For my birthday this year I was treated to a night at Fawsley Hall in Northamptonshire. Fawsley Hall is a lovely old country house hotel that I spent many an event working at back in my events management days. I loved this place and never got a chance to spend a lovely relaxing evening enjoying the surroundings, until now…!

So we prepared for our 2 hour journey on Saturday lunchtime after plenty of birthday spoils in the morning. Brief pit stop at the Oxford motorway services to fill up on a KFC snack and we were soon winding our way through the Northamptonshire countryside. This is a beautiful drive through some really picturesque little villages and past acres and acres of fields which are just perfect.

As you come off of the main road there is a mile of dirt track to get to the hotel which is fun in a Polo, good job we had missed the snow!! We had actually been pretty lucky with the weather and managed to get out for a walk around the grounds after checking in. The spring lambs were jumping around and it was nice not to hear any cars and breathe in the fresh air. Bliss!

After our little walk we settled in our room with a bottle of pink Moet bubbles and watched The September Issue – thanks Sam for putting up with the girly afternoon haha! We decided to go for a pre-dinner drink in The Great Hall. So we sat back on a huge sofa and ordered our apple martinis. The service at Fawsley is exceptional, from the moment you come in the door you are treated like a VIP, our host in The Great Hall tended to our every need and bought the menus for us to choose our food before being taken to the restaurant ‘Equilibrium’.

Whilst enjoying our cocktails we were treated to a little plate of amuse-bouche which were delicious and surely a sign of good things to come. We were led past the plebs in the main dining room and into a small dining room which is Equilibrium, the hotel’s fine dining restaurant. Again, the service was polite and slick. Now I’m not sure if it was our fault that we didn’t choose the tasting menu or that we were left to our own devices to choose from the al la carte menu… but we had made some major fails!

To start they bought us the first palette cleanser, the butternut squash in a shot glass. Bit too much and a bit to gloopy but we got through most of it without vomitting. We had both ordered the ‘24 Hour Suckling Pig’ starter. Our expectation of what was to come was not what was sitting in front of us now. Carried away with the title, we had ignored the fact that this was in fact a cold terrine and not the juicy hot pork belly type creation we had envisaged. Even the little side plate that looked like a nice bit of crackling was in fact a posh sausage roll. Pretty disappointed but it was edible nevertheless.

By now we were quietly laughing to ourselves and hoping the next course was going to save the meal. Hmmm. The next interim course was a duck egg hollowed out and filled with the richest scrambled egg I’ve ever tasted along with some really strong ham. Looked good, tasted way too heavy. Holding back the vomit on this one!

Main courses. We went for different ones here… Sam ordered the ‘Poached and roasted Partridge’, I went with the ‘550 Fallow Deer’. I won this one! Mine actually was pretty nice, although again the sauce was way too rich. Sam’s face said it all really…

(By the way, despite this tragedy on a plate we were actually having an excellent night, taking it all pretty light hearted).

At last we were on the home straight… desert. Again, we had gone for different options. Sam ordered ‘Quince’ and I ordered ‘Artichoke’. Yep, that’s what we thought!! Sam won this round. Simply excrutiating… no idea what it was supposed to be really but I just shoved as much in as I could and took a large swig of wine.

I have to say, even though the tastes were too strong and at times pretty unbearable all mixed together (yes I think we probably should have read the menu properly), the presentation was fantastic and service faultless. We would have stayed for a nightcap but thought better of it just in case they tried to feed us more food!

We giggled our way back to the room and that’s as far as I’ll take you…

Fantastic birthday weekend in our majestic country house hotel.