Today’s post comes from Charlotte, who has plenty of compliments to pay Rudding Park after a fun evening of food and flicks earlier this week.

Living in Yorkshire, we’re lucky enough to have a number of high-end, beautiful hotels on our doorstep, more often than not steeped in the gorgeous green rolling hills that dominate our landscape.

Rudding Park is a fantastic example of this, set in the rural outskirts of Harrogate, but still only a 20 minute drive from our house in North Leeds.

Rudding Park offers fine accommodation, a golf course, a spa, a lovely restaurant (as other Yorkshire food bloggers will no doubt know!), but also a lesser-known option for good fun in the Yorkshire countryside: a food and flicks evening. This allows you to dine in the restaurant before watching a film in their private cinema, which seats around 15 people.

I have fond memories of the Clocktower restaurant at Rudding Park; I had dinner there with my family the evening before I got married in 2012. So, I was keen to head back and savour the culinary delights in a lovely relaxed atmosphere.

Picking from the pre-film menu was tough but I eventually settled on pig’s cheek for starter and cod for main.

The starter was, without a doubt, the star of the meal. The pig’s cheek was tender and fell off my fork, and the accompanying parsnip was soft and delicately flavoured with honey and vanilla. I could have eaten another few portions of it to say the least, but I was glad I had left room for my main course.

The cod came with a Whitby crab croquette, chorizo, and hazelnut, an interesting combination of flavours that I was initially unsure about but soon found myself a convert. The hazelnut added a different texture to the main course, and the flavour of the crab was delicious.

So, with our stomachs full, we headed down to the private cinema to watch a film, in this instance The Grand Budapest Hotel (a really funny, quirky film that I’d certainly recommend).

It was a real treat watching a film in a private cinema and it all certainly felt like a real VIP experience! After the two-course meal it’s fair to say I wasn’t hungry, but the warm popcorn went down a treat nonetheless.

The evening left me wanting to come back to Rudding Park soon, especially since in order to get to the cinema we had to walk through a number of lounges and other public areas, one of which had a lovely open roaring log fire and some really interesting décor.

So, next time you’re looking for a slightly more unusual evening out, try Rudding Park’s food and flicks; you won’t be disappointed!