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An
Italian restaurant located just a few miles from the home of black
pudding has been named the best restaurant in the country by Good
Food Guide
The award
cements the burgeoning reputation of Ramsons in Ramsbottom, just
outside Bury, Lancashire, which in the last few years has emerged as
one of the country's finest Italian restaurants.
It beat
better known names on the shortlist, such as London's Pied à
Terre, to the top spot as the Good Food Guide's Restaurant of the Year.
Its set up,
however, is decidedly unorthodox. The restaurant was founded by a
Northumberland couple Chris and Ros Johnson 23 years ago, with the
kitchen run by Abdullah Naseem from the Maldives, who refined his
skills at the Swiss Hotel School in Lausanne.
Ramsbottom is
a small, former mill town which boasts the World Black Pudding
Throwing Championships once a year.
The intimate
restaurant, with just 34 covers, takes its name from the old English
name for wild garlic that thrives in the cool climate of the West
Pennines, but the food its serves is unashamedly Italian.
Tagliatelle
with veal ragu shares its place alongside flashed fillet of beef with
potato gratin, cardoncelli mushrooms and marrow bone sauce. The wine
list is exclusively Italian and more than one restaurant reviewer has
crowned Ramson's espresso as "the best in the country".
Elizabeth
Carter, The Good Food Guide's editor, said: "Ramsons is a
stylish little restaurant, but also warm and welcoming - the sort of
place you enter as a customer and leave as a friend. We were really
impressed by the passion of owner Chris Johnson, and his talent for
sourcing traceable and seasonal ingredients from local suppliers as
well as superb Mediterranean produce from Italy."
Mr Johnson
said: "I am gobsmacked. The idea that The Good Food Guide has
decided the best restaurant in the country is in Ramsbottom is scary.
"All I set out to do was run a good, local restaurant."
The Good Food
Guide award specifically tries to highlight regional venues, with
each region - chosen by a poll of 20,000 readers - submitting one
entry each year. It was one of a number of awards made by Which?, the
consumer watchdog, which publishes the restaurant guide. Many of the
awards championed smaller, niche operators that have a reputation of
quality of service rather than price.
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