A double accolade for the Ribble Valley restaurant, also named North West's Best Local Restaurant, in an award decided entirely by reader nominations
There are moments a restaurant works towards for twenty years without ever quite believing they’ll arrive. This week, one of them did.
La Locanda has been named the overall winner of The Good Food Guide’s Best Local Restaurant 2026, the top spot among the Guide’s 100 Best Local Restaurants across Great Britain. The Gisburn restaurant also secured the regional title of North West Best Local Restaurant, a double accolade collected by owners Maurizio and Cinzia Bocchi at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 13 July.
“We are so happy,” said Chef Maurizio Bocchi. “To be recognised by The Good Food Guide as the best local restaurant in the country is something we could only have dreamed of when we first opened our doors more than 20 years ago.”
Il Verdetto
The Verdict
The Good Food Guide’s 100 Best Local Restaurants Awards celebrate the independent restaurants that define their neighbourhoods, places chosen not by critics working to a brief, but by the people who eat there. Each year, tens of thousands of nominations are submitted by readers championing their favourite local restaurant. The strongest leads are then followed up in person by the Guide’s nationwide network of inspectors, visiting anonymously, before the editor makes the final call on who earns a place in the 100, and who takes the overall title.
That process is what makes this particular win land differently to an industry award. Nobody at La Locanda entered a form or paid an entry fee. Somebody who ate there, on an ordinary evening, thought it was worth telling a stranger about.
The Good Food Guide’s editor, Chloe Hamilton, put it best: “There are no more deserving winners than Cinzia and Maurizio. The care and quality in everything they do is outstanding and so is their generosity of spirit that makes you feel part of the family. Lucky are the locals of Gisburn!”
Una Storia di Famiglia
A Family Story
The story behind that generosity of spirit starts a long way from Gisburn. Maurizio grew up on the banks of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, foraging for chestnuts and mushrooms with his grandmother, learning to make pasta at his mother’s side. He and Cinzia moved to Lancashire in 1996, and it was a walk past an estate agent’s window in nearby Whalley that led them to the building that would become La Locanda: a former chapel, garage and sweet shop, which they stripped back and rebuilt themselves.
They opened the doors in 2003. More than twenty years on, the menu still carries the food Maurizio learned as a child, made now with Lancashire ingredients from producers the couple have come to know personally, alongside the finest Italian produce they can source.
Ospitalità Vera
True Hospitality
Ask Maurizio and Cinzia what the restaurant is actually about, and neither of them talks about technique first. They talk about the guests who’ve become regulars, the local suppliers whose names appear on the menu, the feeling they’ve tried to build since day one of a table that happens to be Italian rather than a restaurant that happens to serve food.
That’s the thread running through this win. A national award, built entirely on the word of people who kept coming back, and kept telling others to come too.
Cosa Viene Dopo
What Comes Next
Maurizio and Cinzia are planning a thank you event for customers in the coming weeks, details to follow, as a way of marking the award with the people who made it happen. In the meantime, the best way to join the celebration is the way it’s always been done at La Locanda – pull up a chair.
