Bruton Restaurant Guide

“Every mouthful is divine” at ex-Portland and Clipston chef Merlin Labron-Johnson’s “tiny restaurant in rural Somerset” that “dares to be different” – serving a set meal with no menu, “so you just sit back and await the surprises (you receive a menu sheet at the end of the meal)”. “I was absolutely stunned by the intensity of flavours, the simple presentation and responsible sourcing of ingredients”. “Some ingredients I had never tasted before, and the flavour pairings were creative and so exciting” – “what an incredible surprise, superb from start to finish”.

This “beautiful” eighteenth-century chapel was converted 15 years ago into an all-day restaurant-with-rooms, artisan bakery and wine shop, centred around a “fantastic” modern dining room. (In August 2022, after our annual diners’ poll concluded, founder Catherine Butler sold the business to the Stay Original Company, which has five other boutique hotels and pubs in the southwest, and pledged to carry on without major changes).

This “canteen in a converted barn” with “one or two more upscale menu items – for example, smoked local trout and excellent Devon scallops, with very good chips” – is attached to the rural gallery of Swiss contemporary art dealers Hauser & Wirth, and is named after Dieter Roth: one of the artists they represent. The venue kick-started their Artfarm hospitality spin-off, which has spawned rather grander projects in Mayfair and Los Angeles, and last year snapped up London’s Groucho Club.

“Love this place” – set in historic Hadspen House and its famous gardens (operated since 2019 as a luxury hotel, shop and restaurant by South African billionaire Koos Bekker and his wife Karen Roos, an ex-editor of Elle Decoration). It’s “beautifully done”, and the “wood-panelled restaurant in the old house, with its candlelit atmosphere”, makes an ideal setting for “a wonderful, surprising tasting menu”, which is “certainly not your usual country house hotel food” – and which includes pairings with cider produced on the estate. (“Perfect on a late summer evening as the sun finally sets after some great pre-dinner cocktails”).

Owner Max Wigram has known Margot Henderson of Rochelle Canteen in Shoreditch since he was a teen and asked her to take over the stoves at this restored 17th-century Somerset inn with rooms, which is scheduled to reopen after refurbishment in November 2022. According to a September 2022 interview in Wallpaper, he asked her because he “wanted it to be really good, with no poncey rubbish” and it will open all day from breakfast onwards. There’s a walled garden which will come into its own in the summer months.