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The Northgate

A comfortable and fashionable 'restaurant with rooms' in the heart of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk's most happening and foodie town.

Bury St Edmunds is one of our favourite English towns, so we were delighted to discover The Northgate – a relatively new 'restaurant with rooms' situated in an elegant Victorian townhouse, which has taken a rightful place at the top table in what is undeniably one of East Anglia's best towns for food and restaurants. Plus it has rooms so you can make a weekend of it.

The East Anglia hotel and restaurant group Chestnut Inns took over the Northgate 3 years ago, and has turned what was a perfectly nice but quite traditional guesthouse into one of the region's most self-consciously fashionable hotels and places to eat. There's a young, casually dressed staff and a metropolitan air abounds, deliberately bringing a touch of hipsterish glamour to Bury St Edmunds, both in the cool confines of the restaurant and retro-furnished cocktail bar and also in the nine boutiquey rooms upstairs. Each of these is of individually furnished in a classic modern style, and equipped with king-size double beds, good wifi, flatscreen Freeview TVs and lavishly appointed en-suite bathrooms, some of which feature bath/showers and others separate walk-in showers. The rooms are perfectly pitched between luxury and comfort, tradition and modernity, and as such make a great place to stagger up to after dinner and maybe a cocktail or two.

One of the Northgate's nicest guest rooms is a suite, so perfect for a family, though it has to be said that's not the Northgate's target market – as evidenced by the recently refurbished bar, which serves a fabulous array of cocktails (including a mean signature rhubarb cosmopolitan) and the slick and very comfortable restaurant, which serves an admirably short menu that focuses as much as possible on local produce: Blythburgh pork from the Suffolk Coast, salt marsh lamb from the Essex's Colne Valley, crab from Cromer and fish from nearby Lowestoft. The cooking is excellent and the presentation thoroughly up-to-date, and it's not hard to imagine yourself eating here regularly if only you lived in Bury, maybe occasionally at the restaurant's popular 'chef's table'. As it is, you'll have to make do with a very comfortable room and the feeling that Bury might be a place to consider if you're ever consider moving out of town. Just leave yourself some time to browse those estate agents...