The Hive Beach cafe, Burton Bradstock
Diners can enjoy exquisite seafood at this cafe overlooking the pebble beach and sea at Chesil bank. Spider crabs caught from the beach below, brown crabs from Lyme Bay, legendary crab sandwiches and hand-dived scallops are served year round, while during summer sun-seekers can grab a local Craig’s Farm Dairy ice-cream sundae at the Beach Hut. The menu changes daily to reflect the fishermen’s catch. In the winter, the seafront terrace is closed off with side screens to create a cosier spot from which to view the Jurassic Coast.
• From £10.95 for grilled Cornish coast sardines to £24.50 for line-caught Portland Bill seabass, 01308 897 070, hivebeachcafe.co.uk

The Bull Hotel, Bridport
The Grade II-listed hotel, with a shabby-chic interior and a courtyard decorated with fairy 

lights, offers a varied menu in its main restaurant. As well as local seafood such as pan-fried Lyme Bay tandoori scallops with chickpea and yoghurt (£9.50), there’s spice-crusted rump of Dorset lamb, spinach and coconut milk potatoes and a moilee-tomato sauce for £19. There’s also a more relaxed pizza and cider house, The Stable, at the back of the Bull: the Ford Farm four-cheese special includes Dorset blue, smoked red, goat’s milk cheddar and Wookey Hole aged cheddar (£10). Bridport’s cultural scene has also come alive in the last few years, with the revival of music and arts at the Electric Palace – described by Ian Gillan from Deep Purple as the best small venue in the UK – and a monthly antiques and vintage market.
• Rooms, some featuring vintage rolltop tubs and four-poster beds, from £100 to £240, 01308 422878, thebullhotel.co.uk

Sienna, Dorchester
Eat here while you can, as Russell Brown is closing his 15-cover restaurant (the only place in Dorset with a Michelin star) on 25 April. Brown uses local, seasonal ingredients such as Jurassic Coast rose veal saltimbocca and pan-fried fillet of brill with cauliflower, hazelnut, lemon and English caviar.
• Two-course dinner £38.50, three-course £45, tasting menu for the whole table £65 each. Open for dinner Tuesday to Saturday, 01305 250022 siennarestaurant.co.uk

Hix Oyster & Fish House, Lyme Regis
Mark Hix prides himself on sourcing the best produce served as simply as possible – fish fingers with chips and mushy peas and simple grilled fish on the bone served with hollandaise sauce in this light and airy restaurant with relaxing coastal views. The whole Lyme Bay crab (£14.50) is popular, and there’s a wide variety of oysters, such as Brownsea Island or Portland Pearls at £2.25 each. Fish House Suppers for groups of 10 or more are priced at £45pp per person, and Hix also hosts and organises festivals, such as the Lyme Regis Crab Festival (in September this year. 
• Starters around £8.95, mains from £14.95. 01297 446 910 hixoysterandfishhouse.co.uk

The Pig on the Beach, Studland
The charmingly styled hotel restaurant features fish direct from Poole Bay, and ingredients sourced by a team of local foragers and from the impressive walled kitchen garden. Dorset

Crab on toast with pennywort salad and pickled daisies (£8.50), or home smoked pork belly (from its own smoking shed) with Dorset olives, Isle of Wight tomatoes and spring onion (£16) are among the tempting items on a menu that focuses on fish and pork. The hotel is set on the beautiful Studland coastline overlooking King Harry Rocks and Poole Harbour and, if it’s not warm enough to dine lingeringly beside the elegant lawn, then there are cosy fireside seats in the bar that are just as inviting for a post-prandial cocktail.
• Weekend winter room rates start at £139 per night (room only); Shepherd’s huts with log burner and sea views £239, 01929 450288, thepighotel.com

Crab House Café, Wyke Regis, Weymouth
Seafood doesn’t come much fresher than the crabs hooked by the fishermen on Chesil Beach and oysters brought in directly from the boat, than at this fun cafe in its unlikely location at the end of a car park: the blackboard menu is constantly being rubbed out and updated. Head chef Nigel Bloxham’s dedication to locally sourced produce was commended by (former Guardian) food critic Matthew Norman:
“[He] takes local ingredients of top quality, cooks them simply and accurately in its open kitchen, and serves them (via friendly teenagers in aprons) without poncery.” 
• Whole crabs from £19.95, six oysters £9.50, average meal £42 for three courses, 01305 788 867, crabhousecafe.co.uk

MasterChef winner Mat Follas runs The Wild Garlic, which now has room for overnight stays.

