Guests are taken on a flight of fancy through a tale of a tasting menu. Maria Mellor pays a visit
If every meal is like a story, with a beginning, middle and end, in the Tasting Room your meal is a whole novel, with twists and turns, mystery and intrigue, and helpful characters to guide you through.
The new restaurant at the Vineyard at Stockcross in Berkshire opened in October 2023, led by executive chef Tom Scade. At the heart of the story is Sir Peter Michael – the hotel's owner, who also owns a vineyard in California, hence the hotel's name. The links between them are shown throughout the meal, starting with the snacks: an olive oil pebble represents the stones displayed in the wine cellar, flown over from California. A bay leaf tart is a nod to the bay trees that line the Californian vineyard, and a poppy seed cake harks back to the poppy fields the vineyard stands on, which also gave the hotel and the Peter Michael wine brand their poppy flower logos.
"All the dishes have a little bit of a story to them," says Scade, pointing out the taco that follows the snacks is inspired by the food eaten by the Latin American winepickers in California. It has a filling of hen of the wood mushroom and a cucumber and jalapeño jelly.
The only meat on the menu comes in one course: duck breast with swede, orange and chestnut and a duck jus flavoured with honey, orange and spices. The rest of the five courses focus largely on vegetables and fruit, such as a starter of Jerusalem artichoke roasted and served with truffle on a thin crouton with soy milk infused with artichoke, set with pectin, coated in a coffee glaze and topped with a brown butter crunch.
"There's so many great things you can do with plant-based and vegetables," says Scade. "I think it's really important that we showcase our vegetables in the best possible way."
A fish course sees Scade attend to guests tableside, opening up a Dutch oven to reveal monkfish resting on what looks like sizzling hot charcoal but is actually dry ice, so the team aren't filling the restaurant with smoke. He explains how his supplier Flying Fish brings the fish in on the dayboats only the day before, making it super-fresh for guests.
There's an additional cheese course, which Scade decided to make special in its own right, with a warm pastry filled with Tunworth on one half of the plate and on the other a savoury Tunworth ice-cream – hot and cold. "We've got Nick [Bouhelier], who is such a skilled pastry chef. He can make these beautiful pithiviers with the preserved fig in the summer," he says.
With the strong focus on wine, sommelier Marie Konecny Dardel is a leading character in the Tasting Room experience. Before the meal she brings an opaque glass and encourages you to try and guess which wine you can taste and smell. Later in the meal comes the ‘Judgement of Paris' – a pivotal event in the Peter Michael story, so great there's even a lifesize painting of it just beyond the hotel lobby – where a Californian wine was pitted against a French wine. To replicate it, guests are given two wines of their own in a blind taste test and encouraged to pick their favourite.
"It's not always about me putting up food and saying to Romain [Bourger, director of wine] pair this," says Scade. "He can bring in interesting wine that he wants to put on and we then look at creating a dish for it."
The non-alcoholic pairing is no less thorough, with non-alcoholic spirits, de-alcoholised wine and apéritifs. "There's nothing worse than feeling there's no thought put into the non-alcoholic side," he says.
But it's no surprise that the meal ends with one final nod to wine, with chocolates expertly shaped and painted to look like wine corks. They're filled with fruit – apple on the winter menu, which will change to Amalfi lemons in spring.
The final petit fours come with one final spark of theatricality, when a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is served with strawberry-scented dry ice, igniting the guests' tastebuds before they've even taken a bite. Scade says: "It's nice to walk away feeling like you've learned something and experienced something a bit different."
From the menu
- Snacks
- Taco
- Jerusalem artichokes, brown butter, truffle, coffee
- Cornish monkfish, grapes, Tokyo turnips, mustard
- Kings Oscietra, ‘pie and mash' (£15 supplement)
- Wild mallard duck swede, orange, chestnut
- Tunworth and black fig ‘hot and cold' (£10 supplement)
- Sicilian pomegranate mango, coconut
- ‘Dulcey' blonde chocolate apple, almond, pistachio
£115 per person
The Vineyard, Stockcross, Newbury, Berkshire RG20 8JU
