12 ***^ Sunday 1 September 2019 The Sunday Telegraph
WEEKENDERS
HORSTED PLACE,
EAST SUSSEX
FROM £215PP BASED
ON A TWO-NIGHT STAYA two-night stay in a
Junior Suite
Full English breakfast
Cream tea on arrival
Three-course à la carte
dinner with coffee on both
eveningsEnjoy a relaxing stay at the
Horsted Place Hotel in
East Sussex with this
Telegraph exclusive offer.
The property was built in
1850 for a London
merchant trader, and it
has retained its charming
exterior ever since.
Exemplary service awaits,
as well as free access to
facilities. Delectable food
is served, be it at breakfast,
lunch or dinnertime. You
can enjoy pre-dinner
drinks and appetisers in
the drawing room.
Tracey Davies,
Telegraph Travel writer,
says: “A former retreat of
the Windsors, this austere
gothic revival house deep
in the Sussex countryside
has a touch of Downton
Abbey about it. A gnat’s
whisker from two
championship golf
courses, the hotel boasts a
top-notch restaurant and
acclaimed afternoon tea,
making Horsted Place a
regal country escape.”Book by Sept 30 for stays
until Nov 30.
Quote TELH0109; call
0330 162 9798; see terms;
telegraph.co.uk/tt-
horsted-placeEXCLUSIVE
OFFER
PILLOW TALK
HOTEL HIT SQUAD
MARK C O’FLAHERTY
I
made a fairly sizeable,
some might say
catastrophic, mistake a
couple of months ago.
My husband had
announced a sudden
hankering for Nordic
cuisine. “I’m in the
mood for something... foraged and
smoked,” he told me. Suddenly I was
too. Dutifully, I secured a table at
Aska, Fredrik Berselius’s austere
Scandi-dining room in Brooklyn –
15 minutes from where we were
staying at the time. I had passed it
many times, and was intrigued by its
meticulously blackened brick
facade. I booked online, prepaying
for the tasting menu at $95 (£77) a
head. When we arrived, the waiter
asked us if it was a special occasion.
“No, it’s just... Tuesday!?” I
countered, with a shrug. We were
impressed with our supper, which
came in the form of a dozen courses- all was flavourful, pretty and
pleasing. “You know, this is actually
very reasonably priced,” I ventured.
Then the bill came. I had misread
the website. The $95 a head had
been the deposit. It was actually
$295, each. In Brexit conversion
Birchall experience is definitely
something worth investing in an
overnight stay for, particularly when it
comes to the epic breakfast. Moor Hall
provided the best sausage and bacon
I’ve ever had: a plate of sublime curled
pink and crispy salty rashers next to
meaty bangers. After breakfast: a stroll
around those gardens to see where
Birchall grows much of his menu.
The rest of my culinary experience
at Moor Hall was as good as that
breakfast and the aforementioned
tartare. There was a chicken dish I had
in The Barn that came with a potato
and leek terrine that tasted like the
most delicious chips imaginable.
And my three-hour dinner was
extraordinary, from the tour of the
kitchen to see the evening’s
ingredients, to the house-cured
charcuterie served in the lounge with
a negroni, to the baked carrots with a
snow of grassy Doddington cheese,
chrysanthemum and sea buckthorn.
Alongside Tomos Parry’s Basque
grill restaurant Brat in Shoreditch
(also on the National Restaurant list
at number two), Moor Hall is my
favourite place to eat in the country
right now. While I can catch a cab
back home from Brat after the
inevitable second bottle of wine, Moor
Hall has the scenery, sausage and
bacon to give it more of an edge and
sense of occasion.Doubles from £195, including
breakfast. There is one
accessible room.Mark C O’Flaherty travelled as a
guest of Virgin Trains (virgintrains.
co.uk) from London to Liverpool.
Tickets cost from £38.50 each way.Feast on a dazzling
dinner, sleep it off in
style and then wake
up to an ‘epic’ breakfast
at Moor Hall
terms that’s around... £265, before
wine (another £200). As I set my card
down I had one of those dolly-zoom
moments where you feel like Roy
Scheider on the beach in Jaws.