With the exception of Thomasina Miers, the most recognisable MasterChef winner is surely genial, goateed Mat Follas, who scooped the title last year showcasing his love of foraged food. Victory has enabled the Dorset-based former IT consultant to follow his star. The Wild Garlic is it, a small, unassuming restaurant in tiny Beaminster (I say tiny because one minute you're approaching the town square, the next – if you do not park right away – you will be swept out of town by the tide of traffic, next stop, Bridport).

Gastronomes will, of course, have read the opening reviews last year. The reason I am coming is to try out a new apartment, just opened above the restaurant. It proves a devil of a job for me to book the apartment and get a table on the same night, but eventually I pull it off.

My private domain is reached via a staircase from the restaurant (or a side door when The Wild Garlic is shut). So here I am, in the late afternoon, watching the light fading through the stone mullion windows and the 4x4s emptying out from the square.

I'm in the large bed-sitting room looking through to a kitchen-diner, off which is a shower room. I like the personal touch – a good eye has put this together, it's a personal selection, rather than handing over cash to Laura Ashley's design service and saying, "There you go, get on with it." Purple velvet, orange leather, black and white toile de Jouy, a bit of Ercol furniture here, and Scandinavian glass there. It's a posh bedsit, that's what.

Time for a bit of my own foraging. Disappointment. No little plate of brownies to have with a cup of tea. There is milk, butter and – nice touch – a bottle of wine in the fridge though, and a basket on the counter-top contains tea and coffee things and Dorset cereals. It's on the basic side, however, and I cannot find a teapot or cafetière.

The Wild Garlic's apartment.
Photograph: Philippa Gedge

No news tonight, either – the telly is only a DVD screen. When I ask about the heating though, chef himself comes up to sort it. Blimey.

Dinner, with a friend (Sophy has been itching to come for months), is everything we'd hoped and more. Exciting food, served by smiling and knowledgeable staff, in an unponcey atmosphere.

An inter-course amuse bouche arrives after the starter of hand-dived scallops with garlic on seaweed and salad of butternut squash and goats' cheeses. It's a plate of tiny leaves, nasturtium, oyster leaf, red sorrel and red Russian perilla.

"Bloody good – worth the money, which most restaurants round here aren't," says my pal, savouring every mouthful of her £20 plate of rose veal fillet with  

almonds. Venison, the best I've ever had, comes on a bed of the only red cabbage I've ever liked and accompanied by a mini game pie. By the time autumn berry clafoutis and chilli chocolate soup turn up, we've slowed to a crawl. All credit, we agree, to Follas, frankly, for opening off the beaten track, but thank goodness I only have to get upstairs.

The Wild Garlic is a bijoux restaurant-with-a-room, but I can't help thinking that very soon Mr Follas and his worthy team are going to need more restaurant – and more rooms.


What to do in the area: By the locals

A pub meal
The Fox & Hounds (foxandhoundsinn.com) in Cattistock is a warm and friendly country pub, where Scott, the Landlord, serves great food. This is my "local", not that I get there very often any more and it's the place where I had my first experience of running a professional kitchen. Before I opened my restaurant, Scott & Liz were generous enough, or foolish enough, to invite me to do a couple of try-out nights at the pub, where I designed the menu and cooked it. It was very stressful but made me realise just how much fun cooking professionally could be; it was an unforgettable experience.
Mat Follas, co-owner of The Wild Garlic

Take a hike
Lying in the hills of west Dorset, the town of Beaminster is a hub for walkers. One of my favourite hikes takes you from St Mary's church in Beaminster, via St Mary's in Netherbury, and ending at St Mary's in Stoke Abbott. It's about five miles in all and there are pubs at both ends. The walk takes you past Parnham House, once the home of John Makepeace and his furniture school, then on to Netherbury and Stoke Abbott, two of the prettiest villages in Dorset.
Amanda Follas, co-owner of The Wild Garlic

