Dog friendly restaurants in Devon
Published 16 June 2024

There are few better places to enjoy fresh fish in the South Hams than at this blue beach hut on the shingle seafront at Beesands. The Hutchings family have been running their fishing enterprise here for more than 40 years, and are now in the business of serving up their catch to customers. Their weather-beaten shack is now a robust, rustic café/restaurant, which doles out whole Start Bay crabs and lobsters alongside specials such as scallop and monkfish Thai red curry. Book ahead – and BYOB. Those walking the South West Coast Path can stop for a stellar crab sandwich or fish and chips from the takeaway hatch.

Tim Bouget continues to expand the definition of what a modern-day eatery might be at his eco-friendly venue at Ness Cove, overlooking Lyme Bay near Teignmouth. If it takes some finding, persistence is rewarded by a menu of all-day contemporary café food, with electronic pre-ordering a neat way of ensuring a smooth passage through – whether you're at a table or sitting in a waiting car.

In the summer months, the outdoor pizza oven is fired up for terrace feasting. Otherwise, the world is your oyster, kicking off with breakfast (perhaps a house-baked croissant, organic porridge or the ‘best bacon and egg roll ever’). Lunch and all-day menus run from fish-finger wraps to dukkah-spiced roast pumpkin and red onion broth, grilled Haldon fallow deer burgers and panko-crumbed Brixham plaice fillets with tartare sauce and salad in a soft tortilla. Alternatively, warm yourself up with a mug of curried English lentil dhal with kale, coconut milk and spices.

The sweet-treat brigade is also well served with carb fests including fruity flapjacks, sticky ginger cake, choc-chip cookies and the like. Drinking is usually interesting too: boozy hot chocolate, dirty chai, lavender lemonade, mocha milkshakes and so on.

One of those perfect, no-frills seafood spots you dream of finding in every fishing village but rarely do. Despite the name, this is a proper restaurant rather than a shed, while its haul of crabs is landed and boiled a stone's throw from the quay. Other plus points include a good wine and beer list, local spirits, waterside terrace seating and far more variety than just whole crabs cracked and served cold or warm with garlic butter. Expect anything from fish and chips to bouillabaisse; crabs are also available ready-dressed for those who don't fancy getting messy.

Clare Lattin and Tom Hill, once of Ducksoup in Soho, have migrated to the sub-Dartmoor stretches of south Devon and pitched camp on the T-junction that more or less is Ashburton. It's a small room with an agreeable buzz and square tables (some for sharing) supplemented by wicker stools at the counter and window that are probably best reserved for younger, more resilient backsides. Just add a thrifty, serenely industrious kitchen, plus a wine-store (for retail) half-hidden behind a curtain, and a frequently changing menu that works within its own modest capacities to produce contemporary, Italian-inflected small plates and mains. The special of the day on our lunch visit in the long linger of late winter involved chunks of sublime red-rare hanger steak in a mound of roasted Tropea onion with salted ricotta, capers and oregano. Others were scarfing up the broad-ribboned pappardelle with a ragù of ox cheek and black olives, as well as marinated gurnard in an aromatic livery of golden raisins, almonds and saffron. Appetisers are a little more prosaic (a couple of splots of white Gorgonzola with lightly pickled pear; shaved pickled fennel in oregano and chilli) but there is good charcuterie, and even the minimal choice of two desserts will provoke agonies of indecision. The dark chocolate mousse with ginger and oat crumb looked the business, but altogether flawless was our blood-orange and pistachio tart with crème fraîche. Only a select few of the wines emerge from behind the curtain onto the list, but they are enterprising and interesting Italian regional stars: a tobaccoey, Merlot-based Gambellara, perhaps, or a skin-contact Sicilian from Grecanico-Inzolia. Aperitifs run to a take on the Bellini earthed up with rhubarb juice.

A little out of Plymouth city centre, along the route to the international ferry terminals, this is the latest venture from David Jenkins and the team behind Rock Salt (now closed). It's a place that's determined to demonstrate its versatility, with an outdoor area as well as a warren of indoor spaces on different levels – plus regular music nights to add to the gaiety. Jake Hardington cooks a fairly mainstream brasserie menu, with filled bagels (a speciality), a good-value fixed-price lunch and a roster of pedigree Devon suppliers proudly credited on a wall-board. Presentations aim to be eye-catching – witness a broad earthenware dish of gently flavoured smoked mackerel pâté (looking like a bowl of creamy soup), dotted with diced pickled veg, hazelnuts and dill, accompanied by seeded stout and treacle bread. For main course, there could be duck confit with a pork and shrimp 'baozi' or Thai pork curry, but also appealingly tender Dartmoor lamb rump with pommes Anna, roasted asparagus and black garlic purée. Desserts will push most buttons with cheesecake, toffee pudding and the like: our hefty sundae-glass serving of raspberry trifle came topped with chunks of honeycomb, alongside a beautifully intense raspberry sorbet. The flair and finish of the cooking deserves much better wines than the short, perfunctory selection, but there are tempting cocktails too.

