Penningtons Brasserie at The Castle Hotel Opens on Windsor High Street

Date: 21 August 2026

We are pleased to share that Penningtons, a British Brasserie, has opened on Windsor High Street, marking a new food and beverage chapter for Castle Hotel Windsor.

The new restaurant and bar sits moments from Windsor Castle, in a building that has been welcoming guests for more than 500 years. But Penningtons was never about creating a hotel restaurant hidden inside a hotel.

The ambition was always bigger than that.

Penningtons has been designed as street-facing food and beverage with its own identity. A British brasserie that belongs to Windsor High Street, speaks to local guests and visitors, and gives Castle Hotel Windsor a stronger connection to the town around it.

The name Penningtons is rooted in the building’s own history.

Around 1650, an innkeeper named George Pennington ran what is now Castle Hotel Windsor, then known as the Mermaid Inn. During the English Civil War, when small change was scarce, he created the Pennington penny, a local token used to exchange goods around Windsor.

That story became the starting point for the new concept.

Not as nostalgia. Not as a theme. But as a way to connect the restaurant back to the original spirit of the inn: local, useful, generous and part of everyday life on Windsor High Street.

Auden Hospitality developed the restaurant concept and brand direction for Penningtons, helping shape a brasserie that uses history as a foundation rather than a constraint.

The brief was to honour the building’s past while creating something relevant for guests today.

That thinking runs through the design, food and service. Penningtons is warm, confident and quietly considered. It takes the idea of a historic British inn and brings it forward through modern British cooking, thoughtful hospitality and timeless surroundings.

The result is a restaurant that feels rooted, but not old-fashioned. Polished, but not stiff. Proper, but still relaxed enough for everyday use.

Penningtons was created to work for hotel guests, but also to stand on its own.

That distinction matters.

The strongest hotel F&B does not rely only on the guests already staying upstairs. It creates a reason for people on the street to come in. It gives locals somewhere to return to. It makes the hotel feel more open, more relevant and more connected to its setting.

For Penningtons, that meant building a clear brasserie identity around leisurely lunches, memorable dinners, handcrafted cocktails and properly poured pints.

A place for a quick drink. A proper meal. A family occasion. A business lunch. A table that starts with one drink and becomes dinner.

Auden’s role was to design a concept that gave the restaurant its own reason to exist.

That meant defining the positioning, shaping the brand story, building the guest experience and helping translate the history of the building into a restaurant and bar that works for modern Windsor.

The challenge was to avoid two traps.

It could not feel like a generic hotel restaurant. It also could not feel like a heritage concept looking backwards.

Penningtons needed to sit between both worlds. A place that understands its history, but behaves like a modern British brasserie.

Scot Turner, Founder of Auden Hospitality, said: