Restaurant Kensington

Lynton’s most exciting new culinary addition mixes up steak suppers with fine fish dishes and smart puds for a deliciously fun night out on Exmoor.

First, those steaks. Exmoor-reared beef is showcased in a top-drawer menu featuring unusual sharing cuts such as chateaubriand, tomahawk and porterhouse, as well as the more commonly found fillet, rump and sirloin.

The beef is treated with reverence by head chef Matthew Rutter and paired with a plethora of sauces and sides like buttery smoked mash, beef-fat carrots and bacon-jam mac and cheese. Indeed, there’s such an array of sides and sauces that, even if you chose steak each time you visited, it would take quite some time to feel you’d fully “done” the menu.

However, whether you go full Exmoor farmer with a porterhouse or choose a beautifully cooked piece of fish, it would be remiss not to kick off dinner with a beef-shin croquette or to fail to leave room for pud.

The desserts are particularly beautiful; the chocolate delice is recommended for its malty homemade ice cream, suck-it-off-the-spoon-smooth cocoa delice and crisp shard of praline.

Trencherman’s tip

This is the home of the most pimped affogato in the South West: a joyful amalgam of homemade vanilla gelato, coffee brownie, olive-oil roasted almonds, PX sherry, waste-coffee caramel and coffee Italian meringue.