Seaham Hall (Byron's Bar and Grill)

Food ✪✪✪✪*
Service ✪✪✪✪ 
Ambience ✪✪ 

Seaham Hall Hotel
Lord Byron’s Walk 
County Durham 
SR7 7AG 

0191 516 4100 
www.seaham-hall.co.uk 

[*WARNING: Change of chef - Simon Bolsover has moved to become Regional Executive Chef of Macdonald Hotels in Cumbria] 

I love that bit in Masterchef when the most nervous chef-victim gets flung into service at a top London gastro-temple for a day. 

“You’ll be cooking the quail, with 17 components including three sauces and the quail brain mousse – it’s our signature dish, and we have five Hollywood celebrities who’ve flown in specially, so make sure it’s perfect,” says the head chef with an evil smile, raising a carefully rehearsed eyebrow for the closeup which the editor needs for the horror film music sequence. 

The contestant gulps, then with trembling hands clutching sharp knife, picks up the first tiny bird. 

“It’s OK, we have plasters,” says the smiling head chef, as the blood begins to flow from the first cut finger, “but you have just 30 minutes before the customers arrive.” 

More horror music; cut to mound of bloody raw quail. 

Sadly, this isn’t quite how it works in real top restaurants. No one person is responsible for an entire dish; the brigade de cuisine system has chefs working on stations - veg, meat, sauce, garnish and so on – and all their efforts are brought together at the pass. Teamwork is critical; but teamwork, and reality, don’t make for riveting television. 

Simon Bolsover, installed as executive chef of Seaham Hall’s two restaurants last year, has made a point of talking up his team in the catering press, and quite right too. It’s clear that they’re working well, for Bolsover was absent from the stoves on the night of our secret visit.

Seaham Hall (Byron's Bar and Grill by Blunos)

Food ✪✪✪ 

Service ✪✪✪✪✪ 

Ambience ✪✪✪✪ 

Byron’s Bar and Grill

Seaham Hall

Lord Byrons Walk

Seaham

County Durham

SR7 7AG 

0191 516 1400 

www.seaham-hall.co.uk 

Wed to Sun: 6.30pm – 9pm 

Accessibility: Yes 

Poor Martin Blunos has been relegated to second billing. 

Until last week the nearly-celebrity chef (he’s the one with the walrus moustache who used to be on Iron Chef UK, and had two Michelin stars for his restaurant Lettonie in the West Country) had his name over the main restaurant at Seaham Hall. 

The Blunos Sea Grill was housed in the former White Room, where Kenny Atkinson flourished and gained a Michelin star for the region. I remember having had a spectacularly good tasting menu in this room before Kenny went south to Rockliffe Hall. Later the entire hotel, particularly its restaurant, went off the boil, before being sold and restored. 

Thankfully the building is now looking glorious again, and I was looking forward to trying Blunos’s Grill, even though I suspected that, as Culinary Director, he merely wrote the menu. However, between booking and arriving, they’d shut the restaurant and moved the food into the bar.