Wiveliscombe Restaurant Guide

A “small but perfectly formed bistro-style” venue which was set up by Richard Guest and FOH Cedric Chirrosel in 2011, and has since firmly made its mark on the local dining scene with its impeccable local sourcing and “nice French-style cooking” (also inflected by British and Asian touches). Fans say that the “idiosyncratic” venture is “as good as it gets locally” (“when it is open we never go anywhere else”).

In the ‘gateway to Exmoor’, a 30-seat restaurant from self-taught Cypriot chef Tim Zekki, serving West Country ingredients with international flavourings. Telegraph critic William Sitwell hailed it as a “gorgeous and charming flavour bomb of a place”.

This informal, wood-fired restaurant set in a ‘feasting barn’ with a terrace garden and beautiful views of the rolling hills of mid-Devon was started by a couple who used to run events across Somerset and Devon. “It can get very busy, but it’s worth the journey down the lanes” from Tiverton for its sourdough pizzas and what Telegraph critic William Sitwell, in an admiring March 2023 review, called its “enveloping, welcome-to-our-cave spirit” and “exotic menu” (“more Shoreditch than Devon”).

2023 Review: This 500-year-old building in a “beautiful part of Somerset” now houses an “excellent dining pub” that “serves up top-class modern British dishes using brilliant local ingredients”. Chef Olly Jackson and his manager wife Rebecca “used to run the nearby and sadly missed Langford Fivehead hotel”.

As the name suggests, “a great, intimate atmosphere” is found at this seventeenth-century village inn, which is “a cut above the usual for style and service”. Charlotte Vincent was crowned ‘pub chef of the year’ in the 2023 Great British Pub Awards – she sends out “a varied range of dishes, nearly all locally sourced and precisely cooked”, such as a bar snack of roasted marrow bone and Porlock Bay oyster with garlic butter and sourdough bread.