A shopping trip
The historic square in Beaminster is surrounded by 18th- and 19th-century houses of golden limestone. Although there's a small supermarket in the square, Beaminster has managed to buck the usual high street trend and retain a glut of independent retailers. There's the Green Drawers eco shop (greendrawers.com), Cilla & Camilla (gift shop), Strummer Pink (interior design), @Home (kitchenware), three ladies' clothes shops, four cafes and two galleries, not to mention wonderful local food producers Nick Tett (family butcher) and Fruit 'n' Two Veg. AF

Surprisingly Bridport (six miles from Beaminster) has one of the best hat and millinery shops in the UK. T Snook (snooksthehatters.co.uk) was founded in 1896 and is on West Street. This year saw the first Bridport Hat Festival, held on the third weekend in September, and it is likely to be an annual event. If you wear hats, a visit to "the greatest little hat shop in the land" is a must.
John Dean, Colly Farm Bridport (collyfarmbridport.co.uk)

A day trip
Take the kids to quirky West Bay near Bridport to enjoy an excellent rope-themed playground that recalls the area's rope-making history. Follow that with fish and chips on the pier as the sun dips into the sea. (Boxing Day sees the West Bay Wallow, a fancy dress swim for charity. Brr!)
Shirley Samways, Cafe@AnnDay (annday.co.uk)

The village of Symondsbury lies a mile west of Bridport and nestles under Colmers Hill, a landmark in the area. It is a typical west Dorset village, with its manor house, tithe barn and church. Park and visit the pottery in Manor Yard, before walking up Duck Street from where you can walk to the top of Colmers Hill and have a stunning view of Golden Cap and the Jurassic coast. If you wish, you can walk on and join the Monarch's Way, the escape route taken by Charles II in 1651 as he fled to France after the battle of Worcester. On return, your efforts deserve a stop at the Ilchester Arms in the village, where you can enjoy a drink and an excellent meal by a roaring fire. A warm welcome is a given! JD

Local culture
The first week in November sees the annual Bridport Literary Festival, which started last Friday and ends tomorrow (7 November). Still on the bill are talks on Rosamund Barlett's Tolstoy biography and a talk by economist Howard Davies on the financial crisis. Events are held at the Bridport Arts Centre and the Bull Hotel. For full details of the schedule see bridport-arts.com/bridport-literary-festival. JD

Theo Langton imparts local knowledge to the group.
Photograph: Neil Turner for The Guardian

I'm not an outdoor girl. As far as foraging for food goes, I'm less the wilds of Dorset, more the aisles of Waitrose. So how do I find myself eating plants picked from a wet and windy beach on the south coast? I'd like to say, as a trainee chef, it's because I'm passionate about discovering new ingredients – but that would be a lie. No, I'm here because I'm addicted to TV cookery programmes, so when the opportunity to meet a real-life Masterchef arises, I jump at it. Even though it does involve being outside. In the rain.

I have signed up to take part in a foraging day run by 2009 Masterchef winner Mat Follas. For me, Mat was one of the programme's most memorable contestants, a New Zealand-born IT manager with a passion for wild and foraged ingredients. He now runs a successful restaurant, The Wild Garlic, in Beaminster, Dorset, and this summer launched a series of foraging days, giving diners the chance to join him for a morning's exploration of the local environs, followed by lunch at the restaurant.The day starts at 9.30am, when the group meet Mat and guide Theo, a fascinating local character whose family are all ardent foragers and also live entirely without electricity. If anyone knows about living off the land, you trust he does. Despite the rain, everyone is eager to get going.

No sooner than we've set off, Theo stops us. He points to some leaves sprouting from a grate in the road. I'm no gardener but my first guess would be weeds. Apparently not. It's hairy bittercress, an edible leaf related to mustard, which works well in salads.

Clocking the worried faces, Theo stresses he's notadvocating truffling in the gutters, but merely pointing out that these ingredients are on our doorstep.

