Bar & Dining at the Gleneagles

For a hotel forever associated with the most catastrophically run dining room in television history, the real Gleneagles took its food seriously. This page preserves the hotel's dining life as it stood in its final years — and no, the kitchen never once served rat.

Anstey's Restaurant

The hotel's main restaurant took its name from the cove below the grounds. Its kitchen promised — in the house phrase — "unique, global, chef-driven food with a traditional British touch, using local produce," which in South Devon means some of the best raw materials in Britain: fish landed across the bay, Devon beef and lamb, and cream that needs no introduction. By day the restaurant spilled onto the pool terrace for lunch al fresco; after sunset, diners watched the pool's fibre-optic light show from their tables. The full story, including the room's earlier life as the Atlantic Restaurant, is on the Anstey's Restaurant page.

Basil's Bar & Brasserie

The bar lounge was the hotel's social centre and its sense of humour made manifest — because what else do you call the bar at the Fawlty Towers hotel? Restyled by a leading interior design studio in the boutique relaunch, Basil's served light lunches, cocktails and champagne beneath a conservatory with views over the Devon coastline. Its story — and its previous incarnation as the Tropicana Bar — is preserved on the Basil's Bar & Brasserie page.

Afternoon Tea

The hotel claimed, with a straight face, "the best afternoon tea in Torquay" — two set options, a wide selection of teas and coffees, and the obligatory debate about whether cream or jam goes first (in Devon, cream first; the hotel was diplomatic about it). Taken in the conservatory or on the terrace, afternoon tea at the Gleneagles was the most faithfully Victorian thing the hotel did, in a town the Victorians built.

Sunday Lunch and the Weekly Rituals

The dining week had its fixtures. Sunday lunch — billed in the hotel's last years as "the ultimate dining experience" under a new kitchen team — packed the restaurant with locals as well as residents, always a telling sign on the seafront grapevine. Steak nights gave the grill a mid-week outing; a "breakfast to go" service, remarkably ahead of its time for a traditional seaside hotel, sent early-departing guests off with a packed morning meal. And the bar's two-for-one main course offers kept the brasserie busy through the shoulder seasons.

Dining With a View

What unified everything was the setting. Few dining rooms in Torbay looked out the way the Gleneagles did — over its own gardens and pool, across the treetops towards Anstey's Cove, with Lyme Bay beyond. The town's food scene has only grown since (the bay's fishing fleet at Brixham now supplies restaurants across Britain, a story the English Riviera's official guide tells well), but the hotel's particular combination — white linen, sea light, and a bar named for a fictional tyrant — was its own thing entirely.

For where the dining rooms sat within the wider hotel, see the hotel portrait; for the evenings when dinner came with a floor show, see events and entertainment and the celebrated Fawlty Towers Weekends.

The Dining Eras

Like the hotel itself, the table changed with the times. The 2001-era Gleneagles fed the cabaret crowd in the classic manner — set dinners before the show, carvery Sundays, coffee in the lounge while the band re-tuned. The first boutique menu cards of 2011 introduced the Atlantic Restaurant and the Tropicana Bar; within two years both rooms had been renamed — Anstey's and Basil's — as the relaunch found its confidence and its sense of humour. The archived sample menus read as a time capsule of early-2010s hotel dining: three courses, local fish, a dessert involving Devon cream, and prices that now look like typographical errors. Through every era, one constant: the dining room faced the sea, because in Torquay there has never been a better sauce.