Forest Side, Grasmere, Cumbria, LA22 9RN (01539 435 250).
Meal for two, including drinks and service: £120 plus.

We should probably deal with the whole “butter on a rock” thing first. Being sophisticated souls, we laugh in the face of anything that isn’t a plate, don’t we? Or as my youngest once put it: “You start with a mini chip pan fryer and before you know it, there’s couscous in a mini wheelbarrow.” Well quite. But using a polished rock for the butter – exceptional chive butter, the colour of a bowls lawn, dressed with Lilliputian deep-fried onion rings and nasturtium blooms – is a tidy declaration of intent. Kevin Tickle’s cooking at Forest Side, a small country house hotel shoved into the lee of a hill just outside Grasmere, is an expression of the Cumbrian landscape. A shiny stone does the job nicely.

You could argue that a genuine expression of the Cumbrian landscape at the arse end of winter would involve hosing you down with cold water, while directing an Arctic blast at your head, and simultaneously getting four shaggy, dung-crusted Herdwick to nuzzle you. Personally, I prefer the whole bourgeoise, “restaurant table in a warm room” version.

The idea of food reflecting Cumbria is not a new one. Tickle, Cumbrian born and trained, spent eight years working with Simon Rogan at L’Enclume, which has more polished rocks for serving food on than you can shake a whittled elder stick at. The undulating, hobbit rooms of L’Enclume in Cartmel was a perfect setting for his games with botanicals and vegetables, both pristine and foetal. That said, I prefer Tickle’s version of it. L’Enclume is a parade of itsy bitsy tiny things. If you like something, it’s gone too quickly. Here at Forest Side, in an airy dining room with views out to the hills, it’s all just more robust.

Don’t mistake. This is still a grown-up restaurant, with a slightly furrowed brow. The main tasting menu costs £80 and is at least seven courses long. I can’t pretend. I haven’t got as many years left as I’ve had, and I worry about losing them to seven-course tasting menus. Instead, we had the £35 menu but managed to negotiate a few substitutions, so as to work through more of the dishes. The upshot: they’re not keeping all the baubles and luxury ingredients back for the more expensive menu. The cheaper option has just as many fireworks.

Both begin with the same canapés, which are dainty things in polished hobnail boots. One is a sweet-savoury cracker made by some alchemy from butternut squash. It is piled with crumbled black pudding, in turn topped with dinky splodges of funky brie-soft Tunworth cheese. It’s a flavour bomb. The other is a piece of toast topped with salt-cured egg yolk, wind-dried ham and black truffle. It is the best ham and eggs you will ever eat.

Then the beads of chive-flavoured butter, with warm, open-crumbed seeded sourdough. Eventually we have to ask for the bread to be taken away. It is just too good. Then there’s a tiny, soft terrine of pig’s ear in an intense mushroom broth. It’s a textural game of tag, the slipperiness of the mushrooms echoing the slinkiness of the long cooked piggy lug hole. It’s a brilliant, potentially divisive dish and all the cleverer for that.

There’s a lot of salt-baking going on here, to get the most of their vegetables, the majority of which come from their own kitchen garden tucked in behind the hotel. Celeriac is salt-baked until it tastes intensely of itself and served with plump mussels and two burnished fillets of lemon sole pressed together. In the other dish kohlrabi gets the salt-baked treatment, as a supporting act to pearlescent flakes of salt cod, with pickled nasturtium flowers and a lovage emulsion, providing just the edge of bitterness. This is precise, finely calibrated stuff. It stops you, makes you pause and stare for a moment. Or it does, if you are one of those people capable of rooting their emotional wellbeing in their lunch, which I am.

There is the same intensity to the main courses. Pork loin comes with a pleasing ribbon of crisped fat, on bashed Jerusalem artichokes, with a deep, limpid pork jus dotted with puddles of herb oil. More diverting still is a piece of aged beef rib, served on a smoked butter emulsion. There are other things, too, of course. There are hen-of-the-wood mushrooms, and heaps of deep orange smoked squash. But what stays with me is the flavour of that beef, as though it has been hanging out by a winter bonfire, intensifying its own flavour, and gathering the tang of wood smoke on the cool late winter air.

I want to rave all the way unto dessert, but I can’t, not quite. It’s not that they aren’t clever. They really are. But the intellectual, precise approach obvious in the savoury courses doesn’t fully transfer to the sweet end of the meal, where you need lusciousness and indulgence. Curls of dehydrated, caramelised apple are a wonder. The buttermilk custard and the lovage ice cream beneath them are very pleasing. Likewise, the tiny tuft of apple cake alongside them all. But it comes and goes without quite caressing the sweet spot. The same applies to a disk of pear laid with a woodruff ice cream and a granita and crumble. It is Tinker Bell delicate, a whiff of sugar rather than a full dive into the cookie jar.

At the end, with our coffee, we are presented with a box of pebbles, two of which are misshapen pieces of botanical-infused ice cream in a grey chocolate shell. They are interesting rather than lovely, and at this point I wanted something lovely, even crowd-pleasingly blunt. A little loosening of the corsets is in order.

It’s a criticism, but one which takes both Tickle and Forest Side seriously, which is how they wish to be taken; the bill, helped by a less than cheap and cheerful wine list, will reflect that seriousness. It is an exceptionally good hotel restaurant and is, I think, just a function of how much is going on in the Lakes and Cumbria right now. That evening I present the Cumbria Life food and drink awards at Kendal College, home to one of the most influential cooking courses in the country. It’s striking that many of the nominees are already national names. It’s also striking that, against very tough competition. Kevin Tickle is named chef of the year. Quite right, too.

Jay’s news bites

Also among the nominees for the Cumbria Life awards was the Drunken Duck Inn at Ambleside, an old pub up a Lake District hill whose current menu includes treacle-glazed ox cheek with padrón peppers, spiced lamb shoulder with pearl barley and, to finish, a chocolate and Kendal mint cake sundae. Come mid-afternoon and they’ll serve you a bowl of gumbo (drunkenduckinn.co.uk).

Meanwhile in Edinburgh Michel Roux Sr and his son Alain Roux are launching a new £3m restaurant at the Balmoral Hotel. The as-yet-unnamed venture, due to open in May, will seat over 200 and specialise in French classics “using Scottish ingredients”. Mais bien sûr.

Back in the capital, Mark Sargeant, who made his name with Gordon Ramsay, is to open a new venture at the Tower of London called – wait for it – Sargeant’s Mess. The restaurant, operated with food service group CH&Co, will serve Atlantic cod with dripping chips, pressed shoulder of lamb and a selection of soups and salads to take away.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1