Ludlow, British, Traditional Restaurant Guide

“A secluded gem where culinary delights await in the ancient dining room” – close to Ludlow but “not easy to find down a winding country lane through the estate” – Willem & Pippa Vlok’s restaurant-with-rooms offers a “consistently excellent” hyper-local menu from former MasterChef: The Professionals finalist Nick Bennett, staff that are “friendly, efficient and knowledgeable”, and “wooden-beamed bedrooms offer rest from the weary routines of everyday life”. Price-wise, it’s “a bargain for cooking of the quality, emphatically so by London standards”.

2022 Review: Rescued by local regulars from the threat of demolition six years ago, this 200-year-old former drovers’ pub (‘bait’ as in ‘bite’ or ‘snack’) is now an upmarket pub-with-rooms on the Herefordshire-Worcestershire border, serving food of a “consistently high standard”. “The lamb dishes are particularly delicious” (Kate Lane, one of the co-owners, farms sheep). Building on their success here, Kate and her lawyer husband Andrew Cornthwaite now have a growing collection of reinvigorated village pubs.