Alpine Restaurant
The Grange Village
Asfordby Hill
Melton Mowbray
Leicestershire
LE14 3QU
01664 812 802
Website | Email
Visit: October 2009
Summary: Disappointed. Good for a coffee, for food, go visit the farm shop.
Tucked away near a Leicestershire village, the Grange is a collection of little shops, like a garden centre, a gift shop, a sports shop, a gun (!) shop and a farm shop. Attached to it is a restaurant, called the Alpine Restaurant.
We had been there the year before, as we drove from the East Midlands Food Festival - which is exactly what we did this year as well. We had totally forgotten that after last year, we wanted to have lunch at the restaurant, so we shouldn't have bothered having anything proper to eat at the festival... well... we decided to have a coffee and a dessert.
Drinks: Nothing to say about the coffee (actually, it was two mochas, but still... there was coffee involved!), because it was okay, and nice and warm on a chilly day.
Dessert: The dessert we decided on sharing was a rasperry jam crumble pie with custard (£4.50). The custard didn't really have any flavour. The crumble pie was only warm-ish where the warm custard had been poured over it, because the rest was cold. The pastry was quite nice, but the crumble top... it had pools of un-melted caster sugar on top. It really wasn't pleasant.
Service: Felt like it took a bit longer than it should've for what we ordered and how it was delivered (i.e. pie straight from the fridge with what was probably microwaved ready-made custard). Instead of waiting for someone to come by so we could ask for a bill, we went up and paid at the counter instead.
Inside: It's called Alpine for a reason: it's styled in an alpine hut type way: lots and lots of wood. Big, rustic wooden furniture (loooks great!), wooden walls, old, wooden skis on the walls, pictures of alpine resorts and that sort of thing. It looks very cosy and quaint.
Outside: It's quite hidden away, but well signposted. After a bit of a drive through a narrow passage among the trees, it opens up to a gravelled yard with a decent amount of parking spaces. Looks inviting.
The Grange Village: We didn't go to the farm shop this year, but we went last year. Lots of different local food, organic food and such. This is the home of Brockleby's Farm, a producer we like to get lamb meat from at our local farmer's market. That's a post in itself, so won't go into detail here. (Highly recommended, though!) The sports shop has some different clothing options, the gift shop has various gifts and things for the home, and the garden centre didn't seem to have a big indoor selection, but maybe we just didn't look very closely.
All in all, knowing how good the Brockleby's food is, we expected the restaurant food to be just as impressive... and it wasn't. The restaurant does look quite amazing inside, but the chairs aren't that comfortable and they're quite heavy to move. It did seem like you get rather generous portions if you go for a cake slice, and they had plenty of cakes to choose from. The pie wasn't a bad size, it was a pretty standard 2-3 inches wide on the outside, but yeah, we weren't all that impressed with it.
Not sure we'd skip lunch at the food festival next year in order to have proper food at the Alpine Restaurant, because if the dessert is anything to go by, a lunch would leave us wishing we had just bought a Brockleby's pie from the farm shop next door and had it when we got home! There's just no way of knowing, aside from going back next time we're in the area... which is probably in a year's time, when the food festival is next on...
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