There comes a point in a food writer’s year – usually somewhere between the third langoustine of the week and fifteenth duck terrine of the quarter – when everything starts to taste like homework. Tasting-menu fatigue is the most obviously apparent, but there’s a broader ennui, too. Fatigue of trends. Fatigue of “concepts”. Fatigue of chasing the next thing when the old thing still feels alive and kicking.
So what do you eat when you stop caring? When the idea of booking a table makes you feel tired and the idea of queueing for a smash burger makes you violent?
Short answer: you get out of London. You go somewhere like Surrey or Bray, still within that safe suburban orbit that counts as countryside if you squint, and remember that restaurants are meant to look after you, not test you.
Which brings us to two meals that cured a very specific kind of food boredom. One at Latymer, a Michelin-starred tasting menu that reminded me why the format ever mattered. And one at The Crown at Bray, a cosy pub with more French technique than its tartan benches would suggest.
One precise, one chaotic; one plated, one ladled; both, in their own ways, exactly what I needed.
Latymer, Surrey: A tasting menu to cure chronic eye-roll
A Michelin-starred dining room in Surrey shouldn’t feel like an antidote to modern food ennui, but that’s exactly what Latymer turned out to be
Some time around November, I realised I could no longer tell one tasting menu from another. They had blurred into a kind of edible beige: snacks, bread, fish course, another fish course, possibly a third fish course, seasonal game, two puddings too many, petits fours, existential crisis. It’s the sort of professional malaise you can only complain about with a straight face when you work in food. There are, obviously, far worse burdens than scallops.
It wasn’t that the cooking was bad. Quite the opposite. It was that my attention span and digestive system were staging a quiet rebellion. I was becoming the worst kind of diner: bored in the face of brilliance.
So I did what any rational Londoner does to escape their own bad attitude: I went to Surrey.
Latymer, Pennyhill Park, Surrey
Good to know
What/where: Michelin-starred dining room at Pennyhill Park, Surrey – luxury without the London theatrics.
Style: Classical tasting menu with the occasional curveball; elegance over ego.
Chef: Steve Smith – quietly excellent, chronically under-hyped, Michelin-approved.
Vibe: Oak panelling, hushed service, zero conceptual monologues. Cooking-first, everything-else-second.
Budget: £175 for the full tasting; shorter options exist for the attention-span impaired. Drinks extra.
Best for: Cynics who think they’re ‘over’ tasting menus and need to be proven wrong.
Notable: A rare tasting menu that doesn’t leave you plotting your escape by course six.
Pennyhill Park to be precise – 120 acres, rolling grounds and a spa that could easily be a destination in itself, complete with mud rooms, ice igloos, “experience showers” and tepidariums and laconiums, whatever the hell they are. The perfect place to decompress, ideally in a robe and slippers, club sandwich in one hand, martini in the other.
Country-house dining rarely promises revelation. It tends towards the safe and celebratory: anniversary souffles, decent fish and pudding trolleys. I booked Latymer, the hotel’s fine dining restaurant, out of curiosity, not expectation.
Yet expectation is often a poor guide. Latymer has long been a serious proposition – a Michelin star, five AA rosettes, a dining room with heavy oak panelling – but seriousness is not the same as stuffiness. It took all of three minutes to realise that this was not just another perfunctory “hotel restaurant experience”, but a chef’s place. And one that would linger in the memory.
That chef is Steve Smith, who earned his first star at 24. They’ve followed him around ever since, from Yorkshire to Jersey to Surrey. Like fridge magnets. He is, in modern taxonomy, a technician rather than a celebrity: more interested in getting things right than in getting noticed. A cook shaped by long hours on the pass and not by audiences and algorithms.
Every so often, he’d emerge from the kitchen without introduction and bashfully set down a plate with such beguiling shyness that one might mistake him for a waiter on the first day of the job. For a man with his pedigree, he’d have every right to be insufferable. He isn’t.
At first glance, it’s the usual tasting-menu roll call designed to impress inspectors more than seduce diners. A jaded stomach might sink. And then you notice the oddities: crab laced with French-Indian curry spices, mushroom paired with blueberry, koji hyping up John Dory. The bones are classical, but someone in the kitchen is colouring outside the lines.