After examining some ground elder in an overgrown garden (again, good in salads) we continue into the countryside. Forestry work prevents us from exploring the best mushroom-picking areas, so we focus on the hedgerows. The double act between Mat and Theo works well, with Theo explaining the traditional uses of what we spot and Mat focusing on how he uses the ingredients in the kitchen. We discuss an endless trail of plants – I doubt I'd have the confidence to identify them all again but many stick in my mind: the silver birch tree that yields sugar, the jack-by-the-hedge seeds that taste of wasabi and the hogweed seeds that burst with cardamom flavour, which Mat uses in his chocolate brownies.

Briefly we take shelter in a copse, apparently home to an abundance of wild garlic in early spring. Wild garlic typifies what Mat loves about foraging – an ingredient that can be used in numerous ways at every stage of its life cycle: the flower petals in salads, the older leaves wrapped round meat, the bulbs roasted. Here, he also explains the ethics of foraging, encouraging us to be mindful of where we are, who owns the land and the importance of not stripping an environment. Taking just 10% of a plant is almost too much, he warns: "If it's been taken unethically then the food just won't taste good."

After a tea-and-brownie stop back at the restaurant, we head out again by van to explore the shore. The pebble beach is a forager's paradise, littered with patches of bluey-green sea kale and bushes of rock samphire. As the wind picks up, some of us (me included) retreat to the van while others continue with Theo along the coast. We pick them up at the end of their trail and head back for lunch.

On the menu today: watercress soup with red cress and quail's egg served with foraged leaves; locally sourced crayfish salad with crayfish consomme; and tangy sorrel ice-cream with apple and lavender jelly, wild raspberries and borage flowers. These days we're so used to a standard roll call of flavours when we eat out, it's a genuine surprise and pleasure to taste something you have never tried before. My day with the Masterchef has more than lived up to expectations. May many more people take a foraged leaf out of Mat's book.

Mat Follas cooks over on an open fire.
Photograph: David Mansell

I used to go camping in a serious way, with nothing more than a backpack and freeze-dried meals to sustain me. Now, however (I'm not sure whether it is because I'm wiser, or just older), I like a little more comfort, and I want my food to have flavour. Some of the old campfire favourites – bacon, eggs, sausages, beans – are fine, but you don't want them every day, and they tend to be heavy with fat and salt.

To get more variety, the key is to go for different flavours and, while you are at it, why not try some dishes that are not that practical to make at home? Cooking on an open fire is the ideal opportunity for messy cooking: charred jacket potatoes, fish cooked in clay, or an American-style rack of ribs with a dry, spicy rub. This is the sort of cooking that, if attempted in suburbia, would have the neighbours complaining about the smoke or phoning the fire brigade.

When you are camping, you don't take your kitchen scales; you do everything by eye and instinct. All you need is some basic equipment (a good knife, a grater, strong plastic bags that seal, and, if you're not backpacking, a heavy casserole dish), essential flavours (salt, pepper, powdered chilli, allspice, garlic, sugar, ginger, thyme, lemongrass, fresh limes, soy sauce) and some sunflower oil. Here are some of my favourite ideas for meals; use them as a starting point for your own dishes.

Kebabs
Put some prawns in a plastic bag with chilli, oil and lemon. Shake it about, leave for an hour or so, then skewer the prawns and cook them over the fire.

If you prefer meat, mix up some peanut butter with oil and chilli to make a satay sauce. Chop pork, beef or lamb into small cubes and place in a bag with the sauce. To marinate the meat more deeply, add a teaspoon of plain yoghurt if you have some, shake and leave for a couple of hours before cooking.

Wild salads
If you put salad leaves in a sealed plastic bag with a dribble of water, they will keep for a few days. Supplement with foraged wild garlic, dandelions and primrose flowers (assuming you can find these in a dog-and-pesticide-free area). Drain the excess water from the salad leaves.

Chuck some oil, a little lemon juice, a few drops of vinegar (if you have it) and a pinch of salt into a new bag. Shake, then add your salad leaves and wild leaves. Shake again and serve.

Charred jacket potatoes
Wrap the potatoes in foil and chuck them in the ashes for at least half an hour. They should end up black on the outside. Hold them in a thick cloth to prise them open and scoop out the middle. They will be steamy, and delicious with butter.

