Plantation House

From bread to truffles, they cook as much as possible on site in this little hotel, in the rolling South Hams countryside, between wild Dartmoor and the sandy beaches of Bigbury Bay. But as well as raving over the ‘delicious food’, readers give the thumbs up to the rooms in the former Georgian rectory. One wrote that he had ‘a good bed, though not a huge one’, while another was delighted to find that ‘the bathroom even had two speakers in the ceiling’. All bedrooms come with much-appreciated extras: home-made cake, ground coffee and a cafetière, biscuits, mineral water, fresh fruit, flowers and luxury toiletries. Meals are the start of the show, with owner Richard Hendey and chef John Raines using home-grown and wild ingredients, plus locally caught fish, to create dishes such as brill with chive potato cake, lime hollandaise, ginger courgettes and asparagus. The choice at breakfast includes ‘very tasty home-made bread’, locally pressed organic apple juice, nuts, seeds and honey with figs and Hunza apricots, smoked haddock, or four-minute-ten-second boiled egg with asparagus and toast soldiers. (ML, and others)