Banbury Restaurant Guide

This Cotswold local for the Chipping Norton set is a “very busy pub on a Sunday, with great beef choices” and meat – sourced from a farm just six miles away – and is a mainstay on weekdays too: “even if it’s expensive, it’s well worth while ordering the very best of the menu”. Owner Antony Griffith Harris and chef Nick Anderson first worked together more than 35 years ago before teaming up here in 2017.

Richard & Solanche Craven’s “exceptional” venue in a converted village pub on the northern fringe of the Cotswolds is “well worth the detour” for its “well-judged menu” of “beautifully cooked” dishes (many with foraged ingredients) and “democratically inclined wine list” in a “very attractive space”. You don’t have to endure a massive number of courses either, with evening options starting with a four-course menu for £80 per person.

In 2021, after selling The Ebrington Arms near Chipping Campden, which they’d run for 15 years, Jim & Claire Alexander were able to fully focus their attentions on this seventeenth-century inn, handy for Blenheim Palace; chef Adam Brown (a Ramsay alum) oversees the locally sourced food, which inspired solid marks this year, if little in the way of commentary (other than to say that it’s “good again at last” – perhaps a result of the Alexanders’ renewed focus).

Smartly renovated with a ‘no foam’ menu of elevated pub grub to match, this honey-coloured boozer in an idyllic Cotswold village has “benefited from the ‘Country Creatures’ treatment” (now known as Lionhearth) under the co-ownership of locally based billionaire property developer Sir Tony Gallagher, lynchpin of the Chipping Norton set. These days, “the main problem is getting a table”.

Mark Ramshaw’s ‘micro-restaurant’ serves a “seriously inventive menu at a great price” to no more than 11 guests a night on just Fridays and Saturdays. “We sat at the kitchen counter and enjoyed a brilliant modern British menu, strong on local produce and full of lovely bitter-fermented-charred-umami flavour combinations. Pork, peas and pickled strawberry was a yummy main course”. It opened in June 2021, with Marina O’Loughlin of the Sunday Times an early enthusiast.