Hyper-local Dining Destinations 

“When you eat at a farm-to-table restaurant, you know you’re doing something good,” says James Toogood, Savills director of the southwest region. “Eating seasonal fruits and vegetables and locally reared meat is the opposite of instant gratification. You can see the benefits in your local environment. I almost feel that we have a responsibility to do it where we can.” 

Buying food straight from a farm once meant being handed bottles of creamy milk and crates of still-warm eggs over a wooden gate. Eating hyper-local produce today, though, is just as likely to involve being served a delicate sliver of line-caught bass topped with purple kohlrabi purée and lemon pepper leaf oil, or a sculpted boule of lacto-fermented squash and camomile sorbet, all grown within sight of the dining room window.

Far from being somewhere muddy to pick up a pot of jam or a bunch of beetroot as you drive through the countryside, many farms are now home to exceptional restaurants that are destinations in themselves. Crocadon, in St Mellion, Cornwall (where you might be served that bass and kohlrabi), opened in 2023 on a working farm that specialises in regenerative agriculture, and holds both a regular Michelin star and a green one.

Chef-owner Dan Cox describes it as a “soil-centric restaurant” where he serves a 10-course tasting menu made from ingredients raised and gathered on the farm or close by. For a similarly locavore Cornish gourmet experience, Coombeshead Farm in Lewannick, run by Tom Adams – formerly of Pitt Cue in London – is a gastronomic delight.

The relationship between the land and the menu is highly visible at Horrell & Horrell in Somerset, where husband-and-wife team Steve and Jules have turned a tin-roofed cow barn into a gorgeous half-outdoor dining space, warmed by log burners. A long table runs down the centre, garlands of flowers, hops and bunting hang from the ceiling, and chairs are draped with cosy blankets for chillier evenings. Dinners are served family-style, using home-grown and locally gathered ingredients cooked over wood. 

The angles are sharper at Lilliput Farm Kitchen, a striking glass and metal barn conversion that juts out of the landscape near Bath. It is a favourite of Jack King, director of residential sales in Bath for Savills. “They don’t overcomplicate the dishes,” he says. “You can taste every ingredient.” The farm stretches across 168 acres and, over 25 years, the Tredell family has restored hedgerows and shifted to traditional farming cycles to make use of their upland pastures in summer and encourage the growth of wild flowers. Corned beef hash browns with beef fat mayo or the farm’s own beef brisket are favourites. 

An hour’s drive south in Shepton Mallet, Wraxall Vineyard’s restaurant, the View, is similarly sleek: a glass pavilion on a south-facing slope overlooking the Mendips, with a curve of weathered Cor-Ten steel disappearing into the hillside. Here, it’s the wines that are local – sparkling, white and rosé – and at 50 years since the first planting, Wraxall is one of the oldest vineyards in Somerset. 

At Glebe House in Devon, you can stay as well as eat. Overlooking the Coly Valley, this charming Georgian vicarage is set in 15 acres of smallholding, which supplies the restaurant. For Chris Clifford, Savills head of residential sales in Devon and West Somerset, farm-to-table restaurants are an intrinsic part of living in a rural area. “Darts Farm in Topsham has an excellent butcher,” he says, as well as a restaurant with the motto “Field, Fire, Ferment”. 

Clifford also loves the Lost Kitchen near Tiverton, with its tiny market garden, and the Exmoor Forest Inn, a traditional hill farm at the heart of a national park, where cattle, sheep and red deer are raised – the beef is dry-aged at the pub. It has 300 acres of grassland and traditional hay meadows that are not mowed after the first day of May, to encourage biodiversity. The kitchen aims to serve locals from the tiny village of Simonsbath, as well as passing travellers. As Clifford says, “Farm-to-table food connects us as a community.”