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Not for nothing was Joyce Molyneux celebrated as a leading chef. Highly acclaimed by The Good Food Guide, and one of the first female chefs in Britain to be awarded a Michelin star (1978), the restaurant she founded and co-owned was at the forefront of modern British cooking in the 1970s and 1980s. The Carved Angel’s very first appearance in the Guide in 1975 gave notice that this was an extraordinary restaurant and it went on to become one of the most famous restaurants in the UK. Joyce Molyneux retired in 1999, and died in 2022, aged 91.

With International Women’s Day on Friday 8th March, and to celebrate the restaurant’s 50th anniversary, where better to head this week than to Dartmouth and The Angel to chat with Elly Wentworth.

Even before you arrive at the inn, the location is a corker, bang opposite the Gothic remains of Byland Abbey with its huge half-moon of empty rose window. If anything, the ruins look more dramatic when spotlit at night, which is when the Abbey Inn feels at its most welcoming as a retreat from the nearby North York Moors.

Teej Sparks is the co-founder of Wales’ Best Local Restaurant 2024, Inn at the Sticks. How have they been celebrating the win? The Good Food Guide finds out.

It must be the perfect country inn: an 18th-century former farmhouse of mellow stone, set in a beautiful, wooded valley, in the heart of the North York Moors National Park, four miles from Rievaulx Abbey and bang opposite the 12th century Cistercian, Byland Abbey. Jill Turton takes a first look at The Abbey Inn, Byland.