Best restaurants outside of London according to the National Restaurant Awards 2025

While this year’s National Restaurant Awards winners list is dominated by London establishments, there’s also plenty of choice if you are looking for fine dining outside of England’s capital too. Accolades have gone to every corner of the UK, so wherever you are you are never far from a great place to eat.

The National Restaurant Awards, celebrating “the brilliance and vibrancy of the UK’s eating out scene”, first launched in 2007. Revealing a list of the 100 best restaurants in the UK, it rewards the very best chefs, front of house staff and restaurants the country has to offer.

Speaking about the awards ceremony, former Michelin starred chef, Tom Kerridge, said: “Thoroughly loved the award ceremony, it was high energy, fun and a great night. I love the fact that it shows how great and diverse the food scene is in this country"

The list is created by an elite judging academy, using a panel of more than 200 experts from across the industry, including food writers, chefs and restaurateurs. The UK is split into 11 regions, with members of the academy voting for the top seven restaurants that they have dined at in the last 12 months, weighted in order of preference.

Top 10 restaurants outside of London

If you don’t live in London, or have plans to go there any time soon, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on a high-end bite to eat. With this in mind, from the National Restaurant Awards 2025 top 100 list, we have compiled the top 10 restaurants located elsewhere in the UK. This is what the judges had to say about these award-winning eateries.

1. Restaurant Moor Hall in Aughton, Lancashire

“Moor Hall’s idyllic location is a fitting backdrop for chef Mark Birchall’s ambitious and brilliant cooking”

The restaurant: A stunning restaurant with rooms located in a Grade II-listed building dating back to the 13th century, set in five acres of gardens.

The food: At Moor Hall the food really does the talking. The ambitious restaurant is tasting menu only, offering four and eight courses, although guests can expect rather more than this in reality, such is the restaurant’s generosity when it comes to ‘extras’. A meal starts at the bar with a charcuterie selection before moving to the high-ceilinged room for the main event. A tour of the kitchen gardens is also part of the experience, weather permitting.”

2. Osip in Bruton, Somerset

“Merlin Labron-Johnson’s idyllic farm-to-table restaurant has put the Somerset town of Bruton on the culinary map”

The restaurant: Set within a carefully renovated 18th century former pub, in June 2025, Osip introduced onsite accommodation with four rooms making the pilgrimage to taste Merlin Labron-Johnson’s food even easier.

The food: Osip is being billed as a ‘complete re-imagining’ of the Michelin-starred farm-to-table concept. The menu is described as evolving daily and is an expression of the Somerset landscape. At lunch a slightly shorter menu is served alongside longer standard and vegetarian options.

3. Ynyshir in Machynlleth, Powys

“The antithesis of a boring country house hotel, offering a tasting menu of in-your-face, Asian-influenced food and a rambunctious atmosphere”

The restaurant: Located just south of Snowdonia National Park on the western edge of mid Wales, Ynyshir is surrounded by rhododendron bushes and undulating yet carefully trimmed lawns. Inside it’s a little different where a stripped back, intimate dining room with fully-open kitchen is accompanied by an in-house DJ (yes you read that right) complete with glitter ball.

The food: Those that venture inside will find chef Gareth Ward - protégé of the Nottinghamshire-based Sat Bains - cooking a multi-course tasting menu of uncompromisingly edgy, Asian-influenced food. The food itself is described as ‘ingredient led and flavour driven’. This is an entirely accurate description, but one that doesn’t quite do justice to Ward’s explosive cooking. His approach is strikingly different to the norm – a peculiar but effective marriage of top-quality produce, Asian flavours and unusual technique served in a succession of tiny bites.

4. Woven by Adam Smith in Sunningdale, Berkshire

“Adam’s Smith’s slick restaurant is hotel fine dining at its unstuffy best”

The restaurant: Formerly Restaurant Coworth Park, Woven’s interior includes installations above giving the appearance of a loom, with long windows to one end of the dining room providing views over Coworth’s beautiful and impressive estate.

The Food: Woven offers a three course menu that’s bookended by a selection of savoury snacks and sweet ‘treats’. Chef Adam Smith’s cooking style remains rooted in the classical, having spent nearly a decade under John Williams at The Ritz but he has expanded his culinary horizons to create a more eclectic dining experience. This change of direction is most evident in the snacks, with a number of the dishes having a strong Asian influence.

5. Lyla in Edinburgh

“Edinburgh chef Stuart Ralston has thrown down the culinary gauntlet with his restaurant on the former 21212 site”

The restaurant: Opened in 2023, Lyla is the flagship restaurant of Stuart Ralston who previously worked for Gordon Ramsay in New York. Meals begin in a slick upstairs drawing room with the main restaurant area beneath offering a calm and elegant space with design details including crisp white tablecloths, grey velvet-upholstered chairs and sconces casting a dramatic lighting pattern onto the walls.

