Best Restaurants in Somerset: Fine Dining, Local Gems & Where to Eat
Come to Somerset in October, when the apple orchards are heavy with fruit and the lanes smell faintly of cider whether you want them to or not, and you’ll understand immediately why people who visit once tend to come back repeatedly. The light goes amber earlier here than it has any right to. Villages that looked merely pleasant in July suddenly look like paintings. And the food – god, the food – takes on an urgency that only makes sense once you’ve eaten a plate of roasted celeriac in a candlelit former pub with rain tapping at the window and a glass of something natural and orange in your hand. Somerset has always been a place people came to slow down. What’s changed, quietly and without much fanfare, is that slowing down here now involves some of the most interesting cooking in England.
This is not a county that shouts. It has no interest in the kind of restaurant PR that involves dry ice, a DJ, and a tasting menu named after a philosophy. What Somerset has instead is something rarer: a genuine food culture built on exceptional ingredients, restless curiosity, and a willingness to let the seasons do the heavy lifting. If you’re looking for the best restaurants in Somerset – fine dining, local gems and where to eat across this quietly extraordinary county – you’ve come to the right place.
The Fine Dining Scene: Michelin Stars and the Field-to-Table Revolution
It would be difficult to write about fine dining in Somerset without beginning in Bruton, a small town in the Mendip Hills that has somehow, in the space of a decade, become one of the most interesting places to eat in Britain. Hauser & Wirth opened a gallery here. Daylesford is nearby. And at the very top of the conversation sits Osip, which in 2025 was named both Time Out’s best restaurant in the UK and the Good Food Guide’s Restaurant of the Year. Not bad for somewhere you’d drive through without stopping if you didn’t know better.
Chef Merlin Labron-Johnson relocated Osip from Bruton’s high street to a beautifully renovated former pub at Kingsettle Hill in late 2024, and the upgrade has clearly been worth it. The setting is rural and unhurried. The cooking is precise and deeply seasonal – a surprise tasting menu built almost entirely on produce grown or sourced within a very short radius. Dinner sits at £150 per head, with a lunch version at £95 and a more expansive signature menu at £190. Osip also now holds both a Michelin star and a Green Michelin star, that latter award recognising the team’s serious commitment to sustainable sourcing – and Condé Nast included it in their Best New Restaurants in the World for 2025. You can also stay overnight in one of four hotel rooms, which removes the problem of choosing between the wine pairing and driving home. Sensible.
Reservations at Osip are released in advance and go quickly. Book as early as humanly possible – ideally before you’ve booked your villa, your flights, or frankly anything else.
Gastropubs Worth Crossing the County For
The gastropub is a format that Britain has both perfected and periodically ruined, depending on who’s running it. When it works – when the beams are genuine, the fire is lit, the landlord actually knows the farmer who raised the lamb – there is no better place to eat in the world. The Three Horseshoes in Batcombe is exactly that kind of place, and then some.
Owned by Margot Henderson, whose Rochelle Canteen in London has been a benchmark of unpretentious excellence for years, The Three Horseshoes sits between a medieval church and the village hall in the village of Batcombe, near Shepton Mallet. The 17th-century building has been restored with proper care – flagstone floors, beamed ceilings, open fireplaces – without crossing the line into theme-pub territory. The menu changes daily and follows the seasons with the kind of conviction that makes you trust it immediately. Cask ale is poured freely. Kitchen takeovers from notable London chefs, including Jeremy Lee and Chantelle Nicholson, are a regular fixture. The pub is currently ranked seventh in the UK’s Top 50 Gastropubs list, which is the sort of accolade that matters more than many a Michelin nod, because it means the place is actually enjoyable as well as impressive.
One small warning: the bells of the neighbouring church are enthusiastic. Plan your most important conversation accordingly.
Wine Bars, Bistros and the Art of the Small Plate
Not every great meal in Somerset needs to be a three-hour ceremony. Sometimes what you want is a glass of natural wine, a couple of impossibly good small plates, and somewhere relaxed enough that you can stay for another hour without feeling like the staff are calculating your bill with their eyes. The Old Pharmacy in Bruton – also part of Merlin Labron-Johnson’s expanding orbit – is precisely that kind of place.
Housed in a 500-year-old building on Bruton High Street, The Old Pharmacy operates as a wine bar, bistro, and grocery store simultaneously, which sounds chaotic and turns out to be deeply appealing. The daily blackboard menu reads like a sequence of very good bar snacks with a pronounced Italian accent – the kind of food that makes you order one more dish just as you’d decided you were done. The adjacent shop sells organic wines, local cider, and grocery items you’ll wish you could carry home in your hand luggage. With an average Google rating of 4.6 and consistent praise for its creative plates, relaxed atmosphere, and wine selection, The Old Pharmacy is the kind of local discovery that people in the know tend to keep quietly to themselves. We’re telling you anyway.
