The AA has revealed its latest Rosette Award winners, placing luxury hotels The Forest Side and Tuddenham Mill on a par with some of the top dining destinations in the UK, after both establishments earned four AA rosettes for their culinary offerings.
The Forest Side, a Cumbrian retreat located in the Lake District’s Grasmere, picked up four AA rosettes for Head Chef Paul Leonard’s innovative dishes with a strong focus on local ingredients. Leonard’s tasting menus consist of eight or four courses that evolve with the seasons, featuring modern combinations such as raw aged Cumbrian deer served with smoked fresh cheese, wood sorrel and swede. Native lobster is barbecued over forest pine with tomatoes, elder and fennel, while Lakeland Dexter beef appears with alliums from the garden and forest surrounding the hotel.
Tuddenham Mill, an 18th-century boutique hotel in Suffolk, also earned four AA rosettes, thanks to Chef-Patron Lee Bye’s talent for combining ingredients from the surrounding region. His contemporary dishes include langoustines with caviar, beurre blanc and Japanese cresses and Gigha halibut with wild nettles, smoked eel and cobnuts. The food is served in a first-floor restaurant that houses the mill’s original cast-iron water wheel, offering diners views over the millpond below.
Just three establishments received four rosettes during this year’s edition of the AA’s Rosette Awards, with Forest Side and Tuddenham Mill joined by the Manchester restaurant Mana.
A total of 16 restaurants earned three AA rosettes, with five hotel dining venues featuring on the list. These included Ormer Mayfair in London’s Flemings Mayfair hotel, where Executive Chef Sofian Msetfi focuses on precise and technically-skilled modern British dishes, and The Bow Room Restaurant at Grays Court Hotel in York, where ingredients for the contemporary British dishes are sourced from the onsite kitchen garden. The Grill at The Dorchester in London, Pentonbridge Inn in Cumbria and Station Road in the Scottish Highlands also received three rosettes each.
Each year, the AA’s Rosette Awards recognise the top-rated dining destinations in the UK. The awards scheme was first introduced in 1956, with the 2021 ceremony marking the 65 years of celebrating the country’s best restaurants.
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18 April 2024