Clay-baked fish
There are two schools of thought on cooking fish in a fire: you wrap it in either damp newspaper or clay. I lean towards clay as it is easier to handle, and feels more natural. To find clay, you need to look along the edges of a creek or stream.

Roll out a pencil-sized piece, and if you can wrap it around your finger without it breaking, then you've got good clay. Roll-out a 1cm thick sheet

of this clay and place on it a gutted fish stuffed with a few interesting flavourings (wild garlic, a lime, ginger, lemongrass). Wrap the fish in the clay, ensuring there are no air gaps, and carefully place it in the hot ashes, covering with more glowing, hot ashes. Leave it to cook for 40 minutes to an hour.

Spatchcock chicken or ribs
Cooking meat skewered on some branches is great fun and impresses the kids like nothing else, except perhaps cooking fish in clay. Spatchcock a chicken – its easy! – or get your butcher to do it; or use a rack of ribs instead.

Make a dry rub using roughly equal quantities of allspice, crushed garlic, grated ginger, sugar, chilli powder and salt. Then rub thoroughly over the chicken or ribs. Skewer your chicken with crossed branches poked through the legs on opposite sides, in an X shape. Prop the meat above the fire – if the heat is right, the meat should start charring after about five minutes; cook for 15 minutes in total. Check the juices run clear by poking the thickest part of the meat before serving.

Bonfire puddings
Simple banana halves fried in butter never fails. There is no need to add sugar, although leftover Easter egg works well with this.

If you're feeling more ambitious, try this "bonfire clafouti": cover the bottom of a cast-iron casserole dish with a layer of pear or apple halves, make a thick batter using a packet sponge cake or muffin mix, and pour over the fruit. Place the lid on the casserole dish and balance it above the hot ashes (there needs to be an air gap under the dish to stop it from burning). This is a fantastic way to finish your bonfire dinner.

These are my favourites, tried and tested, but I'm always keen to hear new ideas. So what inspired campfire dishes have you come up with and which have ended in disaster? Also, what's good to drink with a charred dinner? I'm a bit biased - I like a certain well-known stout with most things, but a bottle of wine is also guaranteed to taste better drunk in the fresh air around a fire.

The Wild Garlic, Beaminster: 
What a difference a year makes – Matt Follas has gone from winning a TV cooking competition to setting up this little beauty of a restaurant.
Photograph: David Partner

Adducing a corpse as a witness for anything is a cheap and distasteful gambit, so let me begin by suggesting that Keith Floyd, who died after lunching elsewhere in Dorset a few days after our visit, would have adored Mat Follas's first restaurant and might even have identified him as the fruit of his culinary loins. Although familiar to many of you as this year's MasterChef winner, Follas was a new face to me due to the Grossmanophobia that makes watching that show impossible even now, years after that stoic sufferer from irritable vowel syndrome departed. Follas's career is the mirror image of Floyd's, the latter becoming a telly character off the back of being a chef-proprietor and the former achieving the trick in reverse, but otherwise they are as one. The vibrant passion for food – the sourcing and foraging for it, as well as the cooking of it – with which Floyd laid the populist ground for programmes such as MasterChef shines through at the Wild Garlic in the pretty town of Beaminster.
There is so much else to admire that the traditional Hazgush warning must be issued. The twin traps of fierce lighting and lousy acoustics that often ruin otherwise impressive restaurants are nimbly avoided. The light green walls are unencumbered by hideous paintings, the furniture is farmhousy solid, and the room resounds with the appetite- stimulating buzz of relaxed people relishing their grub.

The short printed menu, meanwhile, bolstered by a wide range of blackboarded daily specials, is perfectly judged and resists the temptation to impress with technical wizardry that afflicts many gifted amateurs when they turn pro. Follas understands that encouraging first-rate ingredients to taste of themselves has the edge over poncery and ostentation. He also has unusual mastery of 
presentation, adorning the starters with an exquisite little salad dotted with edible flowers. Pan-fried garlic scallops (three plump beauties for £7; the pricing of both food and wine is without chutzpah) came alluringly browned, and with absurdly delicious miso-infused seaweed. My wife was lukewarm about her caramelised goat's cheese ("Nice enough, but a bit pointless"), but my smooth, subtle chicken liver pâté was great, while ceviche of brill was spectacularly fresh and zingy, and had a limey kick to keep a fleet of Tudor galleons scurvy-free for a year.