The Food: The 28-cover Lyla is billed by Ralston as ‘unapologetically fine dining’. It is not a fish restaurant per se but is fish-focused, with the majority of the courses on its tasting menu seafood based. With just 10 tables to worry about Ralston has been able to up the culinary ante significantly - his previous flagship Aizle has 50 covers - delivering picture-perfect dishes that demonstrate good technique while still allowing his high-quality ingredients to do the talking.

6. Paul Ainsworth at No.6 in Padstow, Cornwall

“Padstow’s ‘other’ restaurant mogul deals in fun as well as fine dining at his beautiful townhouse dining room”

The restaurant: The Michelin-starred restaurant, located in a Georgian townhouse, has built a reputation for its fun approach to fine dining.

The food: Paul Ainsworth at No.6 serves modern British food with a focus on Cornish produce. A former protege of Gordon Ramsay, Paul Ainsworth has learnt lessons that he still applies to this day. Ainsworth is a playful character, keen to bring something new to the table, as it were. His 'land & river' dish of Crapaudine beetroot, with smoked eel, green apple, and caviar is one of the first to pass people's lips, and it sets the tone perfectly for the quality and precision that follows.

7. Restaurant Pine in East Wallhouses, Northumberland

“A former cow barn has been transformed into the one of The North’s most progressive dining rooms”

The restaurant: Located in an old cow barn, it might not sound like the most glamorous of locations, but with a complete overhaul and with views over the Northumberland landscape and Hadrian’s Wall it’s a dining room that more than delivers on the visuals. It’s a tactile environment of light woods and furs with the room taking on an almost ethereal warm glow as the sun sets through its large window for a truly bucolic dining experience.

The food: Siân Buchan and Cal Byerley’s Northumberland restaurant had a sensational debut year, winning a Michelin star just nine months after it opened in 2021. The theatre of nature extends to what’s on the plate with Pine chefs Byerley and Ian Waller serving an almost 20-course procession of dishes, many of which use ingredients foraged from the Northumberland countryside or grown within the restaurant’s own kitchen garden. The cooking is progressive, using techniques such as preserving, fermenting and ageing to full effect, but never feels overwrought.

8. The Unruly Pig in Woodbridge, Suffolk

“Winsome and warm, Suffolk’s Unruly Pig serves filling and well-crafted pub food in an environment that reflects the personalities of the people behind the stunning venue”

The restaurant: Unruly by name, unruly by nature. The Unruly Pig has made waves since it launched back in 2015. In recent years that’s included being named by the Michelin Guide in 2021 as one of the top food pubs in the east of England, and topping the Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs list in 2022 and then repeating the feat in 2024 and 2025.

The food: Chef-patron Dave Wall, whose CV includes stints at Bibendum, Gordon Ramsay’s Boxwood Café, Claridges and Le Talbooth, leads the day-to-day running of the pub alongside head chef Karl Green. Described as the ‘dynamic duo’, the pair oversee a contemporary menu of unfussy ‘Britalian’ food where the focus is on the quality of the ingredients. Dishes change according to what is available from the market each day, with produce coming in fresh from the coast and other local suppliers. Guests can choose between à la carte and set menu options and there's also an excellent Sunday lunch offer, although arguably the best way to experience Wall and Green’s cooking is by going for the ‘Be Unruly’ tasting menu.

9. Restaurant Sat Bains in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire

“Sat Bains’ Nottingham ‘working class two-star’ restaurant is one of the most influential in the UK”

The restaurant: Don’t be put off by the somewhat inauspicious location of Restaurant Sat Bains – you arrive having travelled down a rather shabby lane and it sits under a busy flyover – the incongruity is on purpose. In addition to the main dining room guests can take the four-seat Kitchen Bench within the pastry section of the main kitchen or opt for the Tasting Room, which looks directly onto the savoury kitchen.

The food: For Bains, if you haven’t got a fancy postcode to rely on then the food you serve has to be absolutely top notch, and in the case of his restaurant this is definitely the case. At his restaurant, Bains is in search of perfection. He’s constantly tweaking and playing with ideas, meaning that a dish one week may have morphed into something different the week after.

10. The Sportsman in Seasalter, Kent

“Free of faff, The Sportsman still manages to be a proper pub despite being one of the best places to eat in the UK”

The restaurant: The Sportsman might not look much from the outside but behind its whitewashed and weathered facade is a world-class establishment serving some of the best food in the country, in a wonderfully humble and unpretentious fashion. It remains a proper pub with one of the most charming things about it – and there are many – being gastro tourists mingle with pint-nursing locals and day trippers, some of whom are oblivious to this seaside pub’s status as one of the very best places to eat in the UK.

The food: Low-key chef-patron Stephen Harris came to cooking relatively late in life and is entirely self taught. He has spent the past two decades or so building a closer connection to his environment, refining his recipes for homemade products like air-dried hams, cured fish, butter and even sea salt, which he makes by boiling seawater. The five-course tasting menu gives diners a choice of four dishes meaning that you can return regularly without repeating a meal. Dishes use ingredients from the immediate vicinity, exploring the pub’s unique salt marsh terroir and include mussel and bacon chowder and Harris’ legendary slip sole grilled in seaweed butter as well as Montgomery cheddar soufflé with mustard sauce.