Winsley Restaurant Guide

“A very romantic setting in such a fabulous hotel” helps intoxicate diners at this magnificent destination in fine grounds – a 17th-century house, with additional modern buildings nearby and ‘all mod cons’ sensitively introduced into a fine period setting. Shaun Rankin has been chef here since 2019 and delivers a very contemporary 14-course menu for £180 per person. If it all sounds too good to be true, it’s not, all reports are positive. Even so, some do question the value: “super place, but expensive compared to other places of this standard”.

“Excellent food and service in a garden centre”, where you eat “surrounded by giant plants in a large, airy room” – the “most unusual” formula (“but all the better for that”) at top chef Frances Atkins’s crowd-pleaser of a café. Those who visited her former venture – the posh Yorke Arms – report that the food is “just as good as it always was” there, whether you use it as a “favourite ‘brekkie-with-the girls’ haunt”, as per one reporter’s wife, or you go for tea and cake, when the “baking is something else” (dinner is also offered on Fridays). Add in “wonderful, attentive service” (staff “remember you even if it’s weeks since your last visit”) and “the entire place is a joy!”. (Note – the formula-price is for the supper menu: you eat in the daytime much more cheaply).

This “wonderfully decorated restaurant” offering a pan-Asian menu is one of five dining options at 17th-century Grantley Hall, where it is set in a modern pavilion overlooking the Japanese garden. Slick service (“they happily adapted the tasting menu to cater for our preferences”) adds to the occasion. Andy Lynam succeeded high-profile head chef Samira Effa last summer; she left after three-and-a-half years to head up her own private dining business.

“Such a beautiful place” – a quintessential English country house hotel in the Dales with a pampering spa and a clutch of restaurants, of which this handsome dining room is one, and enlivened by tartan textiles; wood-panelled walls; and views out to the terrace and garden beyond. Reporters had nothing but praise for chef Craig Atchinson’s “wonderful” food – influenced by the region’s larder and focusing on unfussy classics plus meats cooked on the Josper grill.