There then followed a moment that had me cooing at Follas's business sense. The inter-course hiatus was plugged by an amuse-bouche of a dozen clams garnished with capers and garlic mayonnaise, one of those cute touches that costs a restaurant thruppence but leaves punters purring at what seems a lavish freebie. Two of us then went for the lemon sole, a vast and blameless fish served whole and on the bone, and laden with more capers and garlic butter. My wife thought her ribeye steak of water buffalo well seasoned and cooked to the ideal medium rarity, but lacking the depth of flavour of beef, and for what the marital ledger reveals to be the ninth time in 18 years of holy wedlock, we were in full agreement there. However, she was wild about the "smoked mash" – a mound of fluffy, creamy potato suffused with a hickory, mesquitish twang – that also came with my five ruby-red slices of sensationally tender and flavoursome sika venison.

Fresh berry mess was magnificent, and chocolate brownies with cream, chocolate twizzle and berries was "absolutely the best I've had outside the Popeseye," said my wife of a beloved west London steak house.

All in all, this was one of the most pleasing meals I've eaten in years, served with warmth and expertise by a dramatically mustachioed manager and a droll waitress in pole position to do something about it, since her day job is running the old-fashioned barber's bang opposite. Follas is an exceedingly rare talent. Nothing the programme could ever accomplish could compensate for unleashing Loyd Grossman on this island, but MasterChef should be very proud of itself indeed.

It doesn't look like much, but ... Noma restaurant, Copenhagen. Photograph: PR

Before I was sent there for the MasterChef final, I didn't know that Noma, which Sybil Kapoor has written about beautifully in today's G2, existed. I was dreading going to a fussy Michelin-starred restaurant, because what I thought of as Michelin food was not the sort of food I want to cook. It was jaw-dropping for me to find out that at Noma, which has two Michelin stars, René Redzepi does food which is totally different from my preconceptions.

For the final, the other guys were both at five star hotels and had the whole treatment; dinner at chef's tables, all the frills. We stayed at the Scandinavian equivalent of a Travelodge in the red light district and had a few drinks at a Vietnamese, but there's no way I would have swapped. I was delighted to be there. It was very much a life-changing couple of days, offering inspiration as well as the chance to pick up practical tips for my restaurant.

We spent one-and-a-half days at Noma, but even just getting an hour with them, getting to understand what they do, would have been invaluable. René is an 

incredibly busy man, but took the time to show me how, for example, his foraged produce comes in. I now have my own foragers and I can give them the same containers I saw at Noma - nothing fancy, just lined with tissue paper - and I know from going there that fresh foraged bits and pieces will happily last a good few days.

There's certainly inspiration from Noma that I've used all the way through putting our restaurant together, from the induction hobs in the kitchen to a skate dish which I've done with British ingredients, sea kale and sea kale berries, but which is very much inspired by Noma. Without having gone there it would have been so much more difficult. I don't want to copy him, but when I'm thinking, "how the hell do I do this?" it's my touchstone.

We'd cooked turbot during the day of the final, and when it came to attempting to replicate René's signature dish he said, "you're too good at cooking fish, I'm going to give you something else to do." That was good and bad. He gave me a version of the musk ox tartar, which is a very difficult one to do for service. I had to do a swipe of tarragon paste across the plate, exactly the right width, on the right angle. It wasn't something I'd done before, but it was the biggest compliment to hear that he was pleased with it. 

Going back to my management training, I'd call René an authoritative leader. He leads by example. He knows that he can do pretty much any job in the kitchen, and like any good kitchen there isn't any shouting. He was very clear when he wasn't happy with something and he sent a lot of food back, including some of mine; even his experienced sous chef was getting plates returned, perhaps one in four. But there was no belittling involved in it, and I really felt a sense of achievement when I'd done it to the right standard.

Rene is hard to describe, but I think the whole crew, males included, all fell slightly in love with him. The girls went ga-ga; it was kind of a standing joke. What I want to cook is what Noma does. That's as aspirational as it gets for me.