Grilliant! Neil Thomas reviews the Granary Grill for Shropshire Magazine
There might be several reasons for choosing the restaurant that you visit, but it's only an outside bet that helping to maintain one of the nation's most fabulous historic stately homes is one of them. Yet diners at the Granary Grill Bar and Restaurant are doing just that. For the restaurant, in the 1,000-acre grounds of Weston Park on the Shropshire / Staffordshire border is one of the businesses run by the Weston Park Foundation, a charitable trust set up to preserve the exquisite 17th-century house and its sumptuous Capability Brown parkland. While saving a fabulous country pile for the nation may be a laudable objective in your choice of dining-out venue, it is by no means the only worthwhile reason to visit the Granary Grill. You can also add to the list superb food and drink, first-class service, warm hospitality and value for money. For whatever its charitable aims, the restaurant is certainly not a charity case. It can be judged as an excellent dining out establishment on merit.
For instance, my wife Vanessa described her eight-ounce fillet steak (£24) as the best she had ever tasted. The fact that we visit a good many different restaurants in the course of a year and she invariably chooses steak, makes this a fairly wide field to excel in. Granary Grill's steaks are from the finest UK beef, whose provenance is guaranteed. It is aged for a minimum of 28 days. It was cooked to perfection, rare as Vanessa had requested, dark brown on the outside and red in the centre, wonderfully lean, tender and full of flavour. A wild mushroom glaze added further flavour and Vanessa chose side orders of the most superb handcut chips - soft, almost fluffy potato in a crisp coat - and an excellent mixed salad.
Steaks as the 'grill' in the restaurant's title rather implies, are a speciality and we would have chosen the Chateaubriand with béarnaise sauce, an 18-ounce cut intended for two to share, were it not for insurmountable stumbling block presented by Vanessa's preference for rare meat and mine for the thoroughly charcoaled. For couples who like their steaks done the same way, this thick cut from the tenderloin looked fantastic value at a pound under fifty quid.
In the interests of variety, I eschewed beef altogether and thoroughly enjoyed my Wenlock Edge pork done three ways (£14.35) This was slow-cooked belly - with proper crispy crackling, not that insipid lard-flavoured toffee-textured stuff that some places dish up - a thick sausage and, the piece de resistance, the most succulent, delicious tenderloin imaginable. This came with a very good grain mustard mash and a red wine and thyme jus, the richness of which complimented the salty savouriness of the meat and left a pleasing aftertaste. Sautéed winter greens with small bacon pieces were an excellent accompaniment.
If the main courses were memorable, the merits of the starters and desserts certainly shouldn't be overlooked. My warm Roquefort and tomato tart (£7.50) was packed with flavour, the strength of the cheese perfectly offset by the sun-dried tomatoes and the rocket salad with pesto dressing. A pleasing contrast of taste and texture. Vanessa's salad of home-smoked chicken, grilled baby artichoke salad with balsamic onions and chive vinaigrette (£6.85) also set the right tone for her evening.
My milk and white chocolate layer would satisfy even the most demanding chocoholic - two layers of thick, creamy, melt-in-the-mouth chocolate with a dark chocolate crisp for texture. Granary Grill has added its own twist to the archetypal girl's drink of the 1970's, the Snowball, to produce a snazzy dessert of the same name, a vanilla and advocaat vacherin with lemon foam. Both our desserts were extremely generous portions - Vanessa's meringue seemed to fill the entire plate - and represented superb value at £5.85.
We washed it all down with a Pinot Noir from the reasonably priced wine list, which offered plenty of scope and a brief guide to each without overloading you with choices and information. Excellent coffees - an Americano and a double espresso - rounded off the evening with a bill of just over £80 for two drinks representing truly excellent value. Service was all you could wish for - efficient, friendly and attentive without being intrusive.
The 70-seater restaurant is situated in the old Malting House and serves up lunch and dinner daily with a modern British menu incorporating some of the region's finest produce including meat sourced from local farmers and the Weston estate.
With a split level seating area there are views across Church Pool to the estate cottages and out to the Granary courtyard. The room is based around an open-plan kitchen and grill where Head Chef Guy Day and sous chef Dan Smith lead a talented team who prepare the menus, which change with the seasons, using fresh ingredients every day.
Guy has been with Weston for over six years and now leads the brigades in both the House and Granary Grill. The restaurant is very easy on the eye, retaining some of the period charm of the old granary building, which dates back to the 1760's, and in which it was built. This followed a very sympathetic restoration in 2009 with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, so even if you don't win the rollover jackpot, you can console yourself that your £1 has been put to a very good use .. . turning your stake into a steak.
