Samuel's at Swinton Park

The Cunliffe-Lister family's ancestral home is quite some gaff - an imposing castellated mansion with a majestically rising turret at one end, sitting amid 200 acres of parkland, and surrounded by the 20,000 acres of the Swinton Estate. That last resource provides the hotel kitchen with a steady supply of meats, including an array of game in the season and, should you wish to try your hand, there is an on-site cookery school housed in the former stables. The interiors are a riot of marble pillars, chandeliers and gargantuan mirrors, but staff do a good job of tempering any feeling of undue grandiosity. Yorkshireman Simon Crannage is in charge in the kitchens, and favours an approach that uses supreme technical skills to show off the produce of the estate and the hotel's own walled garden to its best advantage. Multi-course tasting menus are the way to go; every dish turns up something surprising, not least when you might start out with an ice cream - a distinctly grown-up one, though, flavoured with white truffle, and served with Madeira jelly and cracked hazelnuts. Your faces set to 'stunned', you may then proceed to a dish of oak-smoked eel with roast chicken, artichokes and variously textured apple, with perhaps the estate's venison as the main draw, almost conventionally served with pear and chestnuts in red wine. Despite the high level of refinement, Crannage has not forgotten his roots, which re-emerge in the form of a serving of Yorkshire parkin with banana and ginger accompaniments. A fine selection of wines by the glass adds to the mixing-and-matching fun.