25 Best Restaurants In England And Scotland

Each week this fall, The Daily Meal will highlight the best restaurants in various regions in Europe, culminating with the debut of our first list of the 101 Best Restaurants in Europe in December. The Daily Meal presents the 25 Best Restaurants in England and Scotland.

David Rockwell's design plays on the moniker of Gordon Ramsay's Maze. The Asian-inspired French fare includes tasting plates, à la carte options, and a seven-course chef's menu. This might include marinated yellow fin tuna with compressed apple, coriander, horseradish, and ponzu; rabbit, smoked duck, and foie gras terrine with peaches, sauternes gel, and bitter almond; and lobster, tiger prawn, and salmon dumplings in lemongrass broth.

Outposts of this high-end Chinese establishment (created by the founder of the low-end Wagamama Japanese noodle chain) — there are Hakkasans in New York City, Las Vegas, Miami, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Mumbai, plus a second London location  — have been criticized for their precipitous prices and the uneven quality of their cooking. The original, though — while indeed pricey — maintains high culinary standards in a sleek, buzzy, multi-million-dollar interior. From jewel-like dim sum (scallop shumai, Chinese chive dumplings) to bright seafood (roasted silver cod with champagne and honey), from unexpectedly good faux-poultry (tofu "chicken" with sugar snaps) to extravagances like Peking duck with Royal Beluga caviar.

A mere eight months after its opening, 21212 was awarded a Michelin star. Set in a restored four-story Georgian townhouse, the 38-seat French restaurant has an open kitchen, drawing room, and private dining room, plus four adjacent bedrooms. Chef Paul Kitching leads a team of seven chefs who prepare set lunch and dinner menus. The five-course dinner includes a choice of starters like creamy Gruyère risotto with six types of mushrooms, a choice of mains like chicken curry with pineapple and artichokes, and desserts like layered spring trifle with blueberries, Granny Smith purée, pecan, honeycomb praline, shortbread, and sliced bananas.

Despite its name, the kitchen at Two Fat Ladies at the Buttery, one of a trio of Two Fat Ladies restaurants, is run by a man, chef Stephen Johnson. The restaurant features oak and mahogany paneling, stained glass, and a marble bar, and its name is a reference to its street number, 88 — "two fat ladies" is a nickname for the number when called out in bingo games (the restaurant is not related to the once popular TV show Two Fat Ladies, starring Clarissa Dickson Wright and the late Jennifer Paterson). The menu includes Scotch beef with wild mushroom duxelle crouton and tarragon jus; king prawn brochette with salmon and red mullet served with roast vegetable couscous and tzatziki dressing; iced Belgian chocolate parfait with toffee vodka sauce and amaretti macaroon; and sabayon-glazed citrus fruits with a basket of strawberry and elderflower sorbet.

For three decades, Eddie and Shirley Spear have been serving Scottish food and hospitality at The Three Chimneys on the shore of Loch Dunvegan in the remote northwest corner of Skye, an island off the west coast of Scotland. Spread across three small dining areas on the ground floor of a 120-year-old crofter's cottage, the restaurant serves lunch from mid-March to mid-October; dinner is served nightly all year long. The set-menu-only restaurant offers a three-course dinner menu and a seven-course Skye Showcase menu, which can be served at one of the wooden tables topped with crisp white linens or at the kitchen table. Courses include Andy Race smoked haddie and ham terrine with Brunigill Farm quail egg, syboes (spring onions), orange, and nasturtium; cannelloni of crowdie (Scottish cream cheese), Totaig kale, and pine kernels with asparagus and mulled Cheddar; pan-fried Gigha halibut and Sconser scallop with Anna potatoes, rhubarb, cauliflower, and vanilla velouté; and iced toddy parfait with pink grapefruit and aniseed brittle.

Because she helped run some top Los Angeles restaurants for some years back in the 1980s, it was perhaps inevitable that when Sally Clarke returned to England and opened her eponymous restaurant, 28 years ago, she would be accused of having brought "California cuisine" to London. In fact what she brought was a then-rare concern for seasonality and freshness, as well as the radical notion of offering only a single fixed-price menu in the evenings (à la Chez Panisse). There is now a choice of dishes at night (as there always was for lunch), but the seasonality and freshness are still in place at Clarke's. Recent choices included chilled tomato, celery, and basil broth with white beans; grilled spatchcocked quail with cracked wheat and muscat grapes; breast of corn-fed chicken with sage, girolles, and leeks; and baked peach and blueberry pancake with vanilla ice cream.

