The King John Inn

Giles Coren was highly impressed. His Times review of the King John Inn at Tollard Royal on the Wiltshire/Dorset bor­der described it as hav­ing “a lovely, light, unpon­cey sym­path­etic style” and “good, simple, mod­ern home cook­ing”. Over­all, he awar­ded the food eight out of ten – very impress­ive by his high standards.

Behind the recent refur­bish­ment works and respons­ible for the cuisine are Alex Boon and his wife, Gretchen. Hav­ing had pre­vi­ous exper­i­ence of the res­taur­ant busi­ness, they left the industry for a short while to set up a whole­sale wine busi­ness. Built in 1859 and named after one of King John’s hunt­ing lodges, the Inn was almost derel­ict when they first saw it. Nine months later they opened with eight bed­rooms. That was almost a year ago and the pair have not looked back. Gretchen has over­seen the refur­bish­ment with the help of local crafts­men like Fran­cis Ruffle Designs. Five sump­tu­ous bed­rooms are in the main build­ing. The remain­ing three are housed in the coach house, along with a wine shop. Here, Alex has put his past exper­i­ence to good use and pat­rons may pur­chase wines they have seen on the wine list. In all, they stock 160 wines, largely from France with some New World bins and they are the import agent for sev­eral wine estates.

“We see ourselves as a hearty coun­try pub serving good local food” says Alex. And it doesn’t get much more local than this. His butcher is Simon Harvell in Iwerne Min­ster, four miles away and ven­ison comes from a mile dis­tant. “In fact”, adds Alex, “there’s not much on the menu that has to travel more than five miles in any dir­ec­tion to reach us. You can’t get much fresher than that!” In the kit­chen is a team of five chefs, busy pre­par­ing such mouth­wa­ter­ing dishes as Port­land crab; part­ridge and wild mush­room ter­rine; twice baked West­combe ched­dar soufflé –and to fin­ish — apple & fig crumble or banana and chocol­ate bread & but­ter pudding.

Alex and Gretchen had dealt with cof­fee sup­plier, Café du Monde before and appoin­ted them again when they set up the King John. Nat­ur­ally, they selec­ted the free on loan cafetière sys­tem once more, but this time, to com­ple­ment the unfussy bed­room décor, they added Café du Monde’s Ser­vice en Chambre bed­room bever­age system.

“Our pre­vi­ous exper­i­ence of Café du Monde left us well sat­is­fied”, says Alex, “oth­er­wise we would not have re-appointed them. It’s a big thumbs up for the cof­fee, but that tells only half a story. To that, add the excel­lence of their sup­port ser­vice, with friendly staff demon­strat­ing total commitment.”

| testimonial | Tags: featured, serviceenchambre