Ockbrook Restaurant Guide

2023 Review: With its untreated oak tables, black granite surfaces and antler candelabras, chef-patron Nick Gillespie’s unusual and “very quiet” venue makes an appropriate showcase for his distinctive modern British cooking, which provided some reporters’ best meal of the year. “Staff cannot do enough for you.”

“Worth a visit” for its “high-quality food from the Indian subcontinent” – Naveed Khaliq’s 21-year-old flagship occupies a grand former picture palace whose plush decor and lavishly uniformed staff bring a sense of occasion to the meal. There are spinoffs in Nottingham and Burton.

2021 Review: This “old mill overlooking the river and weir” – part of the Darley Abbey Mills World Heritage site on the Derwent – has an “interesting menu and consistently high-quality cooking”. “Lunch here is always a pleasure, thanks to its setting, space and service as much as its food”.

“Down the road from Toyota” (whose employees explain its unlikely presence) “a café-sized and café-style Japanese restaurant serving exquisite food”; despite the “strange mix of very high standards (the sashimi, sushi and tempura dishes) and almost homemade kitsch (the menus, the furniture)”, it’s “a delightful experience” by absolutely all accounts.