What follows is a meal that rewards attention. Snacks give the first hint that this isn’t polite hotel cooking for Surrey golf widows and their plus-ones: crab laced with sweet, savoury and smoky vadouvan, cooled with cucumber and fennel – warm spice, cold acidity, perfect proportions. A tiny postcard from late summer that vanished before we could decode it. A king oyster mushroom with spruce and blueberry that looked like vegetarian penance but landed like an epiphany, tasting improbably of pine forest and late-summer hedgerow.
Fish is where Smith really flexes: Orkney scallop with apple, celeriac and truffle, all cream and scent and crunch; John Dory draped in koji, sorrel and Roscoff onion, like a spring breeze at sea; sea bass turned up with razor clams and grapes, like someone finally remembered that fish doesn’t have to sit still in foam and behave.
The compulsory game course – because dem’s the rules – thankfully here flies solo: venison from Aynhoe, figgy and girolle-studded. Proper winter food.
Dessert kept faith with the orchard: blaeberry, basil and pistachio arranged in what felt like crumble-by-deconstruction; Granny Smith apple and seaweed caramel like the world’s most glamorous packed lunch; a chestnut-truffle choux that said, “don’t be silly, you’re not done yet”.
At £175 for the full tasting menu (there are abridged versions, too), this is not inexpensive dining, nor does it pretend to be. But value is a slippery idea. It can be measured in labour – consommés clarified to translucency, reductions coaxed to gloss, canapés assembled with absurd precision – or in how a meal makes you feel.
And Latymer made me feel something I’d forgotten: that a tasting menu can still be a service and not a spectacle. That when they’re at their best, they don’t overwhelm so much as shepherd you, quietly, competently, towards delight.
Which is, in the end, why the fatigue lifted. Latymer hardly reinvents the tasting menu; it’s simply doing it properly, with the confidence to stay quiet and the skill to stay interesting. At a moment when tasting menus feel out of fashion, here is one that makes the case for itself.
Pennyhill Park, London Road, Bagshot, Surrey GU19 5EU.
Open: Wednesday to Sunday, 6.30pm to 8.30pm.
Price: From £115 to £175 for food, £95 to £265 for wine pairing (wines by the bottle available).
Booking essential – £50 deposit per person. Dine and stay packages available.
www.exclusive.co.uk/latymer | 01276 478300
The Crown at Bray: A bouchon hiding in a boozer
In a village where Michelin stars grow like moss, The Crown is the strange outlier serving Lyon-by-way-of-London food at prices that make you question the economic model
If Surrey was a bid to decompress, then Bray was an escape hatch – a pre-Christmas jailbreak that, for once, made it out of the group chat. Nobody wanted turkey or cranberry jus, or the performative cheer of a “festive special”. We wanted a pub fire, proper wine and food that didn’t require queueing, overthinking or canapé maths. Crucially, it had to be close enough that we could totter back to Paddington before the hangxiety set in.
The Crown at Bray ticked all the boxes: a cosy, crooked pub in a village that should have a resident potter and a Midsomer Murders body count.
Bray is one of those surreal English microclimates: a tiny, moneyed village with more Michelin stars than newsagents. Heston’s three-star Fat Duck is on one side of the road, his one-star Hind’s Head on the other, Alain Roux’s three-star Waterside Inn is up the river, and somewhere in the middle, The Crown (formerly Heston’s, too) sits between them like a multiverse glitch that wandered in from another timeline.
The Crown at Bray
Good to know
What/where: Village pub in Bray, wedged between Michelin stars like a time-traveller who took a wrong turn.
Style: French brasserie instincts disguised as pub grub; Lyon in slippers.
Chef: Simon Bonwick – eccentric, gifted, algorithmically invisible.
Vibe: Low beams, woodsmoke, tartan, a wine ‘Haggle Board’, and art that prompts questions you should not ask.
Budget: Starters in the teens, mains in the thirties, wine from £7 – in Bray, this is nearly performance art.
Best for: People who think ‘seasonality’ is code for ‘£95 carrot’ and just want something delicious.
Notable: Pie’n’mash that borders on doctrine; fish that melts mid-sentence; vegetarian options that aren’t punishment.
