The Inn at Welland

Flame memory at a Worcestershire pass

Cast iron, smoke, and a patient fire sit behind the way Josh Drage, Chef at The Inn at Welland in Welland, thinks about a plate. His cooking has been shaped by Dutch ovens, outdoor work, and the seasonal discipline he learned from his grandmothers, then given a formal base at the University of Montana. At The Ranch at Rock Creek in Philipsburg, Montana, he carries the title of Executive Chef; at this village inn near Malvern, he is named as chef, bringing the same practical sense of heat, texture, and terrain to a modern British gastropub with its eyes on the Malvern Hills.

The lineage stated by Drage is familial rather than institutional. One grandmother taught him about the cycle of seasons, abundance, and preserving through winter. His grandmother Dixie taught him Dutch oven cooking, including chicken quarters and a simple potato and onion dish. That matters here because The Inn at Welland is not built around abstraction. It works from a country-inn grammar: local produce, a changing menu, generous British foundations, and enough control at the pass to keep the cooking clean rather than merely comforting.

A daily menu from garden and county

The kitchen’s method is seasonal before it is stylistic. The inn describes food picked fresh from its kitchen garden or sourced from local farmers and producers, then prepared from scratch by a team of five chefs. Menus change daily, which gives the bench less room for habit and more dependence on judgment: what arrived well, what needs slow cooking, what can take acid, what should be left almost alone.

The register is modern British with room for older structures and outside references. A winter plate of sautéed chicken livers with black pudding potato cake, buttered spinach, beetroot and bacon crisp sits in the same kitchen language as slow-cooked Herefordshire lamb shoulder with braised red cabbage, hot pot hash brown, glazed parsnips, and lamb cooking liquor. The named signatures hold that line: seared Orkney King scallops, wild mushroom risotto, and a 28-day aged Herefordshire ribeye. None asks for novelty first. Each asks for timing, seasoning, and the right hand at the finish.

Flagstone, terrace, and the pass

The room keeps to the scale of a country inn rather than a staged dining room. Flagstone floors, muted walls, and shabby chic furniture give the service a lived-in frame; the terrace looks toward the Malvern Hills when the weather allows it. The sound stays conversational. Plates move from the pass into an upscale casual room where comfort is part of the craft, not a softening of it.

Owners David and Gilly Pinchback give the house its hosting character, while the kitchen keeps the food anchored in Worcestershire’s worked landscape. That recognition suits the place because the measure is not ceremony. It is whether scallops, lamb shoulder, ribeye, and the garden’s daily arrivals can keep their shape at The Inn at Welland.