Who needs Poirot? Hrishi’s Farlam culinary whodunnit is a criminal delight

THIS has to be the ‘Secret Santa’ I’ll never forget. Farlam Hall chef patron Hrishikesh Desai has already dispensed an array of decadent snacks that riff on pork, lamb, venison and, unusually for such a Michelin-starred establishment, Cumberland sausage. Now each table is presented with a black box tied in gold ribbon. 

I’m not the first to unleash its contents. Around me are gasps and nervous giggles. Now I see why as I gaze down on two severed fingers, garish green with blood red ends.

Gastronomic excellence with lashings of playfulness… cast-iron evidence that country house hotels can still thrill

A tall, shaven-headed man, black jacket for the moment masking his tattoo sleeves, gets to his feet to reveal they are a homage to the gory opening of his crime novel, The Curator. In it detached digits are discovered in a Secret Santa present. It’s the third in MW Craven’s Washington Poe series, set primarily in Cumbria. 

Adopted Cumbrian Indian-born Desai and Carlisle native Craven are embarking on a one-night-only collaboration at the luxurious hotel outside Brampton. Matching fine dining dishes to arresting plot twists. 14 courses, including those snacks, with matching wines and author’s commentary. They’ve called it Murder Mystery and Michelin Stars. The suspense is killing, as they say.

It’s definitely new territory for the punk/squaddie/probation officer/cancer survivor turned best-selling writer. And certainly also for a chef, whose in-house Cedar Tree restaurant has just been named in La Liste’s 1,000 Global Best.

Desai has crafted the replica fingers from a 36-hour fermented coriander and chilli butter. To be liberally slathered on wedges of poolish bread, boosted by the kind of ferment that puts most sourdough to shame.

It’s just an elite 24 of us who are signed up for this tasting like no other – gastronomic excellence with lashings of playfulness. Cast-iron ‘evidence’ that country house hotels can still thrill. 

It has not always been a given. It was a mystery to me how so many, stiff, chintzy piles got away with murder. And I don’t mean in the Agatha Christie sense, where the suspects assemble in the drawing room for some fiendishly clever denouement. Yes, there are even event firms organising hotel weekends where you can dress up in twin-sets and tweeds to unleash your inner Miss Marple or Poirot.

Punter-pulling certainly, but not my kind of gig. It’s a completely different vibe at progressive hotels such as Farlam Hall, where gloriously revamped accommodation, a Michelin-starred kitchen and a decidedly unstuffy approach to hospitality take it to another level. 

In the recent Condé Nast Johansens Awards Farlam’s Cedar Tree was named UK Restaurant of the Year, while in the Top 50 Boutique Hotels list the Hall has just leapt 25 places to No.11, only five spots behind Lakes game changer Gilpin. That was Hrishi Desai’s previous Cumbrian billet, where he gained his first star for its SPICE restaurant. Cedar Tree’s was awarded within a year of his arrival.

The BBC Great British Menu star was headhunted from Gilpin a couple of years ago by Farlam’s new regime, teaming up again with finance director Karen Baybutt. 

The MW Craven dinner was her idea after they had invited Mike Craven and his wife Joanne over for dinner. His novels had featured ‘Scarness Hall’, an upmarket hotel based loosely on theirs and a malevolent Michelin chef as far removed from Hrishi as you can imagine.

The chef recalled: “We then had a zoom meeting with Mike and Jo, including his publisher and PR. Listening to Mike talk about his work sparked a flood of dish ideas, and that’s when the creative process truly began. The playful element of the menu emerged after I spent four hours locked in the office exploring ways to bring both the food and excerpts from the book to life. A lot of thought went into shaping a menu that would reflect his storytelling.”

He's already considering a similar dinner, this time creating dishes inspired by paintings.

Karen is also responsible for the hotel’s resident hound, Henry. Every Thursday afternoon you can order Afternoon Tea with Henry for £40. It features a rich chocolate shell encasing a mousse of lemon, lime and mango. It kind of sums up the whole playful ethos of the place. Two of the hotel’s 18 rooms and cottage suites are dog-friendly, for an additional fee. Everywhere is people-friendly (not an automatic guarantee at some fellow Relais & Chateau properties).

A contemporary revitalisation of a property steeped in history

All the accommodation has been classily upgraded since the 2020 change of ownership. Our overnight stay was in a Deluxe Garden View Room. It follows the renewed Farlam template of carpets and walls in pale grey and cream, with sink-into comfortable sofas and chairs, occasional antiques but a marked absence of swags and fripperies. Bathrooms are sleek and unfussy but with stupendous showers and, in our case a spa bath.

Our huge sash windows looked out onto the 150-year-old cedar tree that gives its name to the restaurant. This will have been a sapling when Charles Lacy Thompson married Caroline Forbes in 1889. Caroline lived in the house for 70 years – the last member of the family to do so – before it became a family-run hotel in the sixties. There are pictures of her around the public rooms.

Mining was the source of the Thompson family’s vast wealth. It enabled James, Charles’s father, to purchase the ancient Farlam manor house in 1824. Nothing was spared in its transformation to Victorian grandeur. I do, though, like the homely touches in the family history. On birthdays if the weather was foul, the Thompson children would be allowed to ride Phoebe the donkey around the billiards table.

James moved in the highest Industrial Revolution circles. He was friends with George Stephenson and his son Robert, the creators of The Rocket, and indeed at the end of the legendary locomotive’s working life James purchased it and kept it in the Farlam garden.

It was later refurbished and moved to London’s Science Museum, but one memento of the Stephenson era remains at the house – a very rare, still working, clock built by Robert. It was discovered in a neglected bedroom and restored to its place of honour in the back lounge. I can testify how soothing it is to sip Farlam’s own small batch gin, made with botanicals from their kitchen garden, to the whisper of its vintage tick-tock.

