Crouch Hill, French Restaurant Guide

This “lovely family-run hotel” in Thomas Hardy’s ‘Vale of the little dairies’ is “personal and exquisite” – host Richard Prideaux-Brune inherited the family‘s Jacobean manor at the age of 21, opening it as a restaurant with rooms with his wife Alison 51 years ago, brother Brian in the kitchen and daughter Katharine these days part of the team. The “excellent” dinner menu is notably “affordable” at £45 per person for two courses and £55 per person for three, “complemented by wines at sensible prices”. Top Tip – don’t forget to pronounce the B in ‘Plumber’.

“Big meals” made from prime British ingredients cooked in classical French style, “friendly staff” and a “lovely, sensibly priced wine list” is the winning recipe at ex-Four Seasons exec chef Jamie Jones’s restaurant with rooms – a spacious (much extended) former shepherd’s cottage in the heart of Hardy country (the village of Lower Bockhampton is called Mellstock in ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’). This may be about to be a case of ‘all change’, however – the business was put on the market in 2024 as a going concern.