Parsonage Grill
Quietly excellent food behind a wisteria-covered façade on Oxford's Banbury Road, in rooms hung with British art.
Quietly excellent food behind a wisteria-covered façade on Oxford's Banbury Road, in rooms hung with British art.
The Old Parsonage sits at the southern end of the Banbury Road, right where the city proper begins, and it is the kind of Oxford hotel that locals actually use. Its restaurant, the Parsonage Grill, is our first choice when we want a proper meal in the city rather than a snatched sandwich between colleges. The dining room is set within the hotel's 17th-century stone walls, low and enclosed, hung with an eclectic private collection of oil paintings, mostly portraits of writers and artists, that gives the whole place a Bloomsbury-club warmth. Tables are spaced just far enough apart that you can talk without performing, and a long lunch here has a habit of quietly filling the afternoon.
The kitchen keeps things classic British with a light modern touch, cooked simply from good produce rather than reworked for effect. We treat the Parsonage as the fixed point of a day out, then build the rest of the visit around it. From the cottage it is roughly 35 minutes by car, straight down the A4260 through Deddington, and the Banbury Road location means you are on the northern edge of the centre, so parking is a little less of an ordeal than it can be closer in. Walk south and you are among the colleges within minutes; the Ashmolean and the University Parks are both an easy stroll away.
The Parsonage serves right through the day, which is what makes it so useful. Depending on the plan, we drop in at a different hour:
Two things lift the Parsonage above being simply a good hotel restaurant. The first is the walled terrace at the back, a genuine hidden oasis planted in homage to Yves Saint Laurent's Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech, where afternoon tea and a glass of something cold feel a world away from the traffic on the Banbury Road. The second is the paintings. The collection is serious enough to reward a slow wander on its own, and on a wet Oxford afternoon you can happily spend the whole visit inside the Parsonage itself: lunch, a browse of the art, then tea, without ever needing a coat. It is the sort of place that makes a grey day feel like the plan all along.
Oxford rewards a slow visit, and the Parsonage pairs naturally with the rest of it. Our full guide to Oxford lays out the colleges, museums and walks worth building in, and the Ashmolean is the obvious morning if you want something to do before the table is ready. For a different mood on another day, Quod on the High Street is the buzzier, brasserie-style alternative in the thick of the centre, while The Bear Inn is the tiny old pub to duck into for a pint between it all. Our wider guide to eating and drinking in the area runs from Oxford restaurants to village pubs closer to the cottage.
“If you only have one proper lunch in Oxford, make it the Parsonage Grill. The room, the food, the art on the walls. It all just works.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.