John Tovey obituary

Before the 1970s, visitors to the Lake District came for the scenery, not the food; ramblers would count themselves lucky to get a pint and a decent pork pie. In 1971, John Tovey, who has died aged 85, took over Miller Howe hotel, on the banks of Windermere, and it became a fashionable destination throughout the 70s and 80s, one of the first gastronomic country house hotels in the region. Tovey, who had taught himself to cook, was not celebrated for any particular dish, but for the slightly camp drama experienced by guests at Miller Howe.

A large man, with attractive hooded eyelids, and something of both the shambling gait and the dramatic mood changes of Basil Fawlty, Tovey believed that dining at his hotel was a theatrical event. The gong summoned you to dinner: extracting yourself from a leather chesterfield sofa in the cluttered drawing room, you ambled into the candle-lit dining room and the lights were dimmed to emphasise the weather-dependent Lake Poets’ views from the big windows, as well as the over-the-top table setting.

Soup was served first, from the £30 fixed-price, no-choice (puddings excepted) five-course menu; the main course might be roast hogget, a tranche from a whole poached or baked salmon, or “poussin stuffed with prune, apple and bacon, served on homemade rhubarb chutney with rich, old-fashioned gravy”, which the writer Hunter Davies reported eating in 1992. Another diner remembered “local farmyard chicken breast stuffed with Cashel blue cheese and served with coconut, coriander leaves”. This last was probably not a dish that would please his close friend Delia Smith, but restraint was not part of the culinary character of Tovey.

The main dish was always accompanied by seven tortuously prepared vegetables – and Tovey boasted that he had never repeated a menu. In my own experience the excessive homage to the vegetable kingdom was the comic interlude in the drama of dinner, something like the function of the porter in Macbeth. Whether he was cooking that evening or not, Tovey would work the room after the puddings were served, taking his curtain calls.

Born in Barrow-in-Furness, now in Cumbria, Tovey grew up in a working-class family, with his father often working abroad. He claimed in an interview that he was sexually abused by his mother from the age of nine to 15, and when his father did come home, “he battered me. For giving cheek. I left home the second I could, when I was 16 in 1949, forging my father’s name on a passport, and I got away as far as I could.”

He joined the civil service in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and began as a junior cadet clerical officer, rising to become secretary to a regional governor. In 1957 he returned to Barrow, and clubbed together with some friends to buy the local theatre, Her Majesty’s; he was in love with the manager, a relationship that lasted 11 years. “I knew I was gay from the age of nine,” he said.

When money to operate the theatre ran low, Tovey took a job in catering, becoming a manager at the Hydro hotel in Windermere. He then moved to the Sharrow Bay hotel in Ullswater, run by the celebrated partnership of Francis Coulson and Brian Sack. He disliked the pair, and stayed only four months – but it was there he acquired the ambition to have his own hotel, staffed “as if in a private house surrounded by lovely things”, where you were served without your order being written down.

Finding a backer in London, he bought the 13-bedroom Miller Howe in 1971 for £36,500 and spent a further £16,500 on restoring the property, which had been built during the first world war. Tovey slept in the cellar for the three years the work took; but in 1974 the Sunday Times critic Margaret Costa gave the hotel a rave review, after which there was seldom an empty table. The restaurant’s success was not really the menu, which is so easy to parody today, but the 19 devoted, permanent staff, who did their best to make you think you were visiting a genuine country house. By 1989 the business was worth £2.5m.

Tovey achieved a degree of national celebrity with five television series, including John Tovey’s Entertaining on a Plate (1991). He was a natural on screen, where his over-the-top enthusiasm served him well. He wrote several books, including five TV spin-offs.

This success enabled him to buy a farmhouse in Lancashire, where he lived alone with his rescue dog, an Old English sheepdog named Ossie. Later he met Paolo Rebello, a married Portuguese man, and the two set up home together following Rebello’s divorce. In 1998 he sold the hotel to Charles Garside, former editor of the short-lived newspaper the European – but Tovey stayed on as a consultant and taught cookery classes at his farmhouse.

He and Rebello moved to South Africa, relishing the excellence of the wines, first in Cape Town, and then in McGregor, a remote village in the Western Cape. They returned often to the UK, where Tovey entertained his friends lavishly, always ordering, and paying for, the most expensive wine on the list.

He was appointed MBE in 1997 for services to tourism.