Compton, British, Modern Restaurant Guide

“Pleasant old pub, with a modern dining room at the rear, in the Derbyshire countryside near Ashbourne”. “Very competent” cooking emerges from the kitchen of chef Gareth Ward, “including top-class fish (from the same source as sister establishment The Cow at Dalbury) – not often do you find both turbot and halibut on offer alongside good-quality local beef and lamb”.

2023 Review: “The days when this was a pub have long gone: it is an unashamedly ambitious restaurant which charges a full price for some very good cooking” – so say fans of this Peak District gastropub near the Dove Valley, who say “the chef knows what he is doing, and as long as you can afford it this is one of the best places to eat in the Peak District”. William Sitwell of The Telegraph paid it a visit in September 2022 and gave a similar but more nuanced view: the “cooking really is excellent and delicate with clever flavours” and “there is talent and charm by the bucket-load”, but he felt the dishes on the menu were presented and served in tiny portions, and he was encouraged to think of them as tapas. He declared, they “are the most un-tapassy things I’ve ever seen”.

2024 Review: This “old manor house” handy for Chatsworth (and “not to be confused with the Peacock Inn in nearby Bakewell”), may “feel old-fashioned”, but its “great food and interesting menu” (from tasting menus to more “relaxed” options, both taken in the “fine dining room”) make it “a pleasure” by all accounts. Local ingredients (beef and lamb, say) are sourced from the Haddon Estate on which it sits.

2022 Review: This “lovely gastropub” on the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth estate gets mostly positive feedback for its “good food and real ales”. There’s sometimes a perception, though, that “it falls short” of its potential: “the cooking was fair, but it could be so nice here”.

The “unbeatable” combination of “delicious food, good menu options and excellent service” “never disappoints” at this modern British outfit in the Peak District. Chef-patron Lee Smith grew up in nearby Mansfield and made his name cooking at Jersey restaurant Samphire before crowd-funding his debut here in 2020.

This “superb country-house restaurant-with-rooms is a real delight”, with a “small-but-perfectly formed à la carte menu”, “professional and friendly staff”, and wines selected by sommelier-owner Alistair Myers – set in a “peaceful village in the Peak District”, it is an “offshoot of the venerable Rafters in Sheffield”. Last year Myers acquired the Old Eyre Arms in Hassop, an ivy-clad pub he passed regularly on the road between the two Rafters.