Glebe House
Colyton, Devon
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Devon is hardly short of idyllic locations, but each one makes an eloquent case for itself. Here in the eastern reaches, amid the gentle rolling of the Coly valley, not far from Honiton, Glebe House enjoys a truly favoured spot. Occupying a sleek white building overseeing a 15-acre farmstead, the kitchen naturally draws on its own produce for much of the menu, but without making too much of a fanfare about it: 'it just happens,' a reporter comments, 'as it should in places like Devon, where there's space.' Hugo Guest and Sam Lomas have devised a style of cooking that deftly balances country-house seduction with the more vernacular tendency of domestic British cooking, all overlaid with a slight Italian accent, resulting in 'antipasti' that might encompass smoked ox heart with puntarelle and mustard and oaty 'porridge bread' with cultured butter. The fondness for Italian foodways mandates an intermediate pasta course at dinner (perhaps tagliarini with monkfish ragù) before the main business, which on our visit was an exemplary chicken and mushroom pie of hefty dimensions, its comfortingly rich filling encased in the kind of crunchy pastry that only a big country oven can achieve. Accompaniments were distinctly more metropolitan (confit potatoes, charred hispi) in a context that seems to have us yearning for simple greens. To finish, there could be Amalfi lemon tart with crème fraîche, or a sweetly beguiling rhubarb and cream choux bun with toffee sauce. Drinkers have Devon cider and organic lager as well as a short, zesty list of Old World wines.