Older subscribers may recall the Taco Boys' horse-box on Porthilly beach. It was the jumping-off point for the collective that now runs Stage in Exeter's bosky Magdalen Road district, a 10-minute flit from the city centre. The place has been dolled up a little in the last few years, with comfier booth-style seating and the reception desk now moved sensibly to the door. Felix Craft and his team can be seen through a broad hatch at the back, while the effervescent Robbie Ashby runs the front with galvanising panache.

The place takes about five minutes to fill up in the evening (book well ahead), and a sense of community prevails – we're all eating the same things, after all (give or take the odd allergy). It's four set courses at lunch, six at dinner, changing weekly. We began with a bowl of yummy beetroot gazpacho, accompanied by a steel brochette of beetroot, bresaola and quail's egg. Next up was a shatteringly good version of Chinese sticky chilli beef, made with battered and glazed shin, on an underlay of stir-fried spring greens, asparagus and slivered garlic – a stunning success. An intermediate salad saw more wafer-thin, rosy-red beef topped with Devon Blue cheese and rocket, before a majestic main course of crisped pollock with lemony fennel and wholewheat farfalle in a puddle of 'nudja fat, sizzling with chilli. 

A cheese course with lacto-fermented mini-plums and candied pistachios followed, while the whole show was rounded off with a slice of rhubarb frangipane tart, its accompanying milk espuma dotted with cornflakes. The drinks flight is worth taking: only three of the six items were wine when we visited, the rest were aromatic cocktails, shrubs and shandy. Not every match is, strictly speaking, a match, and the approach can teeter on the edge of recklessness, but it adds hugely to the fun. Which is exactly what Stage aims to deliver.

The Bull describes itself as an 'organic, radical, ethical' pub, which is what it's about these days. Who doesn't love a radical pub? Just round the corner at the top end of Totnes' main drag, it's certainly a comfortable and welcoming place to enjoy good beers, adventurous wines, and some conscientiously sourced local produce that is treated with respect for its innate quality.

Johnny Tillbrook's blackboard menus offer a wealth of choice, turning Jersey-milk Ogleshield cheese, Jerusalem artichokes and leeks into a warming gratin topped with pangrattato, or curing monkfish in paprika, alongside electrifying accompaniments of blood-orange, fennel and chilli oil.

No lily feels over-gilded, and yet every dish has plenty to say for itself, through to sustaining mains such as sea bass in ajo blanco with spinach and roast courgette, or chicken breast with greens, turnip, onion, skordalia and green sauce. Basque cheesecake, perhaps with prunes soaked in Earl Grey, is a sweet stalwart. The small plates arrangement remains a good way to go for an enterprising group (how about venison koftas with cumin yoghurt, preserved lemon and pomegranate salad?). Wines are arranged by style, and (not surprisingly) embrace a healthy showing of biodynamic and natural specimens.

‘So consistent, cosy and welcoming,’ commented one regular visitor to this fine old 16th-century inn a short detour from some of the National Park’s best trails. Since taking over in 2019, the Barker-Jones family have given the oak-beamed, slate-floored interior a satisfying makeover, with lots of attention to detail (note the lovely hand-painted photos on the walls). ‘You would feel welcome to just pop in for a drink,’ noted a reporter, but it would be a sin to miss the pub’s main attraction – its menu of carefully sourced local and seasonal food.

The kitchen delivers ‘deep full-on flavours’ across the board, from hunks of warm home-baked bread with Netherend butter and bowls of verdant pea soup topped with seasonal ramsons to panna cotta with rhubarb and shortbread or treacle tart given extra zing with confit orange, candied zest and crystallised ginger ice cream. In between, Jail Ale-battered haddock with triple-cooked chips is a winner, likewise the cider-braised West Country pork fillet and the stone bass and Teignmouth mussels with fennel, samphire and mussel velouté. It’s also worth working up an appetite for the effusively praised Sunday lunch with its offer of roast moorland sirloin and the like. 

Service from really professional, welcoming staff is all you could wish for, as is the wide-ranging drinks list, which covers everything from local Dartmoor Ale to classic cocktails and a small but varied list of mostly Old World wines.

The Tytherleigh could be another whitewashed roadside inn, briefly glimpsed along the A358 as you hurtle towards the Dorset border. But halt. Within its 16th-century walls, there is plenty more going on than pub grub. In the kitchen, there's a firm commitment to West Country supply lines, and the menus speak a language that big-city escapees would recognise. Start with miso-glazed king oyster mushroom with kohlrabi rémoulade, mushroom ketchup and cep soil, a fungal exploration full of umami wallop, or consider grilled and tartared mackerel with compressed apple and beer-vinegared beetroot. Dishes have the sturdiness of flavour to back up their smart looks: cod is rolled up and set beside roasted and puréed cauliflower with a bit of burnt lemon in cockle velouté. A daring ingenuity for combining sees crispy pork belly appear with smoked eel, along with caramelised onion and hispi cabbage. Those in the market for fish and chips or a steak will find themselves rather more royally served than they were expecting. Chips with the latter are, in the modern manner, truffle-oiled and tweaked with Parmesan. Finish with matcha and pistachio cake garnished with white chocolate Chantilly. Wines start at £22 for Italian house selections.