FOXWELL Hotel · Est. 1874
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Dining

Seven courses,
one table

There is no menu, no sitting to choose and no table for two in the corner. Dinner is at eight, once, and everybody eats the same seven courses together.

01 · The Cellar

The Cellar
Dining Room

Dinner is at eight, once, and everybody eats together. There is no menu to choose from because there is no choice to make: seven courses arrive, they are the same seven for everyone, and they were decided somewhere between the kitchen garden and the fish merchant at about nine that morning.

Rhian Morgan has cooked here since 2020 and held three rosettes since 2022. She trained in Copenhagen and then unlearned most of it, which she says was the useful part.

Dietary requirements are not a problem, they are just information: tell us when you book and the seven courses become seven different courses. What we cannot do is a substitution decided at the table.

  • Seven courses
  • Twenty covers
  • Dinner at eight
The cellar, racked floor to ceiling with vintages

The cellar runs under the length of the house and holds about nineteen hundred bottles.

Barrels lined up along the cellar wall

The Wine

Nineteen hundred bottles, and a list you are welcome to argue with.

How an evening goes

Four fixed points, and nothing else arranged

Nine in the morning Rhian decides. The kitchen garden, the fish merchant and the weather get a say; nobody else does.
Four in the afternoon The fire is lit in the library and the bar opens. Somebody will offer you a sherry whether or not you want one.
Half past seven Drinks in the library. This is where you find out who else is staying, which is usually the best part.
Eight Dinner, once, everybody together, at one table of Welsh oak. Seven courses and about two and a half hours.
The library bar, books to the ceiling and a lit stove

02 · The Library Bar

Eleven hundred
books, and a fire

The books came with the house and have been catalogued exactly once, badly, in 1974. There is a card index in the drawer of the writing desk and it is wrong about roughly a third of them.

The fire is lit at four whatever the month. In August this is faintly ridiculous and we do it anyway, because the room is north-facing and the stone never really warms up.

The bar is almost entirely Welsh. Two whiskies, four gins, a vermouth made in a shed near the coast, and one bottle of Islay malt kept for a guest who asks for it by name.

  • Eleven hundred books
  • Fire lit at four
  • Welsh spirits

Breakfast

For as long as you want it

Served in the morning room from half past seven until whenever the last person appears. Eggs from the far field, bread baked at six, and a pot of coffee that will be replaced without your asking.

Non-residents

Four seats a night

Twenty covers, and sixteen of them belong to the house. The remaining four go to non-residents, released a month ahead, and they are gone the same week.

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