Hotel Endsleigh 9.75/10
Telephone 01822 870000.
Address Milton Abbot, Tavistock, Devon.
Open Lunch, all week, 12.30-2.30pm; dinner, all week, 7.30-10pm.
Price Average per head, £38, plus wine.
Wheelchair access and disabled WC.
The matter of reviewing the restaurant at Hotel Endsleigh presents a specific and possibly unique problem. Speaking professionally, I am duty-bound to report that this is easily the best new restaurant I've come across in ages, that the hotel itself is magnificent, and that it stands in what is self-evidently (even to this bucolophobic urban Jew) among the most exquisite rural settings on the planet.
Speaking personally, however, the prospect of hordes descending on it as a result of this article is mortifying. Over the years during which we have rented a cottage by the week or fortnight on this erstwhile ducal estate, my wife has developed the grandiose fantasy that she owns it. Not a woman to brook very much at the best of times, what she brooks least is the public trampling over "her" Devon property. The one thing she would brook even less is a husband held responsible for a sharp increase in human traffic.
The truth is that she nearly did buy the estate three years ago, when the fishing syndicate that owned it ran out of cash. Had five more of her six Lottery numbers come up one Saturday evening, she planned to shell out the requisite £3.5m the following Monday morning. That's how close she came to bridging the chasm between delusion and reality. Instead, it fell to Olga Polizzi to stump up and install her daughter Alex to renovate the house and manage both hotel and restaurant. The result is such a triumphant mingling of the traditional and the dead cool that even my wife, who used to adore earwigging the nonagenarian fisherman telling riverbank tales over what appeared to be boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce, couldn't dredge up a worthwhile whinge.
In fact, this was an unnervingly perfect evening from the moment we sat outside with drinks under gas heaters looking down on the river Tamar, to a slightly squiffy conclusion in front of a log fire in the library. What came in between offered a useful lesson to the proprietors of hotel restaurants in the glory of taking superb local ingredients and cooking them with flair but no pretension.
In so far as we could tell in the faint candlelight, the room itself looks great, in a woody, semi-monastic way, and the determined avoidance of faux-grandeur was confirmed by an Italian-dominated wine list so eager not to take liberties with the mark-ups that the Aussie Riesling we drank was priced at £35.62.
The modern British set menu offers five choices in each course, and all nine dishes cooked by a hugely promising chef called Shay Cooper were immaculate at the very least. Organic salmon with potato gnocchi, shiitake mushrooms, baby squid and kaffir lime was "out of this world", according to my wife, and a small boy of our acquaintance not known for his appetite rattled down his saffron linguine with Cornish crab, raving about both the "beautiful taste" and the texture. My glazed pork belly, with green beans, a poached egg and a subtle foie gras sauce, was as sweet and melty as that princely cut should be.
In the brief hiatus between courses, the small boy inquired after his squab pigeon with turnips and morels in a Madeira sauce every 20 seconds, after the fashion of "Are we there yet?", then set about it like a feral urchin before scribbling a mark of 100/100 on my notes. Roast blackleg chicken with roast chervil root, a lollipop-like herb-crusted drumstick, boudin and lemon thyme was "very slightly dry but totally delicious", and my fillet of beef came in five thick, deep pink slices with sautéed artichokes, cipolline onions and caramelised cauliflower. It was sensationally good, as were the puddings, most notably a hot chocolate fondant with champagne mousse and an amazingly pretty fruit salad.
"I cannot believe how brilliant that meal was, and how wonderfully they've done up my house," said my wife. "I just hope it doesn't lead to a mass invasion of my property by the general public." I suspect it may mean precisely that, so I must conclude with a polite request. Should you visit Endsleigh and find yourself accosted by a tall, blonde and faintly deranged woman with lips pursed to the point of nonexistence, have mercy and tell her you heard about it somewhere else.
