MasterChef: The Professionals winner Stuart Deeley overseeing new Hampton Manor restaurant
MasterChef: The Professionals 2019 champion Stuart Deeley has headed up the launch of a second restaurant at Hampton Manor as the West Midlands hotel ramps up its expansion plans.
Smoke is described as the "edgier younger brother" of Peel's, the hotel's Michelin-starred restaurant overseen by Darren Meacham. Located in a Victorian greenhouse where Deeley cooks over coals in the adjacent old furnace house, the restaurant serves four-and six-course menus priced at £65 and £85 respectively.
Dishes include oak-smoked trout, dill pickled kohlrabi and horseradish; Packington pork belly; whole Cornish plaice; Dunwood Farm rib-eye (for two to share) and baked St Jude cheese with toasted fruit bread and garden chutney.
Deeley, who was head chef of the Wilderness restaurant in Birmingham at the time of his MasterChef success, had planned to open a restaurant in the Jewellery Quarter of the city last year, but his financial backer pulled out of the project.
Smoke is part of a wider expansion of the 15-bedroom Hampton Manor, located near Solihull, which has also launched the Bakery this month.
Headed by Min Go, who joined the hotel earlier this year from Myers Bageri in Copenhagen, the Bakery will provide all the baked goods required by Hampton Manor, with bread made using British stone-ground flour. It will also operate as a shop from Friday to Sunday mornings, selling its own bread, tarts and pastries, as well as cheeses from Neal's Yard, coffee from Hasbean, bottles from Wine Freedom and other produce from artisan suppliers.
Next year will see the launch of an "immersive experience" inside the kitchen garden called Grace & Savour, overlooked by five new bedroom suites.
Built in 1855 as a grand country home, Hampton Manor is today owned by James and Fjona Hill in collaboration with directors and family members Sally and Fraser Bell. More recently it operated as a 45-bedroom care home, until the Hills transformed the dilapidated property in 2010 into the foodie-focused business it is today with a look that embraces the arts and crafts movement.
