Some places try to do everything. Pit Kitchen does the opposite: a handful of dishes, cooked over fire, from ingredients grown or raised within a few miles. You eat outside in a garden near Moreton-in-Marsh, and it is one of the best meals you will have in the Cotswolds.
Pit Kitchen sits in a garden in Todenham, a quiet village just outside Moreton-in-Marsh, and it operates on a principle that sounds simple but is surprisingly rare: cook a few things really well, source almost everything from the fields and farms nearby, and let the fire do the talking. The menu is short and seasonal, built around whatever is growing or ready that week. There are no fryers, no gas burners. Everything passes over coals or through smoke, and the results have a depth of flavour that you remember long after you've left. Bring the dog; they're genuinely welcome, not merely tolerated.
What makes it special is the feel of the whole thing. You are eating in someone's garden, surrounded by the plants that will end up on next week's plates. It is relaxed, unhurried, slightly wild in the best way. The drive from the cottage takes around twenty minutes through some of the prettiest countryside in the area, and booking ahead is essential because word has very much got out. If the weather is kind (and even if it isn't, they have cover), it is one of those evenings that stays with you: woodsmoke, good wine, a plate of something you didn't expect to be that good, and the slow fade of a Cotswold sunset behind the trees.
“Genuinely one of those places where every single thing on the plate earns its spot. Book it, bring the dog, sit outside and let the fire do the work.”
All of this on the doorstep, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.