Eat, Sleep, Replete

Barbecue and birdsong in the Hampshire countryside, but after a good night’s sleep could ISABELLE GRAY conquer her fear of dough and cook a crispy, golden pizza?

When one hears the words ‘five-star hotel’, the mind often conjures up images of luxury wellness spas – complete with their glassy swimming pools, infrared saunas and twinkly ceiling treatment rooms – suggesting that this is the best way to offer R&R to weary guests. This kind of luxury you won’t find at Exclusive Collection’s Lainston House, because this is a hotel that celebrates life’s true luxuries; those that lie in the simplicity of some of our most basic human needs: fantastic food, connection to nature, and a truly great night’s sleep.

Set within 63 acres of Hampshire’s verdant countryside, just outside Winchester, the 17th-century Grade II listed country house hotel positions itself as a destination for explorers, food lovers and the ‘do it differently-ers’. It’s an apt description and Lainston House has two exceptional restaurant offerings and an onsite cookery school so guests can stay, eat, and learn.
“Food is in our DNA,” says Lainston House’s executive chef Phil Yeomans.

“Having two restaurants which are so different in style is a big pull for our guests.” The Wellhouse, a suitably named converted wellhouse centred entirely around wood-fired cooking, offers amazing steaks, wood-fired Sunday lunches and other fire-forged dishes in a relaxed setting, while The Avenue, headed up by 2023’s MasterChef: The Professionals winner Tom Hamblet, is an AA 3-Rosette fine-dining restaurant, which draws in guests who are looking for a refined eating experience and sense of occasion.

But it’s not fine dining that I’m here for this time. Beyond the restaurants and the rooms, Lainston House’s Season cookery school offers a range of culinary classes from its state-of-the-art kitchens, or barbecue classes out in the walled kitchen garden. It’s the latter that I’m here for, and I’m ready to face my long-standing fear of dough by tackling the art of pizza-making and joining a class using one of Season’s Gozney wood-fired ovens.

Before I get my hands in flour and fire up the oven, I stop to snap a quick photograph of the hotel’s magnificent red brick building as I walk down the avenue of lime trees that run from the car park – as I’m sure all those who approach the hotel for the first time do.

I’m staying in the junior heritage suite and quickly realise that no picture I take is going to capture the sense of peace that comes from stepping away from city life, finding yourself surrounded by quiet countryside and waking up to birdsong.

I’m dining at The Wellhouse this evening. One of the UK’s only all wood-fired restaurants, it opened in 2021 and has since become a local gem that’s built up a loyal community of returning customers.

Smoke and fire are imbued into everything on the menu here, where you’ll find dishes like wood-fired mackerel, roasted Japanese aubergine and the star of the show: their signature sharing steaks. Yeomans says The Wellhouse has become so popular that now the covers are mostly made up from guests outside of the hotel compared to residents, and the restaurant is now open seven days a week – a testament to the food and love of wood-fired cooking.

My multi-course dinner consisted of various menu hits, including flatbread baked in the wood-fired oven with smoked garlic butter, BBQ pork burnt ends with pickled garden chilli and smoked mayo, and smoked beef cheek with corn salsa and crispy onions.

“We use smoke in so many different elements,” says Yeomans. “Even smoking the cream to make our desserts.” Indeed, one of the standout dishes for me was the wood-fired crumble with smoked custard.

The kitchen garden plays a huge role in Lainston House’s menus too. As a B-Corp, there’s a drive to use produce sourced from as locally as possible. While some of it travels from within mere metres of the kitchen, meat, cheeses, vegetables and honeys are sourced from within Hampshire and close neighbouring counties.

Uptons of Bassett supplies meat for the restaurants and cookery school, and local artisan companies like Lusso Leaf, based in nearby Stockbridge, provide microgreens to garnish dishes with. ChalkStream trout, another jewel in Hampshire’s produce crown, is used in Season’s Big Green Egg Posh BBQ and Smokehouse classes, where attendees learn to cook the fish on a cedar plank.

An increasing appetite for food cooked over fire is what has allowed The Wellhouse and Season’s outdoor offerings to grow and evolve over time. So much so that now the outdoor side of the cookery school has taken the lead and is a huge part of the appeal that draws people to Lainston. 

The current roster of Gozney classes over the summer at Season of course includes pizza, but to showcase the breadth of what these ovens are capable of, there is also a Woodfired Meat Feast course. This typically includes four dishes: Korean lamb cutlets with kimchi; pan-fried ribeye with wood-fired miso butter onions; Santa Maria heritage meadow hen with smoked Alabama sauce and fermented vegetables; and Mississippi tomahawk pork with smacked cucumber and ginger. My experience at Season was a hybrid of both, and I learned the importance of temperature over timing under the guidance of chef Tom Lampitt (below). 

Greeting us with morning coffees and fresh Gozney-baked donuts, Tom runs through the day and we get to work with our pizza dough. I’m visiting in mid-April, and there are some asparagus spears starting to poke through the soil in the raised beds, but in a few weeks’ time this garden will have transformed even further, and it won’t be long before students can pick their own herbs and vegetables to go back to the grill with.

As the dough proves, we prepare the kimchi for the lamb dish, which will be topped with chives from the garden. After enjoying the fruits of our labour from the first dish, it’s time to move on to the ribeye. While this dish is perhaps the most straightforward ingredients-wise, it’s also the most exciting when peeking inside the mouth of the oven to see the miso butter bubbling away. The pizza, my biggest fear, is somehow my proudest creation. Through chef Tom’s mentoring, I have managed to make a classic margarita, crispy and golden, that I could confidently re-create at home.

Sitting in Lainston House’s car park – a feature in itself, circling an interior garden originally designed by Victorian horticulturalist and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll – I am hesitant to leave.

It’s drizzling, but somehow this adds to the charm, wrapping the grounds in the same quiet calm that greeted me on arrival. Thinking back to the idea of ‘five-star luxury’, it’s rarely this that comes to mind, but, as it turns out, good food, time spent outdoors, and the simple satisfaction of learning something new is harder to leave behind. I’m quietly pondering if there are any other foods I am phobic about cooking, so I can come back for my next class.