Announcing its presence on a sign with a brass silhouette of a cheerful porker, The Pig Hotel sits in the heart of the New Forest.
"Welcome to the Forest," says the short, extremely pretty girl at Reception, giving you the key to the Tamworth Room (many of the rooms are named after pigs) and you soon feel like you've stepped back to a calmer, simpler, more rustic life. The bedrooms are in the country house's old stable yard. They have wooden floors. A key design feature is the hefty log pile in a rectangular wall-space. An old-style telephone, the kind you dial with your finger, sits beside the bed. The bath is old and claw-footed. An old-style leather-clad Roberts radio is tuned to Radio 4 (of course). It's wonderful. This hotel room is the accommodation equivalent of comfort-eating. It's newly and beautifully renovated but it feels at least 50 years old.
It takes a while to put your finger on the prevailing influence. The Pig is a sister restaurant of Lime Wood in Hampshire and both are deeply in thrall to the shabby-chic, traditional-with-a-twist style of Daylesford. The restaurant is a conservatory bolted on to the old house, but it's been done up as a Gardeners' Question Time dream of a greenhouse. The glass roof slopes down to a long window. Led to your seat by another short, amazingly pretty girl, your eye is drawn by a hundred details of watering cans, climbing plants, wooden trugs, wooden crates, terracotta pots of thyme and rosemary. It's set-dressing of a comprehensive kind. No greenhouse in history ever had such a patchwork floor of Moorish tiles. No garden shed ever boasted such a giant pine dresser or such a vast, UFO-like chandelier.
The menu is rather archly divided into six sections. 'Piggy Bits' are pre-starter snacks, 'Starters and Small Plates (Or Bigger!)' are more substantial hors d'oeuvres, 'Literally Picked This Morning' are foraged dishes, fresh eggs and fish, 'Forest and Solent' are the main courses, including The Pie @ The Pig (steak and Old Thumper ale with bubble'n'squeak), The Pig's Hampshire bacon chop and Dorset cockles and Cornish mussels. 'Garden Sides' offer greens, onions, pumpkins and potatoes from The Pig's much-vaunted walled garden of home-grown produce. It crosses your mind that they're trying to emulate the vegetable garden at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, plus the restaurant-in-a-greenhouse that is Petersham Nurseries plus Mrs Patmore's kitchen in Downton Abbey...
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk
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