Elizabeth Kirby tried the locally sourced menu at The Broadstreet Restaurant at The Meon Valley Marriot Hotel and Country Club in Shedfield as part of Hampshire Food Festival
You wouldn’t automatically think of the local Marriott Hotel for a dinner reservation, unless you were staying the night, or were perhaps using the golfing facilities that so many offer. However, The Meon Valley Marriot Hotel and Country Club just outside Southampton is looking to change all that. We recently escaped the city for a Friday night dinner at their AA rosette Broadstreet Restaurant to experience their locally sourced menu inspired by the Hampshire Food Festival.
Squeezing in with the merry golfers in the lift to take us up to the dining area, so far expectations were being met. But once through the doors of the award-winning restaurant you could have been in any trendy inner-city dining establishment, not a country club in Shedfield.
Décor is modern with lots of natural materials – slate walls and dark wood tables set the scene inside and complement the views out over the grounds through the floor to ceiling windows.
Menus were simple, entitled Hampshire on a Plate and full of locally produced ingredients such as Chalk Stream Trout, Beaulieu Estate Wood Pigeon, Owtons Black Pudding and Bracken Farm Pork. Executive Head Chef, Paul Watts had clearly given a lot of thought to each dish, pairing the fresh ingredients perfectly.
To start we chose the cured trout with Hampshire watercress and pickled cucumber and the rosary goat’s cheese and sun dried tomato bon bons, beetroot and basil. Both were delicious, with the trout making a fantastic alternative to the more traditional smoked salmon. Next up was the pork honey roasted fillet, confit belly, crisp pancetta, hill farm apple gel and baby leaf spinach and the fir tree lamb breast, gooseberry stuffing, minted crushed new potatoes and spring peas. The pork was beautifully cooked and the simplicity of the dish really allowed for the flavours to come through. Equally the lamb was tender and the gooseberry stuffing offered a twist – it was nice to see seasonal produce being used in a creative way.
Deciding to forgo dessert and instead nibbling on the artisan cheese board full of local names, we finished our coffees feeling incredibly full. Perhaps a round of golf should have been in order to walk it all off!
Not sure we would make this a regular stop, it’s a little too far out for us. But if you’re looking for some good grub on the way out of or in to Southampton, then don’t just assume this is nothing more than a golf hotel and spa.
