Salt

Made possible by a £100,000 crowd-funding campaign, chef Paul Foster’s ambitious but unassuming Michelin star restaurant has straightaway become the leading light in Stratford-upon-Avon’s dining scene. The narrow townhouse contains two intimate, sparsely adorned rooms of bare wood, brick and whitewash, leading to an open kitchen from which similarly simple but immaculately rendered dishes emerge. Veggie ideas have a modern edge, but the real emphasis is on meat, fish and game – as in homemade black pudding with cauliflower purée, roast cod in green sauce with braised beef shin and pickled vegetables or Otterburn Mangalitza pork with salted pear, malted artichoke and sprouting broccoli. Seasonality is a byword, which means that show-stopping desserts such as sea buckthorn mille-feuille with fig, goats’ milk and dulce de leche or Yorkshire rhubarb, buttermilk ice, ginger crisp and sorrel are unlikely to be on the menu for long. Prices are very fair (particularly if you opt for a prix-fixe lunch), while staff are effortlessly warm, zipping through fascinating wine flights with zero pomposity.