Our friend Val is visiting from BC. Much of her visit is spent with quality time with family but she asked us if we were interested in a visit to Langdon Hall - a fancy 'hotel' about an hour away. We decided to go for Sunday brunch - mainly because jacket and tie was optional for brunch.

The Main House, with its grand front hall and dining room, was built in 1898 as a summer home for Eugene Langdon Wilks, a grandson of the New York fur trader and real estate magnate John Jacob Astor. Nestled in gentle rolling land near the Grand River, the majestic main building was designed as a complement to properties the Wilks family owned in New York state and in France and is surrounded, today, by the high arbor of some 200 acres of magnificent and rare Carolina forest.
The long approach to Langdon Hall works like a balm, an entry not just into gated hotel grounds but to a whole other rhythm and approach to life. There is no hurrying here, where the promise is not just of rest but of that very special elevation of the spirit that truly elegant architecture, gardens, rooms and their finery provide.

Erected in the Gilded Age, Langdon Hall did not always know such high times and had fallen into negligence (a retirement residence and even a condominium development were being planned in its place), before the architect William Bennett and his wife, Mary Beaton, purchased it in 1987 wanting not just to return it to its former grandeur but to build, here, their dream of a first-class country house hotel.

This they have done — magnificently. Langdon Hall is one of just 15 Relais & Chateaux in Canada, the only one in Ontario, and the work of its master chef has garnered it a cornucopia of awards including the distinction of being added to San Pellegrino’s list of the world’s 50 best restaurants. The main house has been painstakingly, faithfully and lovingly restored, its 13 rooms and suites individually decorated by Beaton who has made a feature of their indisputable charms — the original beams of a garret, a staircase of a studio in the gables, others with their own terraces. At the back of the Main House, its high windows in daytime filling the room with light, the airy dining room with its elegant paintings opens out onto a terrace with several tables in the shade of a Camperdown Elm tree, a pretty pond high with reeds and, at the foot of the near woods, the Stables converted as maisonettes.
Of course, we were going for the food!

The menu is seasonal featuring fresh, local ingredients as much as possible. Sunday brunch is a prix fix with three courses for $ 55. In additional the dinging hall (although I'm not sure I'd use that phrase as it brings back memories of university residence and this is NO residence) has an amazing wine list and intriguing cocktails to over.
Paul has a rhubarb sparkler:

I ordered the scotch egg for my first course. It was served with pickled mustard seed, crisp apple, radish, and edible flower blossoms.

For my main course I decided on the slow roasted pork belly. It was served with fondant potatoes, carrots, peas, and a sherry jus.

Dessert was hard to order - I wanted it all. The dishes were 'flavours'. I ordered Key Lime - Key Lime Curd, Poppy Seed Cheesecake, Graham Ganache.

It was nothing like I was expecting - however, like everything we enjoyed at Langdon Hall- it was amazing. The individual pieces came together in a beautiful way.
My goodness, everything about our visit was wonderful - leaving us to wonder why it has taken us so long to visit.