Home / Dining
One dining room, one bar, one walled gardenThe garden decides the menu
An acre of walled kitchen garden sits forty yards from the stove, and in summer it supplies most of what reaches the table. The rest comes from a short list of farms, none of them further than the far side of the county.
The Long Room
The rectory's old drawing room and library, knocked into one in 1908 by somebody who evidently gave dinner parties. Thirty-eight covers, candles rather than spotlights, and a run of oak tables that came out of a chapel in Stow.
Dinner is a set menu of three courses with two choices at each, written at noon once the gardeners have been in. Kate Marlow cooks it — ten years in Bristol before she came back to the county she grew up in — and the style is plain in the way that takes effort: a whole turbot for two, mutton that has been in the oven since breakfast, gooseberries with elderflower in the ten days that gooseberries allow.
- Three courses, £58 a head
- Two choices per course; the garden dictates the rest
- Non-residents welcome — book a week ahead at weekends
- No dinner on Monday or Tuesday; the bar serves supper instead
The Snug
One room, one fire, two settles and a bar the length of a door. Donnington BB comes from four miles away and Hook Norton from fifteen; there are twenty-odd gins made within the county and one bottle of Armagnac older than the bar itself.
Lunch is served here every day — a proper sandwich, a pie, a bowl of soup — and on Mondays and Tuesdays, when the kitchen closes, so is supper. Muddy boots and wet dogs are the expected condition of guests in this room.
- Lunch 12:00–14:30 daily
- Bar supper Monday and Tuesday, 18:30–21:00
- Local ale, cider and about twenty Cotswold gins
- Dogs welcome at any hour
The walled garden
An acre inside eighteenth-century walls, worked by Ellen and Joe, with glasshouses along the south wall and a cutting bed that keeps every vase in the house filled. Guests are welcome to wander through it at any hour, and to ask what anything is.
On Saturdays at eleven, one of the gardeners walks anybody who turns up around it for half an hour. It is free, it is not a performance, and it is the reason a number of guests go home and dig up their own lawn.
Where we send guests on a Monday
In the village
Two pubs in Bourton do food worth walking to, and one does not. Reception will tell you which is which, and book the table while you are standing there.
Twenty minutes away
Kingham, Daylesford and Stow between them hold the county's best-known kitchens. Weekend tables need a fortnight; we can sometimes do better by telephone.
Farm shops
Daylesford is fifteen minutes and is what everybody has heard of. The farm shop at Bourton is four minutes, half the price and where our own kitchen shops.
A picnic instead
Ask the day before and the kitchen will pack a hamper for two at £34 — bread, cheese, a pie, fruit from the garden and a rug that you are trusted to bring back.
Hours, and what happens when
| Meal | Where | Days | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breakfast | The Long Room | Daily | 07:30–10:00 · 10:30 Sat–Sun |
| Lunch | The Snug & terrace | Daily | 12:00–14:30 |
| Afternoon tea | Hall or garden | Daily | 15:00–17:00 |
| High tea for children | The Snug | Daily | 17:30 |
| Dinner | The Long Room | Wed–Sun | 19:00–21:00 |
| Bar supper | The Snug | Mon & Tue | 18:30–21:00 |
| In-room dining | Anywhere | Daily | 07:30–21:30 |
A table, a hamper, or the whole Long Room
Dinner for two, a private lunch for twelve, or the dining room to yourselves — all arranged through reception.