Jeremy Lee has long been one of the best no-nonsense, seasonally aware cooks in London, but in his berth at the Blueprint Café atop the city's Design Museum, he never got the attention he deserved. Now he's in the middle of Soho, at the old-line (but newly revivified) Quo Vadis. His wonderfully British menu ranges from (at this time of year) smoked eel and horseradish sandwich and crab with mayonnaise to whole mackerel with pickled gooseberries and "grouse & co". The room is pretty, the cooking is just right, and the wines are well-chosen.

Having given Britain some of the most scientifically advanced cooking in the world at The Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal next embarked on a quest to give them some of the most historical. The conceit of Dinner by Heston Blumenthal (and yes, to answer the inevitable question, it is also open for lunch) is to reproduce recipes from his country's surprisingly rich culinary past. The oldest example on the current menu is Rice and Flesh (rice with saffron, red wine, and calf's tail, from c. 1390). The most famous dish is Meat Fruit (c. 1500), a chicken liver parfait coated with, and resembling, mandarin orange. Spiced pigeon with ale and artichokes (c. 1780), roast sea bass with leaf chicory and cockle ketchup (c. 1830), and a chamomile- and orange blossom-scented strawberry tart (c. 1591) are among the other offerings. The nice thing about all this food is that it's very tasty and doesn't seem "historical" at all; it's a testament to the longevity of good cooking.

The first European venture for Japanese chef Nobu Matsuhisa, the sleek and sophisticated Nobu London is located in The Metropolitan Hotel. Matsuhisa's Japanese cuisine, infused with Latin American influences, has earned the restaurant a Michelin star. The menu includes Wagyu beef and foie gras gyoza with spicy ponzu sauce; black cod on butter lettuce; and a multi-course omakase menu.

Since 1998, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay has served impeccable cuisine in an intimate 45-seat dining room designed by David Collins. Ramsay's first restaurant, this establishment was awarded three Michelin stars in 2001, and head chef Clare Smyth is the only female chef in the U.K. to hold this honor. The three-course lunch menu includes smoked potato and poached hen's egg ravioli with bok choi, roast chicken jus, and leek velouté; Cornish pollock with chorizo couscous, baby squid, artichoke, and spiced tomato jus; and banana parfait served with a peanut butter mousse and bitter chocolate sandwich with caramelized bananas.

Set in a 16^th-century merchant's house, The Witchery serves Scottish seafood, its signature Angus steak tartare, and that most definitive of Scottish dishes, haggis. Lunch, dinner, and pre- and post-theater suppers are available. The sumptuously appointed baroque-style dining room includes ancient oak paneling and heraldic painted ceilings, tapestries, and antique candlesticks. Guests who stay at The Witchery, which is also a small hotel, are treated to candlelit breakfasts.

Heston Blumenthal's temple of so-called molecular gastronomy, The Fat Duck, is lots of fun, a kind of haute-cuisine theme park where the food is delicious and the unorthodox presentations will make you smile. Mini-cocktails (vodka and lime sour, gin and tonic, Campari soda) are "poached" with liquid nitrogen. "Sound of the Sea," a fantasy involving five kinds of shellfish, several varieties of seaweed, "sand" based on toasted panko breadcrumbs and maltodextrin, and assorted Japanese flavorings (mirin, tamari, and kombu, among others), is served with an iPod playing, well, sounds of the sea. A new dish on the menu, Mad Hatter's Tea Party, involves a tea bag of edible gold leaf filled with gelatinized bouillon and shaped like the Mad Hatter's pocket watch, along with a "caterpillar" made of ox tongue terrine and a mock turtle egg made of puréed vegetables. The charm of food like this is that it's presented without pretension, as if it were a series of benevolent magic tricks designed not to intimidate but to amuse. (Warning, though: This divertissement takes about four hours and costs $290 per person, without wine or tip.)