Restaurant review: The Bell Inn at Ladbroke

It’s a good time to be a meat lover if you live in and around Leamington.

And we know our readers get excited when a new establishment opens specialising in serving steaks or other carnivore-focused dishes around the town.

With this in mind, we recommend to many of you that you venture a short distance out of town to check out The Bell Inn at Ladbroke.

The countryside pub has been given a new lease of life since it was taken over by the Freespirit Pub Company in January and, as its highly experienced new general manager Danny Mitova has announced, is ‘aiming to be the best independent steak house in the region’.

Judging by the meal my ‘plus one’ and I enjoyed at the warm and welcoming venue, on a reassuringly busy Wednesday evening last week, the venue is making the right moves to achieve this status and to bring in and please customers, who will no doubt want to return.

For our main we shared a wonderfully succulent and superbly seasoned T-Bone with both chimichurri and peppercorn sauces.

The house fries, crispy onions and buttered English greens were the perfect accompaniment to the fantastic T-Bone, sourced from local farmer and beef expert Robert Leech of Carpenters Farm.

The lovely main had been preceded by two top quality and beautifully prepared and cooked starters – handpicked crab on toast and roasted scallops with bacon and garlic butter – the kitchen at The Bell is clearly about more than serving sublime steaks.

This was proved further by our puddings – sticky toffee pudding with caramel sauce and vanilla ice cream and vanilla crème brulee, served with raspberries and home-made ginger biscuit which we were both glad we still had room to enjoy the way they deserved to be.

The Bell’s new owners and management have lofty ambitions for the restaurant and they are doing all they can to achieve these.

The many steak appreciators among our readers should be very excited about this new gem of a restaurant in the countryside just outside of Leamington.

bellinnatladbroke.co.uk