The Restaurant
Roger Hickman took over the former Adlards site — a restaurant that held one of Norwich's earliest Michelin stars in the 1980s and 90s — in 2010 and has since built the most consistent fine-dining room in East Anglia. Trained at Morston Hall and at L'Escargot in Soho, Hickman cooks modern European with a Norfolk sensibility: Cromer crab, rare-breed pork from the Norfolk Saddleback, samphire, and sea buckthorn foraged from the marshes east of the city.
The room itself is contained and formal — ivory walls, white linen, banquette seating — and seats thirty across two small dining rooms. The service is career-level: the maître d' has been with Hickman since opening. The tasting menu runs seven courses (£95) with a shorter a la carte available Tuesday through Thursday. The wine list is carefully chosen and extends from serious Burgundy through to Hickman's favourite Alsace producers.
Three AA Rosettes for fifteen consecutive years place Roger Hickman's alongside the very best provincial British restaurants. The Michelin Guide has never awarded a star — a fact Hickman himself discusses with a wry acceptance — but the cooking consistently performs at that level and the kitchen retains a following of Norwich regulars who have eaten here hundreds of times across a decade and a half.
Why This Is Norwich’s Close a Deal Pick
For closing a deal in Norwich, Roger Hickman's delivers the one thing that is genuinely difficult in a regional British city: formal fine-dining pacing without country-house pretension. The dining room is small enough for private conversation, the wine list is serious enough to demonstrate investment, and the service is controlled enough that the business discussion can proceed without interruption. The seven-course tasting provides the two-hour window required for any serious contract conversation. Upper St Giles Street is a five-minute taxi from the city's main hotels; the restaurant closes at 10pm, leaving enough time for a nightcap at a hotel bar afterwards if the evening requires it.