Grace and Savour, Hampton Manor, Hampton-in-Arden

Back in May, I was judging coffee in Bournemouth, surrounded by the usual collection of over-caffeinated, over-excited people, when Steve Ashworth mentioned Grace and Savour over lunch. Steve is one of those people whose opinions about food you listen to, partly because he knows an enormous amount about it and partly because he has the irritating habit of being right. Grace and Savour is his favourite restaurant in the country. He visits more often than I do, which sounds reasonable until you discover that I am thirty-five minutes away and Steve is roughly five times that. Some around the table had heard of it; others hadn’t. We all sat and listened as Steve, with genuine enthusiasm and the sort of detail that comes from repeated experience rather than a press release, explained why he loved the place. And it got me thinking. Not about Steve – not in that way anyhow – but about the fact that I hadn’t been to eat at Grace and Savour for three years. Three years. In restaurant terms,…