Matfen Hall is celebrating the arrival of spring with a new seasonal menu.
The Northumberland venue has launched a spring à la carte menu in its Cloisters Restaurant and Bar, offering a selection of dishes featuring seasonal and locally sourced produce, including ingredients grown in the estate’s gardens and foraged from its grounds.
Dishes include seared beef carpaccio, pan-fried salmon with polenta and roasted gem heart, and cauliflower steak with roasted pears and black garlic.
“The Cloisters brasserie menu is seasonal driven, and we’ve updated it to fit the shift in season,” said head chef Ernst Van Zyl. “With Mother Nature defrosting and waking up, bringing a whole new array of delicious produce, we aim to utilise the best produce from local farms, suppliers and Matfen’s own grounds. By using fresh, seasonal local ingredients, we are able to develop tantalising dishes for a sensational dining experience. We base our menu and dishes on the ingredients and produce that are in season. We’ve seen an uptick in wild garlic on the Matfen Hall gardens, so for the past weeks the kitchen staff have been foraging through the grounds.”
Cloisters is one of several restaurants at the hotel, along with the Emerald Restaurant, Matfen Hall’s premier dining destination, and The Drawing Room, an elegant afternoon tea venue with a harpist playing live on Saturdays. The majority of the produce sourced by the restaurants comes from the region, with most of the meat sourced from Northumberland and Durham while seafood comes from the east coast and the North Sea, and fruit and vegetables tend to come from Northumberland, Yorkshire and Cumbria.
