Lower Swell, British, Modern - Restaurant Guide

“Comfort through and through” helps characterise this luxurious Cotswolds retreat – a “lovely building and grounds” with a “gorgeous” elegant interior. Chef Charles Smith provides “superlative presentation, taste & seasoning, with every element of each dish perfectly prepared”. from a nine-course menu in the evening for £130 per person. (There’s also the simpler Dining Room where you can enjoy high quality but more straightforward dishes).

2022 Review: Limited but upbeat feedback on this relatively recent (2019) addition to the well-known Cotswolds manor house, with Charles Smith delivering a nine-course tasting menu for £95. Fans do say it’s “wonderful”, but we have to leave a rating till we have a few more reports.

2024 Review: This archetypal Cotswolds manor house, just outside Bourton on the Water, occupies a seventeenth century property that’s nowadays part of Andrew Brownsword’s hotel group. The cuisine – under chef Nik Chappell – wins a consistent thumbs-up (“we do enjoy going here... results can be a bit hit and miss, but are mostly good! while service is very good and the dining room attractive”). As well as a fairly pricey à la carte (three courses for £80) there’s a relatively affordable all-day menu served in the bar and lounges (with dishes such as omelette Arnold Bennett, steak, posh sarnies, and so on).

2025 Review: This “wonderful old Cotswold inn” has been “beautifully renovated by the Daylesford owners” who took over in mid-2021, and now features stately equine paintings and lemon trees in the foreground of its mullioned windows. While it’s “larger and a bit more of a machine since becoming part of the Bamford empire”, the atmosphere is “lovely” (not least in the courtyard garden) and on the food front it is seen as “reliable”, with much sourcing from its famed sibling Daylesford Organic, and a crowd-pleasing menu of pub classics, wood-fired pizzas and fancier seasonal dishes.

2024 Review: “The Fox has had a major makeover since the old days when it had the ambience of a venerable Cotswold pub” – as you’d expect since the July 2022 takeover by Lady Bamford and her Daylesford empire. Some old timers feel “the money lavished on its gentrification has not resulted in improvement”, although they concede the result is “very comfortable” and deliver a thumbs-up to its selection of posh pub grub (pizza, steak, burgers and Cornish fish for the most part). In early 2023, Giles Coren declared himself a fan too, even if there was nowhere close to park that wasn’t already taken by “gleaming Land Rovers and Porsches, piled three deep in the narrow lanes and stacked on pavements”.

The cornerstone of Lady Bamford’s organic empire, this farm shop and café (juggling Michelin Green Star dining room ‘The Trough’; pizza and small plates joint ‘The Old Spot’; and ‘The Legbar’ for snacks), “remains a modern oasis amidst all the pubs serving the same menu” in this bucolic corner of The Cotswolds. It “can be a bit haughty” given its Chipping Norton set clientèle (and it remains “pricey”), but then again “perhaps the greatest plus is people-watching and seeing how the other half sometimes behave!”.

Owned by the nearby Donnington Brewery – a “popular, comfortable, attractive and welcoming” roadside inn with five bedrooms and a rangy garden in a “very picturesque” setting. The classic British cooking features a generous dose of grilled meats and game. While, for the odd reporter, it’s “OK but not exceptional”, for fans it “achieves all it sets out to do”.

“Absolutely lovely” – “Tucked away down a lane”, this restored Georgian malthouse overlooking the Evenlode valley is “everything that you could want a Cotswold Pub now Restaurant with Rooms to be”: “a stunning place with real atmosphere” and high marks too to the accomplished cuisine, be it from the high quality à la carte menu, or the more ambitious seven-course tasting menu for £90 per person. It’s not a case of fancy combinations – you’re paying for high quality protein that’s been sensitively prepared.

“Really delicious, well-executed, restaurant-quality food” has established this 17th-century village pub as a Cotswold star under former Simpsons head chef Nathan Eades and Liam Goff since they took over in late 2023; although “it’s a limited space so gets noisy when busy”. The founders meanwhile have new openings nearby: The Horse and Groom at Bourton on the Hill and most recently The Hollow Bottom at Guiting Power.