Armscote Restaurant Guide

“Traditional pub/small country hotel with nice touches”, nine miles south of Stratford, where the northern Cotswolds intersects with Shakespeare – you’ll find “very good local real ales plus superior pub grub, friendly staff and good-value set lunches”. It’s owned by journalist Andrew Knight, who ran both the Telegraph and Times newspaper groups.

“Really deserves to be up there with the best” – a “very attractive” restaurant-with-five-flashy-rooms set in Georgian premises, and luring diners to this quaint market town betwixt Stratford-upon-Avon and Chipping Norton. There’s considerable flair to the British cooking (they offer à la carte or a tasting menu), which nods to honest produce like trout and quail.

Highly rated village pub on the edge of the Cotswolds from Richard & Solanche Craven where “originality and local resourcing are dominant concerns” – “Richard’s cookery is always spot-on, and his love of game shines through in the fantastic dishes he serves up”. In late 2025 the couple launched a second venture in the village: a daytime bakery, ‘Ferment & Flour’, that turns into ‘Ricardo Bastardo’s’, a trattoria using English produce, in the evening.

Honeyed stone on the outside and Scandi-chic on the interior characterise the scene at this Cotswold retreat – a 17th-century manor house within 60 acres which opened in September 2025 – too late for any feedback in our annual diners’ poll. TS Eliot sojourned here in days gone by – if he visited now he could toy with some of the straightforward but competitively priced options on the focused menu, which includes the likes of Kedgeree Arancini, Wood-fired Octopus, and Briar Hill Farm Lamb.