Excellent Hotels and Restaurants

Glenneagles Hotel thanks to House & Garden 

Title: Excellent Hotels and Restaurants 

Author: not known 

Publisher: not known 

Source book: One Enchanted Evening by Katie Fforde

Katie Fforde’s vivacious 1960s heroines Lizzy, Alexandra and Meg, who first appeared in A Wedding in the Country, all feature again in One Enchanted Evening. This time the focus is on Meg, the cook, who arrives in Dorset to help her mother who is working in a slightly run down but utterly charming country house hotel: Nightingale Woods.

Together with her mother Louise, the faithful Susan and Susan’s extended family of useful plumbers, gardeners, drivers, waiters etc, Meg drags the hotel (kicking and screaming of course) into the 1960s and the world of en suite bathrooms. The cooking improves immeasurably now that ghastly chef Geoff is no longer around to cook things out of packets and guests are enjoying fabulous teas in the garden, coming to stay and planning productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the grounds.

By chance, Basil Knott-Dean is a last minute guest, invited to the hotel by the terrifyingly picky Lady Lennox-Stanley. Basil turns out to be a restaurant reviewer, a major contributor to Excellent Hotels and Restaurants, and gives Nightingale Woods a very good review to be included in the next edition.

Now, you may wonder why we should be so delighted that the hotel should be included in what is essentially a list of hotels and restaurants. Well, until really quite recently, with increased access to the internet while out and about, dedicated travellers would have a great pile of books recommending fancy hotels. We used drive across Europe with all sorts of books. Our copy of a Guide de Charme is dated 2005. I imagine Excellent Hotels and Restaurants is a very similar publication.

Lime Wood Hotel thanks to House & Garden