There is a category of hotel, mostly small, mostly rural, where the owners cook lunch. They do not always advertise it. You arrive on a weekday at 13:00, sit down and a plate appears; nobody asks what you would like, because the answer is whatever is on. We rate this kind of hotel highly, for three practical reasons.

The first is that the food is better. An owner cooking for ten guests works differently from a chef cooking for ninety: there is no menu to defend, no covers to turn and no printed promise to keep. The owner cooks what she bought that morning and if the market was thin she cooks something else. It is the meal she would have made at home if there had been no guests.

The second is that it teaches you the place. An owner who cooks knows the farmers, the fish market and the family who keep the goats up the hill, so lunch amounts to a tour of the surrounding area in three courses. You finish it knowing where to stop for cheese on the drive home.

The third is that it changes the shape of the day. You sit down at 13:00 and finish around 15:00 and then you have nowhere to be. The hotel becomes a place to stay rather than a place to leave each morning: the afternoon is for walking or sleeping, the evening meal is light and by the third day the holiday has changed gear.

The strongest example we know

The lunch at Pelagos House on Milos is the best example of this in the collection. The owners serve a daily lunch at one long table for the guests of the house’s 9 rooms, cooked from what the boats landed that morning and what the island grows. When we visited we ate a chilled soup, a whole grilled fish and apricots in honey; the wine came from a small Cycladic producer and sitting down to finishing the last glass took just over 2 hours. Nothing about it was complicated and nothing about it could be reproduced by a hotel with a menu.

We are looking for more of these. If you run one, or you have eaten lunch at one, tell us through the contact page.