The Hrishi factor brings a whole new dimension to Farlam

That and maybe a wellness treatment at the in-house Sycamore Retreat would make a luxurious chill-out after a busy day exploring the forts along nearby Hadrian’s Wall or venturing as far as the Solway Firth. Give Carlisle some attention too and you’ll be rewarded. But the the 4 AA rosette, Michelin-starred Cedar Tree restaurant is the major reason to visit. Pune in Maharastra is chef Desai’s home town and its spices inform his cooking but don’t dominate in some coarse fusion way. 

He told me: “My Indian heritage will always be a part of me. You’ll find a gentle thread of Indian-Asian influence in my food, and that subtlety is very much intentional. What I don’t want is to be labelled as a chef creating Indian fine dining or ‘progressive Indian’ cuisine — that’s not what I’m doing. Instead, I’m drawing on my roots in a way that complements the broader culinary style we aim for at Farlam Hall.”

Indeed, his peripatetic career has taken in stages in starry French kitchens, followed by a decade at British culinary stronghold Lucknam Park, outside Bath, that prepared him for his breakthrough at Gilpin. A Roux scholarship that took him to Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in California adds further stardust. Just before our dinner with him he’d been on a revelatory Roux trip to Mexico, so expect his take on a Mole Poblano stew in 2026.

You sense he has finally found his home at Farlam. He is his own master in a place that allows him to indulge his passion for bee-keeping (80,000 and counting in the Farlam hives) and star-gazing (this is classic dark sky territory). Local produce is a constant inspiration. Sunday to Tuesday the dining room is home to the more casual delights of Enkel (it’s an old Nordic world for ‘simple’), but from Wednesday to Saturday evening it’s the showcase for two tasting menus and, available for just 10 guests, Hrishi’s Chef’s Table.

An Inspector Calls! Two highlights of Murder Mystery and Michelin stars

I asked him about the kitchen’s diversion into “detective work’. “Some elements are already part of our menu — such as the pork belly, venison tartare, and a few of the sauces. The lobster dish is also something we’ve served regularly. I believe the crow dish has the potential to become a signature dish; it just needs a bit more refinement with the team before we introduce it as a main course on one of our tasting menus.”

Ah, Crow’s Nightmare, a dish based on nightmares in Craven’s darkest novel, Mercy Chair. A stuffed poussin shares a plate with a quail scotch egg, a mushroom puree and (Rajasthan-influenced) a Laal Maas sauce. It looked sinister, it tasted awesome.

So too ‘Scarness Hall Spaghetti alle Vongole’, a dish that exemplified ‘suspension of disbelief’. The term was coined by the poet Coleridge, another Cumbrian incomer, who based himself  in Keswick. It means accepting impossible events as real within a story, allowing you to become immersed and enjoy the narrative, even if you know it's not true. A link between Craven’s liberal scattering of serial killers across real-life Cumbrian locations and Hrishi challenging expectations of a much-loved savoury pasta dish? This was pudding: sweet spaghetti, passion fruit cream, and a classic chocolate mousse re-imagined in the shapes of shells, conches, and clams. An end to the evening to make you smile.

Three places to visit from Farlam Hall

1 Farlam offers a Let’s Go Walking Package for two-night stays, which includes packed lunches for hiking guests, while each bedroom offers a copy of the Hall’s own booklet of local walks. Hadrian’s Wall is just four miles away; even closer is English Heritage’s Lanercost Priory. Easiest routes are to Talkin Tarn, a glacial lake that has been a leisure/watersports destination since the 19th century. Once you arrive it’s an easy 2.5km circuit past beech woods and reed beds. You might even spot a red squirrel. En route check out in St Thomas a Beckett’s churchyard the family memorial of Joseph Bell, chief engineer of the Titanic, who went down with the ship.

2 Closest town to the Hall is Brampton, which hosts a surprising Pre-Raphaelite treasure house, well worth a visit. Towards the end of the 19th century its patrons the Howard Family, Earls of Carlisle, offered the townsfolk the choice of a tram service or a new place of worship. They went down the holy route and, unusually for the period what they got was in the Arts and Crafts style rather than Gothic.

St Martin’s was the only church ever built by Philip Webb, an associate of William Morris and member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. That’s how he was able to commission Edward-Burne-Jones to design the stained glass. He made a powerful fist of it – reds, blues, pinks and purples glow vividly, leaves, flowers and animals densely pack the frames. There’s not much Nativity or Crucifixion in the scene and angels and saints have been chosen because they share names with Howard family members. Look out for the fantastic pelican below the figure of Christ The Good Shepherd.

3 Spoiler alert: Long Meg and Her Daughters is the scene of a horrific killing that kicks off MW Craven’s debut novel, The Puppet Show. But, suspension of disbelief and all that, don’t let this deter you from visiting one of the UK’s greatest neolithic stone circles, set in the idyllic Eden Valley a 40 minute drive south of of Farlam.

It is 350ft in diameter. Long Meg is the tallest of the 69 stones, some 12ft feet high, with three mysterious symbols, its four corners facing the points of the compass and standing some 60ft outside the circle. It dates from around 1500 BC;  Long Meg is made of local red sandstone, while the daughters are granite boulders.

That’s the prosaic briefing. Local legend claims that Long Meg was a witch who with her daughters, was turned to stone for profaning the Sabbath, as they danced wildly on the moor. The circle is supposedly endowed with magic, so that it is impossible to count the same number of stones twice, but if you do then the magic is broken. MW Craven doesn’t have all the best Cumbrian storylines.