Meadowsweet
Holt, Norfolk
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Rebecca Williams and chef Greg Anderson deliver effortless class rather than try-hard conceptual at Meadowsweet – a contemporary restaurant with rooms that is a joyous treat from start to finish. Dinner is bookended by Anderson's spirited flurry of snacks and desserts. First up are last year’s walnuts in the form of a shimmering black gel covering a mousse of Baron Bigod cheese on a Parmesan sablé (a one-bite umami hit) as well as Amarena cherry, similarly glossy, over a little rabbit parfait. Standouts among the snacks proper range from a chickpea wafer heaped with crabmeat, bound with aromatic Indonesian bumbu spicing and topped with a flutter of fresh herbs to a beef tartare ‘sandwich’ – the Angus/Limousin meat dressed in the sultry smoke of charcoal oil and contained between tuiles made with rendered bone marrow. Home-baked breads (a nutty rye loaf and a sourdough focaccia) come with raw Jersey butter, and rightly get their own moment in the dinnertime sun. The fat sweetness of a scallop, hand-dived off Orkney, is lifted by a purée of strawberries and grape juice, and offset by the butter-richness of a tomatoey sauce split with lobster oil. This being a classically rooted kitchen, butter also shines elsewhere: mixed with garlic, it finishes a bowl of risotto made from aged Acquerello rice topped with an elderflower honey-glazed sweetbread; it emulsifies a smoked eel dashi that is poured round kohlrabi ‘tagliatelle’; and it delivers richness in a Vadouvan-inflected lobster-stock sauce with monkfish. Roasted, herb-crusted saddle of Middle White pork from Huntsham Farm is spellbindingly tender, the centrepiece in a supreme dish that includes a farce made from the trim, two purées – one a peppy sobrasada, the other an earthy mix of sweetcorn, bacon and girolles – and yet another beautiful sauce, punchy with sage, mustard and bacon. A hotpot of the slow-cooked shoulder is un-lidded to truffly swirls of steam, anchoring the dish in the realms of seasonal comfort. It feels right that the paired wine should be poured from a magnum, a fresh, red-berried Viña Tondonia Rioja from López de Heredia – one of a carefully considered six-glass pairing that ends triumphantly with a 'vin cuit' from Provence, sweet with red berries, apricots and plenty of balancing acidity. This is a blinder with the fruit-celebrating desserts. Highlights? Cherry clafoutis, portioned from the pan and served with meadowsweet-infused custard, and a cloud-like apricot soufflé into which is poured an orange-blossom sauce. Heavenly.