From the outside, it’s peak English pub, all whitewashed brick, black timbering and just enough sag to prove it’s older than its regulars. Inside, you get the full period-drama treatment: forehead-threatening low beams, woodsmoke, pew-style benches and walls hung with the proprietor’s own paintings of “phantasmagorical” owls, werewolves and moons (there are prices if you’re brave enough to ask). There’s a wine “Haggle Board” scribbled with offers like a village fête tombola. A string of coloured Christmas lights is strewn haphazardly above the bar, blinking like a migraine aura until the chef marched out mid-service and argued with them into submission. Nobody wants strobe lighting with their lunch. Or ever.
If you didn’t know who that chef was, you might expect a competent gastropub operation with a very good butcher. But since last year, the kitchen has been run by Simon Bonwick, a man who has somehow managed to exist almost entirely outside the algorithmic glare of modern hospitality. His pedigree is quietly intimidating (The Crown at Burchetts Green, The Dew Drop Inn, among others, with a star along the way), but his manner is the opposite. He appears with the shambling energy of a genial mad professor, with hair that refuses to observe gravity. He’s been dubbed the UK’s “most eccentric chef”, which explains the art.
The “Bouchon Bonwick” menu reads like something from a French brasserie translated through the Home Counties. There’s soup of the day; on our visit, ratatouille, a Provençal greatest hit put through a blender and jabbed with herbs. Cromer crab that landed looking as if it’s been through finishing school: a neat little puck of sweet meat crowned with batonned apple, cashews for ballast and Baroque curls of mango sauce, the plating all lattices and filigree swirls, as if there’s a pâtissier chained up in the back.
The pâté de campagne was its cousin from agricultural college, a squat, handsome cylinder, topped with glossy lentils like caviar for the virtuous. It wouldn’t look out of place at a bistro in Lyon, which says something about what Bonwick is trying to do here. Across the table, smoked salmon came as thick, coral ribbons under a thatch of dill. Lemon on the side, no explanation, which is the only correct way to serve smoked salmon.
If there’s a Rosetta Stone on this menu, it’s the pie’n’mash, the pie arriving looking like a polished cannonball glazed in a gravy so viscous Just Stop Oil would probably chuck it over the Mona Lisa; the mash, Robuchon (half butter, half potato), because of course, so NSFW-smooth it could have been piped through a lady’s stocking. We passed it around like communion for the irredeemably greedy.
The “Like When In Paris” market fish, sole on our visit, was halfway between poached and confit, yielding to cutlery like just-melted butter. The duck flapped in the opposite direction; rosy slices under glossy, sharp-sweet rowanberry sauce – “Those red things that grow on the side of the motorway,” its devourer kindly clarified. It’s delightfully old-school, like something out of a 1970s Troisgros playbook.
Vegetarians don’t get sidelined here either. In a moment of pre-Christmas piety, I ordered the winter tart: a haystack of mushrooms, tomatoes, spinach and spiralised carrot and celeriac dusted in parmesan – practically glowing with virtue, though any health benefits were immediately neutralised by the Burgundy sluicing around the table.
Bonwick cooks as if the last decade of British hospitality never happened – no small plates, no chef’s tables, no “concepts”. There’s Britishness in the ingredients, but the grammar is French. It’s a menu that assumes you know how to order lunch without a lecture, and the prices seem almost shy in a village that contains two Hestons. Soup for a surreal six quid, starters in the teens, most mains in the thirties, wines by the glass from £7, by the bottle from £30. The result is that rare thing – a place where eating and drinking seem equally valid pursuits. Treat it as a pub first, then remember there’s very good food happening in the periphery.
What links The Crown to Latymer isn’t style or setting but attitude. Both are serious about food without insisting you applaud. Both rely on labour rather than theatre, classical foundations rather than trends. And both, in their own ways, make you feel looked after.
We left after four hours, blinking into Bray’s cold dusk, pleasantly overfed, lightly soused and extremely grateful that the Elizabeth line exists. London was 40 minutes away, but it felt like another country. Which, at that particular point in December, was exactly what we needed.
High Street, Bray, Berkshire, SL6 2AH.
Open: Wednesday to Saturday, lunch 12pm to 2.30pm, dinner 5.30pm to 8.30pm. Sunday, 12pm to 4.30pm.
Price: Around £50 a head for three courses. Wine starts at £7 a glass, £30 for a bottle.
Booking advised but not essential.
www.thecrownatbray.com | 01628 621936 | reservations@thecrownatbray.co.uk
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