Comfort food is having a confident winter. At Burnham Beeches Hotel, the Georgian country house in Buckinghamshire a short run from London on the Elizabeth Line, the colder season is being marked not with reinvention but with a deliberate return to the dishes people actually crave when the clocks go back: pies, slow-cooked meat and puddings worth lingering over.
The new autumn and winter menu at the hotel’s restaurant, Brasserie 1927, arrives alongside a new head chef. Nasser Kheir joins after more than two decades in London’s luxury hotel kitchens, among them The Dorchester, Hotel Cafe Royal and the Four Seasons at Park Lane. It is a CV that usually signals tweezers and foams. What he has put at the centre of the plate instead is a chicken and mushroom pie.
That is rather the point. The interesting move in restaurant food right now is not another technical flourish; it is kitchens with serious pedigree choosing to cook the familiar things properly. Done carelessly, comfort food is a soft option. Done by someone who has spent 25 years in exacting rooms, it is a statement about where the pleasure in eating actually lives.
The evening menu opens with roasted pumpkin with celeriac remoulade and grilled artichoke, and a beetroot tartare with feta, glazed walnuts and rocket. The mains lean into the season: a confit duck leg with sweet potato puree, puy lentils and duck jus, and the pie itself, served with mashed potato and a Madeira jus. For something more upright there is beef fillet with red wine jus, or pan-fried sea bass with cannellini beans and a brown shrimp stew. Vegetarians are not treated as an afterthought, with a roasted cauliflower steak built out with black garlic puree and coconut foam.
Then the puddings, which is where the menu plants its flag. A dark chocolate fondant with coffee ice cream, a vegan sticky toffee with butterscotch and walnut ice cream, and a rice pudding creme brulee that takes a nursery staple and gives it a blowtorch. For anyone who would rather finish savoury, there is a trio of British cheeses with the hotel’s own truffle honey.
The provenance is doing real work here, not just marketing. Meat comes from Timpsons, the hotel’s local butcher, and bread from Jung’s Bakery. Herbs and vegetables are pulled from the hotel’s own kitchen garden, and honey comes from its on-site beehives. It is the kind of short-supply-chain cooking that has quietly become the expectation rather than the boast, something we looked at in why restaurants keep telling you they grow their own.
The timing is not accidental either. Burnham Beeches turns 300 in 2027, and a confident winter menu under a new chef reads like a kitchen limbering up for the anniversary. Kheir’s stated philosophy is refreshingly plain: good ingredients, seasonal flavours and dishes people genuinely want to eat. It is a chef changing rooms rather than reinventing the wheel, a move in the same spirit as Tomos Parry taking his cooking somewhere new.
Whether this is a long lunch with friends, a winter dinner or a Sunday escape from the city, the pitch is the same one comfort food has always made, now with a sharper kitchen behind it: slow down, and eat something that was made to be enjoyed rather than photographed.
Menu details via Burnham Beeches Hotel, Brasserie 1927.