St Michael's Manor

Just a short stroll from the cathedral and city centre, St Michael's is an Elizabethan manor house in five acres of well-kept grounds with a lake at the centre - a view which you can appreciate at leisure from the elegant orangery-style Lake Restaurant. Attentively professional service boosts still further the sense of well-being in this luminous space, while the kitchen steers a broadly modern British course, delivering frequently-changing menus of technically-adept, classically-based cooking with modish touches here and there, as in the roasted shoulder lollipops that are matched with venison carpaccio and shallot and hazelnut dressing. Elsewhere, line-caught sea bass is paired to great effect with crab and dill beignets, purple sprouting broccoli, crushed Jersey Royals and pinot grigio cream, while meat-eaters could get a more robust pairing of shin of beef and oxtail suet pudding with roasted shallots, broccoli Mornay, and duck fat-roasted potatoes. Creative desserts run to galette of Cox's apple with Calvados cream, mint opaline and black butter ice cream.