The story
The Farm Table is a modern British restaurant in Exeter, at Darts Farm Village, Clyst St George, Topsham, Devon. It holds two AA Rosettes for Culinary Excellence (2026), and the Good Food Guide lists it as a Good restaurant in the same year. The kitchen cooks with ingredients grown, reared, caught and crafted on the surrounding farm, so the menu moves with the seasons.
The menu changes regularly to suit what the fields are producing. Ingredients that do not come from the farm are sourced from a network of artisan food producers, farmers and fishermen in the local community. On Sundays a roast is cooked over fire alongside the regular menu.
Reviewers have singled out grilled flatbread with pancetta, hot honey and garlic butter from the dedicated pizza chef. A fillet of sea bream comes with pickled cockles, tomatoes, jalapeños and a thick ajo blanco. Portions run generous, and the rhubarb sponge with clotted cream is large enough to share. Lighter options include gin and strawberry parfait with pink-peppercorn meringue.
The wine list is built for a mix of tastes, with fruity cocktails and wines from £6 a glass. A wine club lets diners pick a bottle from more than 100 wines sold at retail price, provided it accompanies a main course. The offer excludes events and wine by the glass.
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Almost lost amid the tangle of east Devon villages, Darts Farm is rather more of a hive of activity than the nearby Exeter airport. It's a family-run enterprise (and then some), with a wellness spa, extensive farm shop, butcher and deli counters, vineyard, farm walk and bird hide, among other amenities. Alongside a maze of other eating possibilities, serving food in the very precincts where much of it is grown, there is also now the Farm Table for ‘agricultural fine dining’ – a very 21st-century style. You might feel you are eating in a large hangar, but the quality of what the kitchen puts out tends to encourage people to get a little glammed-up for the occasion. The rattle call of ice-cubes being shaken is a sure lure to the bar, and a dedicated pizza chef always raises expectations, amply fulfilled with the arrival of grilled flatbread topped with pancetta, hot honey and garlic butter. Nibbles are full of allure: burnt broad-bean pods sprinkled with chilli salt or crispy brawn bites with rhubarb and apple sauce might kick things off, ahead of a simple salad of sweetly delicious picked-this-morning beetroot, chicory and truffled Graceburn cheese – an array of incomparable ingredients. Fish dishes are forthrightly but sensitively handled, as when a hulking fillet of a sea bream is teamed with pickled cockles, tomatoes and jalapeños, all sauced with a thick ajo blanco. Gold-standard meats range from a starter portion of grilled pigeon breast with lentils and redcurrants to Ruby Red steaks and Creedy Carver duck, the latter with grilled radicchio and pickled cherries in red wine. Portions tend to the hearty, meaning that two might easily share a whopping rhubarb sponge pudding topped with a gigantic clod of clotted cream, but if you are feeling a little delicate by now, consider gin and strawberry parfait with pink-peppercorn meringue. Special-occasion menus add to the offer, and there is an excellent range of drinking to contemplate, from fruity cocktails to a well-chosen list of wines at manageable prices (from £6 a glass).
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