Casual Dining Restaurant of the Year: Great Food Club Awards 2020

Winner

House of Feasts, Eye Green, Peterborough

Finalists

Hitchen’s Barn, Oakham, Rutland
Boboli, Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire
Bar Iberico, Nottingham

The winner is House of Feasts in the village of Eye Green near Peterborough, which impressed with its take on modern Polish cuisine.

Chef-patron Damian Wawrzyniak shows drive and passion to showcase a largely unknown and underrated European cuisine, giving it a modern twist using local ingredients.

It’s not all boiled potatoes and dumplings at House of Feasts – far from it. Damian takes the best of Polish cuisine and modernises and refines it with dishes such as Royal Smalec (as served to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge), and Cambridgeshire Organic Pork Belly Hong Kong-style. The pork is brined with soy, cooked with orange, star anise and honey, fermented apples and marjoram.

Sunday lunches are a big hit at House of Feasts and we enjoyed the ham hock – brined and cooked in beer and served with roasted Cambridgeshire potatoes and vegetables. This was followed by aerated chocolate mousse with whipped cream, cocoa, preserved red currants and salted caramel.

Hitchen’s Barn of Oakham served us a delicious main of sea trout with new potatoes, samphire and brown shrimp.

Bar Iberico in the bustling centre of Nottingham wowed us with some tasty tapas, including ‘Josperised’ bream with caramelised lemon and green sauce.

Boboli in the peaceful backwaters of Kibworth Harcourt served us a main of rolled neck of lamb.

Great Food Club Awards 2020: The Results

The Winners

Fine-Dining Restaurant of the Year – full details & pictures
The Hammer & Pincers, Wymeswold, Leics
Last year’s winner: John’s House, Mountsorrel, Leics

Casual-Dining Restaurant of the Year (new category) – full details & pictures
House of Feasts, Eye Green, Peterborough, Cambs

Dining Pub of the Year – full details & pictures
The Wheatsheaf, Greetham, Rutland
Last year’s winner: The Olive Branch, Clipsham

Asian Restaurant of the Year (new category) – full details & pictures
Sanctua, Oadby, Leics

Classic Pub of the Year (new category) – full details & pictures
The Black Horse, Aylestone, Leics

Café of the Year – full details & pictures
The Larder, Oakham, Rutland
Last year’s winner: Kavanagh’s, Oakham

Food Shop of the Year – full details & pictures
The Melton Cheeseboard, Melton Mowbray, Leics
Last year’s winner: Christopher James Deli, Leicester

Food Producer of the Year – full details & pictures
Elms Farm, Costock, Leics
Last year’s winner: Redhill Farm Free Range Pork, Gainsborough, Lincs

Drink Producer of the Year – full details & pictures
Round Corner Brewing, Melton Mowbray, Leics
Last year’s winner: Wharf Distillery, Potterspury, Northants

Farm Shop of the Year – full details & pictures
Farndon Fields Farm Shop, Market Harborough, Leics
Last year’s winner: Harker’s Farm Shop, Clipston-on-the-Wolds, Notts

Bakery of the Year – full details & pictures
Best Sourdough Producer: Small Food Bakery, Nottingham
Best Cake Baker: Hambleton Bakery, Rutland
Last year’s winner: The Garage Bakehouse, Market Harborough

Butcher of the Year (new category) – full details & pictures
Best High-Street Butcher: The Snobby Butcher, Nottingham, Notts
Best Catering Butcher: Price & Fretwell, Tibshelf, Derbyshire

Food Hero of the Year (new category) – full details & pictures
Pratik Master for his work at Wigston News & Deli in Leicestershire

Important information

The judging process
Our judges have visited every shortlisted business. They’ve eaten – anonymously where possible – at all the pubs, cafés and restaurants. They’ve chatted to each of the producers and shop owners to get under the skins of their businesses.

How the shortlist was compiled
We asked our members and readers to nominate “one independent food/drink business that has brought you most joy over the past 12 months”. Over 3,000 online votes were cast between July 1 and July 31, 2019. The top four vote winners in each category made the shortlist – five where there was a tie between fourth and fifth. Multiple votes from individuals were discarded. Click here to see all shortlisted businesses.

Ineligible businesses
Businesses that won GFC awards last year were not eligible to be shortlisted this year. Our aim is to showcase a broad range of independents and by not allowing a single business to win an award two years in a row, we go some way to achieving this aim.

Click here to see the previous year’s winners.

