Broadway does not lack for hotels. What it has lacked, until recently, is a serious restaurant, and that is what makes House of George W. Davies interesting. The 10-bedroom retreat has opened in a restored 17th-century limestone building that was once a doctor’s surgery, with interiors designed by Arlene Davies in collaboration with Laura Cole of The Cole Collective. The building itself dates to a 1201 listing on the site, though the current structure is considerably more recent.
The hotel is the project of George Davies, the retail entrepreneur behind Next, George at ASDA and Per Una, and his wife Arlene. By their own account they spent more than a decade admiring the building before taking on its transformation. The result is 10 bedrooms blending the original character of the limestone Cotswold building with contemporary design, a sensibility that favours texture and material quality over period pastiche.
The real story is Moda, the hotel’s tasting menu restaurant, led by head chef James Wilson, previously of The Newt in Somerset. Wilson’s menu is a nine-course seasonal affair, built around what he describes as the best British produce the Cotswolds has to offer: Cornish lobster with dill and lobster butter sauce, duck with boudin noir and spices, sea buckthorn with Earl Grey and white chocolate among the current dishes. A full vegan nine-course menu runs alongside it. A set lunch is available Monday to Friday at £40 for two courses or £45 for three, and Sunday brings a roast from Toddington’s Martins Meats with vegetables from Worcester Produce.
This is the kind of opening that matters because the food is the point, not an afterthought. A chef of Wilson’s pedigree choosing to open his first solo restaurant in a 10-bedroom hotel in Broadway is a signal worth paying attention to.
House of George W. Davies is open now in Broadway, Worcestershire. More at houseofgeorge.co.uk