Buckingham Restaurant Guide

2022 Review: You can eat like a Rothschild at this gastropub on the Waddeston estate, dining on meat from the estate’s farms and vegetables from Baron Rothschild’s walled garden at Eythrope. The pub serves “really excellent food” and is set in “pleasant countryside”, with profits going to support the historic Waddesdon Manor, now owned by the National Trust while the Baron retains the estate. There is also afternoon ‘teapas’ – a selection of savoury small plates and more traditional scones and cakes.

2023 Review: “The team is small but work incredibly hard to create beautifully presented dishes that always hit the spot” at this “lovely pub” between the Chilterns and the Cotswolds, where Matt Gill’s cuisine provides “excellent food” from an à la carte menu that, while “rustic”, bears no relation to pub grub.

2022 Review: This rural pub (complete with beams and roaring fire, and also accommodation) in a lovely Buckinghamshire village still achieves solid ratings, and – notwithstanding gripes from the occasional reporter about its takeover by Oakman Inns in late 2019 – most feedback rates the food as “very good”.

“Michael North delivers sublime food and Imogen North creates the perfect front-of-house ambience” according to the many fans of this well-known foodie destination, which occupies a thatched rural pub. “Mike and Imogen have maintained such high standards since the first day they opened” in 2006. You can go for the short ‘Pub Classics’ menu – which delivers superior steak or fish ’n’ chips in the bar – but our reporters are more generally interested in the seven-course tasting menu (plus bread) for £115 per person. In either case, it’s a “lovely setting” and you get “high quality every time”. (A plea from one regular though: “I hope they go back to a full à la carte menu some time soon”).

“Splendid surroundings for a plentiful and tasty afternoon tea” are again noted as a highpoint at this Jacobean/Georgian stately home spa hotel, with grounds laid out originally by Capability Brown and nowadays owned by the National Trust. Top Tip – “they are happy to give you a box for anything you can’t finish!”

Two minutes from the station, a scion from the dynasty behind the famous Brilliant Indian restaurant in Southall has spread her wings to open a 150-cover venue in the shiny new Unity Place development in late 2023; dusting off some of her family’s oldest recipes (and there’s an in-house microbrewery too). No survey feedback as yet, but in her June 2024 review, The Guardian’s Grace Dent declared it one of the best things to have happened to Milton Keynes in ages – “absolutely charming” once you leave the exterior streetscape behind, with “light, thoughtful cooking that determinedly sets out to incapacitate you, with lovely, kind service”.

“Go mad for further adventures in veg” at Yotam Ottolenghi’s famous deli-cafés, whose Middle Eastern inspired menus are best known for their “creative” salads and meat-free dishes (bread and pastries are also “fabulous”) but there are also some meat and fish options. They are far from cheap, but “the spicing is interesting”, “the flavours are immense” and “the small-plates format allows you to try a number of options”. “A great spot for brunch” or “to drop in for cake and tea”. The Islington branch is most commented-on, and in December 2023 its newest sibling (also in north London) opened on Rosslyn Hill, Hampstead, while a branch in Richmond, in the leafy southwest, is scheduled for late 2024.