Hipping Hall, Lancashire

Halfway through my meal at Hipping Hall, a small luxury hotel just outside Kirkby Lonsdale, I have a moment of existential doubt. It occurs as I'm lifting a glazed sweetbread to my mouth and I suddenly find myself thinking, "Do I really want to eat this?" As my appetite splutters and momentarily dies altogether I feel a bit like a solo pilot whose engine has just cut out in the mid-Atlantic. This kind of thing is not supposed to happen to a restaurant critic - and certainly not when the cooking is this good. The chef here, Jason Birkbeck, is a former winner of The Restaurant Association's Young Chef of the Year and one of a growing diaspora of Northern cooks who've passed through Nigel Haworth's Northcote Manor. After a stint at The Samling in Ambleside near Windermere, he's come to build a clientele here - in a low-linteled farmhouse with an oak-beamed Tudor dining hall conveniently attached at the rear. And he apparently aims to do it with a menu that mixes Michelin-style refinements with the kind of local ingredients that are esteemed for their ability to put hairs on your chest.

It's my susceptibility to that kind of nose-to-tail eating, we eventually realise, that has caused the problem. I just couldn't resist starting with the confit belly of Gloucester Old Spot, served with roasted langoustine, choucroute and a crispy pig's ear - and though this dish is very good it also takes up occupancy in my stomach like a Yorkshire farmer sprawling out in front of a fire. Trying to add a fillet of veal with glazed sweetbreads and black pudding tortellini on top is simply asking too much of an appetite that has already been given a thorough work-out by an array of canapés and amuse-bouches (including a fine foamed bisque, dotted with Morecambe Bay shrimps, and deep-fried frog's legs, which hop with astonishing speed into the children's mouths).

My wife and children, I should say, choose a little more wisely and barely falter at all. A dish of pan-fried scallops, served with pea purée and smoked bacon, is probably the best of the starters, a really good balance of heft and lightness, but the breast of quail served with beetroot jus and foie gras is good too, as are the tortellini of duxelled girolles, served with asparagus and spinach and deep-fried quail's egg. The latter - a kind of scotch egg for dwarfs - is a symptom of the menu's preference for adding one more thing, rather than taking something away - but on the whole that doesn't get out of hand. This is hardly pared-down cooking, but at £42.50 for the three-course menu with coffee and petits fours, I don't think that's what the customers are coming for.

Main courses are strong too - including a loin of local lamb served with shallot purée and baby artichokes, and a roast breast of poussin, with truffled potato purée, peas and broad beans - and though I now know that I should have gone for the poached fillet of lemon sole, my cobblestone-shaped piece of veal is beautifully cooked.

The odd thing about appetite, of course, is that it's so easy to body-swerve satiety with sugar. A terrific pre-dessert of a ball of peach ice cream served on a raspberry panna cotta (like a culinary anagram of a peach melba) reveals that there are still unfilled spaces - which are soon taking delivery of a very good banana walnut bread served with banana ice cream and glazed banana. I couldn't entirely see the point of dismantling a sherry trifle so that the components were spread across the plate like a clock at the mender's, but even so the individual cogs and springs were faultless. A chocolate fondant was served with a tonka bean foam - a tropical seed that is apparently banned in the US by the Food and Drug Administration because as well as the very delicious flavours of vanilla, almonds and cinnamon, it also contains a powerful anti-coagulant. I don't know whether it can work its way into the bloodstream, but after a meal of such rich and solid pleasures it may well be just what the doctor ordered.

Hipping Hall, Cowan Bridge, nr Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire

(01524 271187)

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£42.50 for three courses plus coffee and petits fours

Side orders: Lancashire hot spots

Cassis

A beguiling mix of Ribble Valley views, blackcurrant-shaded interiors and magical cooking conjured up by Warrick Dodds, who made his name at Northcote Manor (see right). Distinguished mains include a caramelised confit pork belly, celeriac and apple purée with black pudding beignet (£17).

Cassis at Stanley House, Mellor (01254 769200)

Northcote Manor

Nigel Haworth's amazing Lancashire Hot Pot, made from slow-cooked Bowland lamb and glazed carrots, is unmissable. Haworth has received countless accolades for his delicious down-to-earth dishes. The wine list is extensive and excellent; the hotel is a great base from which to explore the Yorkshire Dales.

Northcote Road, Langho (01254 240555)

The Fence Gate Inn

The prices are sensible, the cooking modern and the 17th-century surroundings are shamelessly romantic. Fence Gate has scooped up awards from Les Routiers and Johansens, and the menu features organic home-made sausages dishes, with red wine onion gravy, bubble and squeak and mash.

Fence, Nr Burnley (01282 618101)

The Dining Room

Having earned his spurs as a senior chef at London's Petrus, chef-patron Andrew Robinshaw is putting the North West firmly on the culinary map at The Dining room. Pan-fried fillet of halibut with asparagus is £17.50; shelled and poached whole lobster is £18.95.

8-12 Burnley Road, Rawtenstall (01706 210567)