Fine-Dining Restaurant of the Year: Great Food Club Awards 2020

Winner

The Hammer & Pincers, Wymeswold, Leicestershire

Finalists

The Jew’s House, Lincoln
Hambleton Hall, near Oakham, Rutland
Prévost, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire
Ascough’s, Market Harborough

The winner is The Hammer & Pincers in Wymeswold, Leicestershire. This restaurant has evolved into something special. The food hits all the right notes via a unique style of cooking that the kitchen here has made all its own. What you get is skilfully prepared, ingredient-led fine-dining imbued with the laid-back characteristics of great comfort food, and finished with a sprinkling of decadence and fun.

Dishes we’ve loved here include Rosary Ash goats’ cheese soufflé with allotment rhubarb and rose chutney; baked Alaska with ginger ice cream; hay-smoked celeriac carpaccio with braised venison shin and apple and lovage salad; and cumin & lime sugar grilled hake fillet with aloo tikki, summer bean and tamarind chutney and cauliflower pakora. The Saturday Grazing Menu is a delight from start to finish.

With a stylish, intimate interior to match the food, The Hammer & Pincers really is a treat.

Hambleton Hall is a jewel in the East Midlands’ dining crown. When the sun glitters on Rutland Water and you browse the menu from Hambleton’s stunning terrace, there are few better feelings of ‘dining expectation’ anywhere in Britain.

And Hambleton Hall’s food delivers on that promise, too. The cooking is exceptional and impressively consistent. If you want a traditional ‘fine dining’ experience, this handsome Rutland gem is incredibly hard to beat.

The Jew’s House in Lincoln is located in one of Britain’s oldest buildings. Everything about eating here feels neat and polished, from the delicious homemade bread you receive on arrival, to the top-quality service. Ingredients are lovingly chosen and put together with genuine skill. It provides a sophisticated, satisfying dining experience.

Stylish Prévost in Peterborough is a hidden-away restaurant that you should seek out. Lee Clarke and his team’s cooking is full of ambition, passion and vibrancy, and they choose their ingredients with care.

Ascough’s in Market Harborough straddles the boundary between casual and fine dining. Perennially popular, it does what it does well, offering good cooking and exceptional value for money.

Farm Shop of the Year: Great Food Club Awards 2020

Winner

Farndon Fields Farm Shop, Market Harborough, Leicestershire

Finalists

Welbeck Farm Shop, Welbeck, Notts
March House Farm Shop, Great Dalby, Leics
Hackwood Farm Shop, Radbourne, Derbys

The winner is Farndon Fields Farm Shop of Market Harborough. It started with a farmer selling a few spuds direct from the field out of his garage. Some 36 years later, it has become a genuine destination shopping experience that remains close to its founding principles of local and seasonal.

Entering the shop, customers see a wonderful array of beautifully arranged fruit and vegetables, much of it still grown on the Stokes family farm in nearby fields. Several other local growers now produce specifically for the shop. There is plenty of information about varieties and what each is best for.

Customers then move to a butchery, complete with new maturing cabinets where Charolais and Aberdeen Angus beef from less than 10 miles away is displayed, along with lamb from the next-door farm.

There is a bakery, frozen section, dairy counter, and a wine and spirit section that again features local producers such as Welland Valley Wines, Warner Edwards and Two Birds. The on-site café is exceptional.

Farndon Fields does a good job of engaging with and listening to its customers. It has thoughtfully expanded over the years to offer one-stop shopping of the utmost quality.

March House Farm at Great Dalby near Melton Mowbray has been successfully selling its meat at farmers’ markets for two decades. In 2018, the owners built a large butchery-focused farm shop on-site, as well as a big, airy, impressive café. They sit next to fields and farm buildings.

All the meat in the shop except the chicken is raised on March House Farm. Their popular sausages, black pudding and salt-beef are produced on-site. This is farming and retail where provenance, quality and welfare are genuinely important. Beef comes from pasture-fed Angus-Fresian crosses and Shorthorns, and cows that single suckle. Many Leicester people will attest to the quality because this is the beef behind the fabulous Crafty Burger in St Martin’s Square. March House Farm Shop also sells a range of excellent locally sourced produce.

At Hackwood Farm Shop near Derby, Georgina and Neil Crofts have done an outstanding job of converting some old farm buildings into one of Derbyshire’s most popular farm shops and cafés. The butchery sells locally-reared Dexter beef, Packington chicken and venison from Calke Abbey. They make their own sausages, bacon and hams, and have expanded their deli offering, which provides high-quality ingredients for their popular café.

The café serves more than 200 afternoon teas a week and you often need to book for breakfast at weekends.  “Any café can do a similar menu, but something about the way we do it – local, seasonal food in an honest old building – seems to resonate,” says Neil. “It’s not complicated, it’s just real, and people like it.”