Which brings my focus to Moor
Hall, on this side of the Atlantic, where
an eight-course tasting menu costs
£125 and would be cheap at twice the
price. It’s flavourful, pretty and
pleasing, too. But also magnificent.
Moor Hall is chef Mark Birchall’s
mother ship in west Lancashire. He
opened it in 2017 in a Grade II listed
16th-century manor house with seven
guest bedrooms. It received its second
Michelin star last year, and this year
was named National Restaurant of the
Year by Restaurant magazine. Birchall
is doing all right, you might say. I
didn’t realise until halfway through
my dinner at Moor Hall that I’d eaten
Birchall’s food before, when he was
head chef at Simon Rogan’s L’Enclume
in Cartmel, for a long time my
favourite restaurant in Britain.
Realisation struck when I was
transported back to L’Enclume by a
dish Birchall has brought with him
from his tenure there – venison tartare
in coal oil. For about a year after
tasting it the first time around, I
craved raw meat with coal oil. Why
had no one made this alchemical
discovery sooner?
While Moor Hall feels remote – as
remote as L’Enclume in the Lake
District actually is – it is do-able as a
day trip from the capital on the train
( just over two hours to Liverpool, then
a 40-minute taxi ride). I arrived in time
for lunch in The Barn, the more casual
sibling to the main dining room. It is
indeed, a barn, albeit one containing
a Perspex grand piano. Here is aMOOR HALL
WEST LANCASHIRE
8
/
10Prescot Road, Aughton, Ormskirk
L39 6RT (01695 572511; moorhall.com)paradigm of Birchall’s style – informed
by terroir and rural tradition, but with
irreverent and eye-catching twists.
Birchall’s full tasting menu is served
at lunch in the main restaurant, but if
you’re having dinner you’ll almost
definitely be staying over. The rooms
are nice, but no match for the food. I
stayed in The Damson Suite (from
£275 per night), which was
comfortable, but has unsettling design
choices: a leather croc-skin headboard,
mirrored wardrobe and silver-edged
lacquered Louis XIV-style desk create
a kind of Philipp Plein-does-
Debenhams mood. That said, theTREND SPOT
The aim of the newly
opened Asbury Ocean
Club, the first five-star
hotel on the Jersey
Shore, is to create the
atmosphere of awelcoming beach house:
no money changes hands,
no credit cards are swiped,
and guests are not asked to
sign anything (payment
details are all collected in
advance). There is no
formal check-in; guestsare instead met at the front
door with water and a
refreshing towel, while
luggage is whisked away.
Rooms £242 (00 1 732
825 6000; asbury
oceanclub.com)HOT HOTEL
Rwanda’s new Singita
Kwitonda Lodge is a great
addition for gorilla
trekking fans. The lodge is
set within the borders ofSingita Volcanoes National
Park, affording an ideal
vantage of the Sabyinyo,
Gahinga and Muhabura
volcanoes, plus the
surrounding cloud forest.
Besides getting up close
and personal with the 320
mountain gorillas, there’s
plenty else to explore in
Rwanda, from the forests
of Nyungwe National Park
to the buzzing capital city
of Kigali.
£1,218pp per night(00 27 683 3424;
rwanda.singita.
com)TREAT
YOURSELFSuzanne Martin,
the brow
magician, has a residency
at Lanesborough Club &
Spa in London, promising
to transform your face
with her “couture brow”and “eyelash
enhancer”
semi-permanent
make-up
treatments.
Available at
£1,400 per initial
treatment.
lanesborough
clubandspa.com;
020 7333 7064.
For more hotel news,
see: telegraph.co.uk/
tt-pillowtalkMEET THE TEAM
Mark reports on
design and luxury –
he likes lights
that are easy
to turn off,
extraordinarily
plush mattress
toppers and a
single large cube of
ice in his negroni36% OFF
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