Lutterworth Restaurant Guide

This “great local restaurant” from Chris & Abby Ascough has built a solid reputation over 19 years for its “beautifully cooked and presented food” at “exceptionally good value” – including a £20 set lunch and a six-course tasting menu for £48 per person with matching wines for £20 per person.

Stephen and Tracy Fitzpatrick, who also run The Joiners Arms at Bruntingthorpe, are the winning duo behind this sixteenth-century village inn with four rooms, three miles south of Market Harborough; the wide-ranging menu tips its hat to fish ‘n’ chips on Friday, and takes in thrice-weekly ‘Auberge Suppers’, and there are “lovely gardens to go with the excellent food”. Tip Tip – it’s “worth staying for the superb veggie breakfast”.

This “excellent South Indian” near Leicester Tigers’ Welford Road stadium is “the real deal”, and “never disappoints” with its “superb food served by a wonderful team”. Top Menu Tips – “the fish curry is a delight, as is the masala dosa”.

2021 Review: Cyrus Todiwala OBE, the acclaimed Bombay-born TV-chef behind London’s Café Spice Namaste, has chosen a Grade II listed building in the city-centre for his first restaurant outside London; and will feature five separate areas over two floors, including a bar, casual dining and fine dining room. For the town with the biggest Diwali festival outside India, Leicester has always curiously lacked a go-to Indian dining destination – maybe this is it?

Only recently opened, in early 2023, ‘Yummy Brummie’ Glynn Purnell (operating in partnership with Historic Coventry Trust), launched this cafe and pizzeria in the cloisters of a Grade I-listed 14th Century former Carthusian monastery. “It’s similar to Purnell’s Plates in Birmingham serving delicious and very good-value small dishes, tapas style” and “the setting is beautiful – a spacious, modern and comfortable conservatory in this historic building in a lovely park on the outskirts of Coventry”.

This “beautiful old country pub” – thatched and beamed, with a “lovely cosy atmosphere, open fire and low lighting” – serves “top-quality food” from chef Emilie Bull, backed up with an “impressive wine list” overseen by proprietor Tim Hubbard, here for 22 years with his wife Kate. “Kate and Tim know what they’re doing and they do it very well indeed” – “they’re always so friendly and happy to see you again”.

“Incredible Indian street food” has been enjoyed at this Gujarati vegetarian fixture on Leicester’s ‘Golden Mile’ since 1976, when it was opened by the late Bhagwanjibhai and Manglaben Lakhani. Now run by their son Dharmesh, it has been refurbished taking inspiration from the classic Bollywood film ‘Bobby’, the source of its name.

With its oak beams and flagstone floors, this family-run rural gastropub between Leicester and Lutterworth continues to win a solid thumbs up from Midlands-based reporters in our annual diners’ poll. The fairly traditional, bistro-style cooking (e.g. chicken liver parfait, steak or seabass, panna cotta) is in a more ambitious mould than typical pub grub.