Welbeck Farm Shop sits at the heart of Welbeck Abbey Estate in north Nottinghamshire – a food destination of national significance. The Estate is home to The School of Artisan Food, Stichelton Cheese, plus a celebrated bakery, brewery and a number of small food business start-ups. Welbeck’s first-rate farm shop provides a wonderful showcase for food from the Estate and the surrounding region.

At the heart of the success of this beautifully appointed farm shop is its fine butchery, which provides lamb and game from the Welbeck Estate, pork from neighbouring Clumber Park and beef from five local farmers. Then there is its sought-after bread and, in addition to Stichelton, a stunning cheese selection supplied in collaboration with Neal’s Yard Dairy. Another draw is the in-store raw-milk vending machine.

Drink Producer of the Year: Great Food Club Awards 2020

Winner

Round Corner Brewing, Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire

Finalists

Brentingby Gin, Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire
Rothley Wines, Rothley, Leicestershire
Witham’s, Grantham, Lincolnshire

The winner is Round Corner Brewing of Melton Mowbray for its outstanding, well-balanced beers, relentless energy and policy of teaming up with other food and drink independents.

Round Corner was founded by two Irishman who met in New Zealand. Head brewer Colin Paige, who has produced award-winning beer around the world, met business partner Combie Cryan in Wellington. Fate shoved them towards Melton Mowbray.

A friend had just bought Melton Cattle Market, the largest town-centre cattle market in the UK, which attracts 350,000 thirsty visitors every year. It proved an irresistible destination for the new brewery. With money raised from friends and family, they spent £650,000 kitting out the brewery and creating a simple taproom with clear views of the mash tuns and fermenters. You walk in just yards from the chatter of the auctioneer and are immediately assailed with the heady smell of malt and hops.

The core range is characterised by distinctive, crisp beers done well – with no self-consciously wacky stuff. They include Frisby, a bright, clean lager that picked up a Silver at the International Brewing Awards, and Gun Metal, a black lager with a creamy head and counter-intuitively crisp taste which won a Gold. Hopping Spree, a 6.8% hop bomb is up there with the best in its class – bursting with flavour from Centennial, Cascade, Amarillo, Simcoe, Mosaic and Citra hops.

The beers are outstanding, but what makes Round Corner stand out more is the energetic way it teams up with other independent local food businesses to put on great events. Each Friday a different street-food producer comes to the brewery to cook up, while Colin, Combie and the team serve their exceptional beers.

The other finalists

In a hamlet just outside Melton Mowbray, Bruce Midgely has built Brentingby Gin into one of the UK’s most dynamic craft gin companies in just two years. Bruce made 300 trial runs before using his engineering skills to create a unique ten-plate copper still, fondly known as ‘Ayanda’.

Brentingby’s gins are superb: exceptionally clear, clean and well-balanced. The London Dry is juniper-led, balanced by floral and spice notes. Black Edition ramps up the pepper and pine characteristics. And Brentingby’s pink gin features subtle but exotic floral notes from hibiscus, rooibos and baobab. All receive consistently excellent reviews, and some 6,000 bottles leave the distillery each month. Growth plans are ambitious.

Witham’s of Grantham makes two key products: Sparkling Elderflower Infusion (3.5%ABV) and Sparkling Elderflower Wine (12%ABV). Both are made with Swithland Spring Water from Leicestershire and hand-picked Lincolnshire elderflowers. The wine uses a blend of Italian grapes.

Each year, Witham’s picks around 20,000 elderflower heads, avoiding roadsides and margins of intensively cultivated fields to make some 4,500 bottles. Using méthode champenoise they produce a crisp, dry wine with a fine mousse, citrus from Trebbiano grapes, richness from Chardonnay and a glorious floral aroma from the elderflower. Witham’s is on a mission to show people that elderflower fizz can be a dry, sophisticated drink that sits neatly between prosecco and the new wave of fine English sparkling wines.

English wine might be a success story, but Leicestershire remains a challenging place to grow grapes and make fine wine. All credit then to Rothley Wines, founded by Liz Robson, who from just a couple of acres on the edge of the village of Rothley produces a range of award-winning red, white and sparkling wines.

The range includes the very Leicestershire pairing of King Richard III – a bright, spicy white – and King Henry – a light, Beaujolais-style red made with Rondo and Regent grapes. Probably most successful is High Hopes – a sparkling white made from 100% Orion. It has a pleasing soft dryness and balance of flavours from peach to melon and hint of ginger. It should be a staple at Leicestershire weddings and celebrations.