What to Order: Dishes, Drinks and Local Producers
Somerset’s larder is genuinely exceptional, and understanding it helps you order better – wherever you end up eating. Cheddar, the real thing made in or near the Cheddar Gorge, is nothing like the plasticated block you’ve been tolerating from the supermarket. Seek out aged farmhouse versions: Montgomery’s and Westcombe are the names to know. West Country beef and lamb benefit from the lush, rain-fed pasture in a way that is quietly obvious the moment you taste them. And Somerset’s apple orchards produce cider that ranges from the industrial to the genuinely complex – ask for something still, dry and farmhouse-made, and you may never look at wine in quite the same way.
Speaking of wine: the natural wine movement has found enthusiastic supporters across Somerset’s restaurant scene, particularly in Bruton. Expect skin-contact whites, low-intervention reds and producers you’ve never heard of, served by people who talk about wine the way enthusiasts do rather than sommeliers who are trying to impress you. It’s a better conversation. As for spirits, Somerset Cider Brandy – made by Burrow Hill near Kingsbury Episcopi – is the county’s answer to Calvados, and a very good answer at that. Order it after dinner and watch whoever you’re with become immediately more agreeable.
On the food side: order whatever the kitchen is telling you is in season. Tasting menus built around surprise are worth trusting here, because the supply chains are short and the producers are known personally. A chef who grew the vegetables is rarely going to give you a bad meal.
Food Markets and Local Finds
Somerset has a strong tradition of farmers’ markets, and they reward the kind of unhurried morning that a good holiday allows. Wells, one of the world’s smallest cities and home to a cathedral of breathtaking scale, hosts a regular market where local producers bring cheese, bread, charcuterie, honey and seasonal produce. It’s the sort of place where you arrive intending to pick up a small amount and leave rearranging your entire bag.
Frome’s independent food scene deserves particular attention. The town has an energy that belies its size – a mix of artisan producers, independent cafés and the kind of delicatessens that stock things you haven’t been able to find since that trip to Emilia-Romagna. Frome Market, held on the first Sunday of the month, draws producers and visitors from across the region and is worth building an itinerary around. The town also has a cluster of good coffee shops and casual lunch spots that punch well above their weight.
For something more self-catered, the farm shops scattered across the county are superb. Look for ones attached to working farms rather than retail operations dressed up to look agricultural – the difference is usually apparent within about thirty seconds of walking in.
Casual Dining and Hidden Gems
The best hidden gems in Somerset have a tendency to be hiding in plain sight – a pub that looks unremarkable from the outside but serves exceptional food, a café attached to a vineyard, a farm shop with a lunch counter that the locals treat as their personal secret. The key is to follow local recommendations rather than purely algorithmic ones, and to be willing to drive a few extra miles down a lane that feels questionable.
Castle Cary, a market town a few miles from Bruton, has a handful of independent cafés and pubs worth investigating for a casual lunch. The surrounding villages – Ansford, Ditcheat, Evercreech – have the kind of traditional country pubs that Somerset does quietly and well: local ales, proper food, no pretension. They don’t make lists often. They don’t need to.
Glastonbury, for all its festival associations, has a surprisingly varied food scene at the casual end – vegetarian and vegan cooking done with genuine skill, reflecting the town’s longstanding alternative culture. It’s a different Somerset from the Michelin-starred world of Bruton, and no less interesting for it.
Reservation Tips: Getting the Table You Want
Somerset’s top restaurants – particularly Osip – operate on release-based booking systems and fill up fast, especially in the warmer months and around peak weekends. The practical advice is straightforward: sign up for mailing lists, book the moment the window opens, and treat a reservation at Osip with the same urgency you’d apply to a sought-after restaurant in Paris or New York. Because in 2025, that’s effectively what it is.
The Three Horseshoes in Batcombe is similarly in demand and benefits from advance booking, particularly for weekend dinners and kitchen takeover events. The Old Pharmacy is more walk-in friendly by nature – the bar seating lends itself to spontaneity – but a call ahead on busy nights is still wise. For gastropubs and casual spots across the county, the general rule applies: if it looks good and you want to eat there, don’t assume availability. Somerset has been discovered. The people who lived here already knew, of course, but the rest of us are catching up.
The Case for a Private Chef at Your Villa
There is, of course, a version of eating in Somerset that requires no reservation at all. If you’re staying in a luxury villa in Somerset, the option of a private chef brings the county’s extraordinary produce directly to your table – and to your kitchen, which in a well-appointed Somerset property is usually somewhere you actually want to spend time. The farms are minutes away. The ingredients are exceptional. And a private chef who knows the county’s producers can put together a dinner that would hold its own against any tasting menu in the region, without the drive home. For families, house parties or anyone who simply wants the best possible version of a Somerset evening, it’s an option worth serious consideration.
For everything else you need to know about this remarkable county, our full Somerset Travel Guide covers the landscape, the culture, the villages and the very best places to stay.
