Yorkshire's highest rated hotel wins AA award for culinary excellence

Swinton Park, the 30 bedroom luxury castle hotel at Masham owned by the Cunliffe-Lister family, has been awarded 3 Rosettes by the AA for Culinary Excellence at its restaurant, Samuel’s.

This award places the hotel in the top ten per cent of restaurants in the country, and combined with its Four AA Red Stars, Swinton Park is now the highest rated hotel in Yorkshire and Cumbria.

Head chef, Andy Burton, joined Swinton Park in May 2004. “Reaching this standard of excellence is a great achievement, and we are all thrilled with the award”. The style of the cuisine served is Modern British, and heavily influenced by the meat, game and produce sourced from the surrounding family estate and the hotel’s four acre walled garden which has been designed by Susan Cunliffe-Lister (Country Life Gardener of the Year 2001).

The restaurant is named after Mark Cunliffe-Lister’s great-great-great grandfather, Samuel, a Bradford mill owner who moved to Swinton on retirement in the 1880’s. Portraits of Samuel adorn the walls of the dining room, which is lavishly decorated with an ornate gold leaf ceiling.