Lisa Goodwin-Allen joined Northcote in the Ribble Valley as a junior chef in 2002. She became executive chef in 2007, at the age of twenty-six, taking over a kitchen that had been shaped by Nigel Haworth's long tenure and that carried with it the expectations of a Michelin star, a nationally recognised food programme and a hotel clientele who knew what they were coming for. She has been running it ever since.
The longevity is, in itself, remarkable — particularly in an industry that celebrates movement and novelty, and in a context where female executive chefs at Michelin-starred properties remain considerably fewer than their representation in the broader chef population would suggest. Goodwin-Allen does not dwell on the latter point but does not dismiss it either.
"When I was coming up, there were very few women at senior kitchen level in the kinds of restaurants I was interested in," she says. "That's changed, but not as much as it should have. I think part of what I try to do at Northcote is show that the kitchen can be run differently — not as a gender statement, but as a practical demonstration that the culture the industry has historically relied on is not the only way to produce great food."
The Spring Menu
Spring arrives slightly later in the Ribble Valley than in the south, and the spring menu at Northcote reflects that — Goodwin-Allen waits for her own landscape's season rather than following a national calendar that doesn't apply to Lancashire's altitude and latitude.
The current menu opens with snacks built around the kitchen garden, which supplies the restaurant from a walled growing space behind the hotel. Wild garlic — at its peak in the hedgerows and woodlands of the Ribble Valley through April — appears in a butter for the bread service and in an early menu course alongside Morecambe Bay shrimps and a light bisque. A tartlet of Goosnargh duck egg with asparagus and hollandaise uses eggs from a farm a few miles from the hotel; the asparagus arrives from the Vale of Evesham until the Ribble Valley's own season begins in late April.
The centrepiece of the spring tasting menu is a Herdwick lamb course that represents the most direct expression of what Northcote's sourcing philosophy achieves at its best: animals from a farm she can see on a clear day from the hotel driveway, the rack and the shoulder prepared differently and served together, with a sauce built from bones that have been reducing for two days. The timing — Herdwick spring lambs arriving in the valley through March and April — makes it a dish that is genuinely of its moment.
The Northcote Programme
Beyond the tasting menu restaurant, Goodwin-Allen oversees a food programme at Northcote that includes the Obsession festival — the annual winter event that brings twenty or so internationally significant chefs to cook in the Ribble Valley — and a growing education component that runs masterclasses and workshops throughout the year.
"Northcote under Nigel was always about more than the restaurant," she says. "Obsession started as his idea about bringing the world to Lancashire and seeing what happened. I have continued it because it still does something unusual — it takes chefs who have never cooked in Lancashire and puts them in a landscape they don't know, with produce they have to understand quickly, and the cooking that comes out of that is always surprising."
The current Obsession programme for 2026 has already run its winter dates. Goodwin-Allen is in the early stages of planning the 2027 iteration and confirms that conversations are underway with international chefs across three continents.
The Northcote spring tasting menu is £120 per person. The hotel and restaurant are open year-round in the Ribble Valley village of Langho. Bookings at northcote.com.