Eating in a smart hotel restaurant with a five and seven year old can be a little worrying. Will the food be too fussy for them? Will they behave? We had already enjoyed gorgeous hot cold canapés in the garden with cocktails, where the children had ample room to run about but I was a little worried about the mixture of small children and the abundance of white table clothes and sparkling glassware in the beautiful, huge-windowed restaurant overlooking the garden. But as it was, I needn’t have worried.

The kitchen is led by head chef Mark Sayers and is designed to change with the seasons. The vast majority of the food is sourced locally from named providers and fresh herbs and salad leaves come from the garden. If there is something particular you want which is not on the menu, the restaurant is happy to prepare it for you given 24 hours notice.

As all the food is prepared to order, the hotel owner Jill Fleming told me that while there isn’t a children’s menu, any of the dishes could be simplified for the children. So to start, five-year-old Livi, who is quite sophisticated in her tastes, tried Charentais melon salad with vine tomatoes, cucumber, mint and feta cheese, which apart from picking the mint off as “yucky green bits” she loved, and seven-year-old Toby was delighted with his plain “orange melon.” My husband Alex had a fantastically fresh-tasting lobster salad while I had Baked Cromer crab with Wells alpine cheese served with lemon dressed summer leaves, which managed to be both light and flavoursome.

To follow Alex had roast rump of English lamb (“beautifully tender” he said) with a cassoulet of summer beans and rosemary-infused red wine sauce (“excellent”) while I had seared king scallops, parma ham, and salad leaves with tomato, black olive and basil vinaigrette. My scallops tasted straight-from-the-sea fresh and the salad and its dressing were perfect. The children shared chargrilled sirloin steak with chef’s hand cut chips which was declared “even better than burgers.”

The wine list is extensive and varied – we opted for a 2005 Chateau La Courolle St Emilion which was excellent.

The desert menu was particularly tempting and it was very difficult to choose between the eight options, which included two and a half year old Parmigiano Reggiano, pear and quince cheese. Tempting as that sounded, I felt like something sweet so opted for crunchy walnut and chestnut honey tart with Norfolk lavender (home made) ice cream while Alex had roast peaches and nectarines with dark rum and brown sugar served with vanilla ice cream. Both were excellent, and we were only sorry we didn’t have room to try the other fabulous-sounding deserts on the menu too.

By now the children were falling asleep at the table so a waiter brought coffee and exquisite petit-fours over to our cottage so we could put the children to bed. After an afternoon at the beach and such a perfect meal, it wasn’t long before we found ourselves falling asleep too.