Kington Restaurant Guide

This well-known border-country inn is “still one of the best places to eat in the area”, with “well prepared and flavoursome food”. Long-time regulars miss Steve & Nicola Reynolds, who retired a couple of years ago, but the new management team of chef Tom Tudor and his partner Vittoria Turolla, FOH, have settled in well and the place is now “performing better again”.

2022 Review: This “busy” seventeenth-century inn is appreciated for its “simple, tasty, well-executed dishes” of “good honest food”.

“A lovely small restaurant” in a converted, ancient ecclesiastical building which bills itself as ‘Dining & Bottle Shop’, “where you can enjoy unusual flavours and be taken through the menu by the delightful staff”. All reports are enthusiastic about its approach, which includes sourcing from the venue’s own garden, delivering “amazing food” of diverse inspiration and “good value”. Foodwise, it was the highlight of the year for some reporters.

Ideal for a “hideaway date night in the shires”, with a “combination of discrete modern features melded into an ancient, beautiful and comfortable building” (whose stone dining room was built at the time of the Norman Conquest) – Pippa & Willem Vlok’s country-house guarantees a “really great experience”. “Truly remarkable staff” include head chef Nick Bennett, whose “highly skilled cooking” produces meals to savour.

“What a pub dining experience should be like” – this “lovely old drovers’ pub at the foot of Black Hill” may be remote (the Welsh border isn’t far off) but “if you can find it, you will not be disappointed”; after long lying idle, it was reinvented by John Stead of Longtown’s Wild By Nature group, and its ingredient-led gastropub menu is winning highly positive reports. Watch out for rooms coming soon.

2021 Review: Between Ludlow and Leominster, this sixteenth-century, black and white pub was taken over and revamped in spring 2018. Feedback on the new regime is too limited as yet for a full rating, but all of it is upbeat.