Lainston House

My friends and I family treated me to a pre wedding afternoon tea .. a beautiful location … with excellent service and staff very attentive.. the private room was decorated and was so beautiful arranged it made you feel very emotional…the tea and food was superb thank you Lainston for helping create such a wonderful occasion would highly recommend

Having seen Tom Hamblett on Masterchef and been very impressed with his dishes, the opportunity to experience a 3-course meal at Lainston was too good an opportunity not to take up. £85 for 3 courses, extra for additional sides, drinks and service at this level is pretty decent value, as long as the meal lives up to expectation, and it went way beyond that! We’ve been lucky to experience many 3-star Michelin and fabulous meals and restaurants all over the world, and whilst the theatre and starched service is not on the menu here, the food was amongst the best we have had in a very long time. The service is really friendly, the right side of familiar and the crew we experienced certainly knew the dishes and their wines. From the moment the home made breads and butters as a complimentary palette wetter were brought, it felt this was going to be good. Lobster (£10 supplement) was simply sublime. The scallop starter was possibly one of the best things I have ever eaten, to combine scallop, cauliflower, ponzu and raisins in a dish is audacious and it paid off! We both went for the signature beef fillet with beef tartare and roscoff onion stuffed with brisket - incredible. The additional side of truffled new potatoes were absolute perfection too. Desserts were simply outstanding - olive oil cake and the now legendary peanut and chocolate slice with banana ice cream. I can still taste it. We were celebrating a birthday and our anniversary, and we also got a little chocolate cake with a Happy Birthday, a very nice gesture in a high-end place. To top it all off we met Tom in person afterwards; you could tell he had been burning the oil for the last few months but was so humble, interested in what we had ordered and what we liked. We have vowed to try and celebrate our anniversary wherever he is cooking next time as he really is an exceptional talent.

Best afternoon tea in Hampshire. And we eat a lot of afternoon tea! Chloe and the other server we had were fabulous and made our tea feel very special. Love the new layout of the room which has much more space and is much easier to eat in than on the smaller tables in the drawing room. Excellent experience 👏 👌

Booked for dinner for a joint birthday celebration. Advised by reception that both restaurants on a par, clearly not as The Wheelhouse where we ended up was more of a cafe/lunch venue not dinner. Slow service and under staffed. The menu was limited and the options I selected not great, onion and goats cheese salad, not presented well and seemed like a bag of Florete ripped over the cheese. The beef bavette was chewy and dauphinoise that was essentially a large chip. None of us opted for dessert as we had tired of the experience. Evidently we had misinformation from the reception when booking, do we try The Avenue to perhaps regain the joy of birthday celebration, I’m not sure.

Feeling sad ,,,,20 years ago my husband and i would go a couple of saturday nights a month nearly for dinner in the restaurant and it was just wonderful And we would often share the dining room with the rich and famous Well the ex president bush would not want sunday lunch thats for certain What has happened How difficult can it be to employ a chef to cook a roast dinner a couple of decent starter and a couple of puddings Just appalling food Service was good Until we complained and one dark haired girl looked very sulky This is Lainstone House ! Used to be the very best you could getv What a terrible terrible shame Should be ashamed of theirselves Serving rubbish tough stringy fatty beef frozen roast potatoes Soggy limp yorkshire puddings !!!!! Chef no chef would serve up that And this is from someone that liked school dinners ! The starter was disgusting 🤮 Absolutely disgusting 🤢 I am in total shock and sad sad sad and the demise of what was such a wonderful place to go Zero standards You cannot serve that up to humans

We stayed 2 nights here for our wedding anniversary, didn’t arrive until 6pm on our first night, we had booked a table in the Wellhouse restaurant which was situated a short distance from the main hotel. I ordered the Pork Burnt Ends to start which were delicious, we then shared bone in Porterhouse steak which absolutely unbelievable, cooked to perfection and really tender with beautiful red cabbage, sorry no room for dessert. We enjoyed a good breakfast ahead of attending the cookery school which a fabulous event, very much a must do if you stay at Lainston House. After a much needed walk around the hotel grounds we then looked forward to our dinner in the Avenue restaurant headed by masterchef champion Tom Hamblet, WOW WOW, what a extremely enjoyable meal with such perfection shown on every plate, hopefully the chef will get a Michelin star soon, best of luck to him and team.