Chris Emery to head up the kitchen at new Oxfordshire restaurant The Alice
The restaurant will open in The Randolph Hotel, a collaboration between White Rabbit Projects, which is behind restaurants including Lina Stores, Kricket, and Island Poké, and Graduate Hotels.
The Alice will be an all-day dining restaurant and bar serving classic British dishes made with ingredients from local farmers and suppliers from Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. Named as a nod to Oxford alumnus Lewis Carroll, it will serve breakfast, lunch, dinner, pre-theatre dining and afternoon tea and will also inform the menu at the hotel’s other hospitality spaces, The Snug, The Morse Bar, The Drawing Room and The Lancaster Room.
Dishes on the launch menu will include Chalk Stream trout, Porthilly oyster and charcoal mayonnaise; chicken and duck liver terrine, cherry, brioche and summer salad; Lake District lamb, asparagus, black garlic and morels; and brill, datterini tomatoes and butter sauce.
The 78-cover space will also house the Alice Bar with an adjoining 20-seat cocktail lounge The Snug. The hotel will also be home to the 17-seat The Morse Bar, inspired by Inspector Morse creator Colin Dexter who was a regular at the hotel and who is said to have written some of the Morse books from the bar.
Snacks and small plates will be served at The Morse Bar from Emery and his team.
The building of the 151-room hotel was initially designed between 1864 and 1866 and will reopen in 1 August following an extensive refurbishment.
Graduate Hotels is also due to open a second venue in partnership with White Rabbit Studio in Cambridge. The property, located beside the River Cam, will open as part if the group's plans to open eight hotels by the end of 2022.
