Restaurant Nathan Outlaw in Cornwall has taken the top spot and it has also achieved a perfect score of ten for the second year running. Nathan Outlaw is also The Staff Canteen's next Featured Chef so you can watch his new videos exclusively on our YouTube channel in the next few weeks.
On being Britain's best restaurant Nathan said: “We’ve always been proud to have a place in the listings, but to hear that Restaurant Nathan Outlaw has made it to No 1 is phenomenal. I’d say the award has come due to the hard work and dedication of our team who have now been working together for a decade.
Restaurant Nathan Outlaw
credit: Beth Druce
"It just goes to show that if you stay true to yourself, get your head down, look after your customers and use the very best ingredients available to you, you’ll make it to the top.”
The Port Isaac seafood restaurant has been crowned number one in the UK for being ‘the whole package’, with its relaxed dining room, a menu carefully crafted around the freshest Cornish seafood, along with perfect service which ‘just happens in the most discreet and attentive way’. It takes the title of Britain’s best restaurant from L’Enclume in Cumbria after its four years at the summit. However, Simon Rogan’s L’Enclume still retains a perfect ten score for its ‘fiercely seasonal ingredients’ and ‘knockout dishes’.
Speaking about the newly crowned number one restaurant, Waitrose Good Food Guide Editor, Elizabeth Carter said: “Nathan Outlaw’s food is characterised by the absolute freshness of ingredients and a clear sense of purpose. He has done an enormous amount to educate and encourage the public appetite for fish, driven by his supply of impeccably fine ingredients, and a special talent for creating unique and thrilling fish dishes. Moreover, nobody seems to leave Nathan Outlaw’s staff – they just go and work in another one of his restaurants. They obviously think he’s a pretty good boss as well as a fine chef.”
Alongside the finest dining establishments, the Good Food Guide also champions more unusual eateries that you may not find in more traditional restaurant guides.
This year’s edition features four new entries housed under railway arches: Umezushi in Manchester; Hart’s Bakery in Bristol; and Bala Baya and El Pastor, both in London.
Also new to the guide this year is Vice and Virtue, a Leeds restaurant located in a former strip club. With its Art Deco style interior, this venue is now poles apart from its previous life - it now serves up three tasting menus, with dishes including ‘perfect’ lobster ravioli and organic apple strudel.
And in Devon you'll find Ode & Co in a posh holiday park above the sea on the Teign Estuary. Run by husband and wife team Tim and Clare Bouget, this eatery has a real focus on local ingredients, with their pizzas cooked in a recycled oven and made with organic Devon flour, topped with local cheese. The GFG has celebrated fine food in a holiday park before. The Marram Grass Cafe found on a caravan site in Anglesey, was featured two years ago.
A plea from the Editor
While some restaurant trends are a benefit to the customer, such as the offering of free tap water as standard, others can be off-putting. Editor Elizabeth Carter has made a plea for two trends to fade.
Turn it down
“Restaurants are getting noisier - that’s what our readers, this year in unprecedented numbers, are telling us. Noise levels, already amplified by bare-bones design, are being raised by music played at Glastonbury force. Everyone loves a restaurant that has a buzzing, vibrant atmosphere, but it becomes exhausting and self-defeating when, as one old hand told us: ‘I have never heard such loudly amplified music in an eating place. It was so loud that I couldn’t hear a word the waitress was saying, and vice versa. We had to gesture and point.’ The reporter was not recommending inclusion in the guide.”
Small plates or sharing plates?
“As for that other trend that’s been warmly embraced by chefs and restaurateurs across the country - let’s be honest, small plates are frequently not designed to be shared. Why the reduction in size if more than one person is supposed to be eating it? If plates are for sharing, there ought to be more, not less, food – after all, a dish featuring a fried egg is best tackled by a solo diner. Moreover, these plates often come out in a random, inhospitable manner. As customers, we have let this weak formula go unchallenged for too long.”
Elizabeth said: “Once again the readers of theguide have pointed our experts towards some brilliant eating in unexpected places. Whether it’s fine-dining in a former strip-club, sushi under a railway arch or a fish supper in a shipping container, we find and celebrate culinary flair in all its forms. With this year’s new entries including an ‘ecological canteen’ constructed from renewables in a holiday park, and a former town library playing host to one of Devon’s best new openings, The Good Food Guide continues in its mission to uncover great cooking whatever the venue, wherever the talent. We think that eating out should be fun – and that’s something these restaurants deliver in spades.”
The full list of the Good Food Guide 2018's top 50 Restaurants
(A top score of 10 means "Just perfect dishes, showing faultless technique at every service; extremely rare, and the highest accolade the Guide can give.)
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