holborn Dining Rooms or Parkers Arms serving meat just the wrong side of dry, that stuck to the mouth, and in a rather thin, wine-y sauce that needed a bit more beefing up with stock.

Scallops wrapped in pancetta is another familiar gastropub play, and the Wellington are too confident and skillful an operation to serve anything less than a hugely enjoyable version of it. I suppose if you were determined to pick fault you could say that with a dish like this the kitchens are playing it safe somewhat, but then it's almost certainly only tragic saddos like me that could ever be "bored" with scallops wrapped in pancetta, as nobody else had an issue with them.

Perhaps a more reasonable criticism of the place is that despite a large and spectacular kitchen garden, the number of items marked "HG" (Home Grown) on the menu was limited to a few salad leaves and courgettes (plus flowers). Broad beans were apparently not ready yet, which is nobody's fault, but I spotted plenty of plump red strawberries in the garden which featured nowhere on the desserts menu, and things like Jersey Royals and other root vegetables, asparagus, tomatoes and peas were all bought in. Sincere apologies to the Wellington Arms if I'm completely trivialising the difficulties of running a functioning professional kitchen garden, but as one of those hopeless tragic saddos I mentioned earlier my first instinct when given a menu is to pick whatever the restaurant has been able to grow themselves, and on that front it was slim pickings.

But despite this, it was still hard not to be impressed by the sheer hospitality, warmth and professionalism of the Wellington Arms team. Desserts, solid if unspectacular versions of a treacle tart and Eton Mess (the latter using home grown rhubarb at least) would have been much harder to fault had the pacing of the evening and attentiveness of the staff been anything less than perfect the whole evening. And just look at that bill - without the £20 worth of jams and chutneys we took home with us this accomplished and enjoyable meal in charming surroundings came to under £50/head. By anyone's standards, this is a bargain.

So though not in the very top-tier of its ilk, there's still plenty to recommend at the Wellington, and you'd have to be very unlucky indeed to not to come away from a meal here thinking you'd got far more than your money's worth. And it's worth pointing out that the Top 50 Gastropub list that I have been working my way through over the last couple of years, pedantic definition of "gastropub" aside, is yet to really offer up a significant dud. Picking an entry and planning a day or two based around a meal there is a pretty-much-guaranteed way of having a lovely country gastro-break. So, where next?

8/10