Riverside Inn at Aymestrey, The

The Riverside Inn offers a small but beautifully formed a la carte menu of local and carefully selected regional food with the emphasis on seasonal variations. They source their ingredients from small local growers and regional producers, as well as from their own hillside garden. For instance they offer marinated and confited belly of pork (bred 3 miles away), rare breed beef from Craven Arms and rainbow trout from a farm 10 miles upstream on the Lugg.

For a starter you might wish to order the Cornish crab and salmon on a bed of spring leaves with a tomato coulis, or perhaps the goat's cheese with leek and mushrooms in filo pastry with a cranberry dressing. Lamb is usually pretty good anywhere but down here in leafy Herefordshire it has a special flavour, and you may be sure that what you are eating is almost guaranteed to be local. So don't be shy of the Marches lamb with a fresh thyme sauce, or for that matter the Herefordfshire beef with foie gras and a claret sauce. Quite apart from the inland variety almost swimming past the door there are wild sea trout on the menu from time to time.

Indeed the food is prepared and cooked by home grown chefs, a group of hand picked and Riverside-trained local boys. The Riverside attracts a wide range of customer, from young families to the retired, walkers and managing directors, locals and people from as far afield as Birmingham and Shrewsbury.

Surrounded by wooded hillsides and rushing river, The Riverside has been an inn since 1640, a Welsh longhouse where the animals were housed in a barn alongside the main building. The barn has been sympathetically converted to a forty seater restaurant, hung with horse brasses and tack and paintings by local artists. The riverbank and terraced gardens can seat up to 40 on rustic benches. The food is complemented by local ales and ciders from this abundant county.