Address: The Village Pub, Barnsley
There is a ritual to the making of a good Bloody Mary, a certain ceremonial stateliness to the ordering of ingredients, adding the dash of this and the splash of that, building up the layers of flavour, keeping a balance and harmony between them, so that, as you taste that first slug, there's the crackle of celery salt, the fruitiness of tomato juice, the round warmth of Worcestershire sauce, the slow burn of Tabasco, the dry crackle of sherry and, finally, the long fingers of alcohol reaching gently up into the brain as the vodka comes into its own.
But horseradish? "Would you like horseradish?" asked the young lady behind the bar of the Village Pub. Why not, said Philomena, for whom the sacramental Bloody Mary was being prepared. So it came with horseradish, and celery salt crusted around the rim. The perfect, definitive Bloody Mary, said Philomena. Oho, I thought. Ahah.
We - that is, Philomena, Room-for-Two Lewis, their son Ben and I - had gone to The Village Pub at the suggestion of two readers. You can find it in the languidly pretty village of Barnsley, just outside Cirencester. The appealing baldness of the name is matched by the appealing comfort of the place. Had the weather been more clement, we could have eaten in the courtyard outside. As it was, proto-Arctic conditions encouraged us to take up a table in the plain, handsome interior.
I was right about the wider implications of the Bloody Mary rituals. The Hook Norton bitter, with which Room-for-Two and I settled the nerves, was in exquisite nick, and young Ben's lemonade was Fentimans, a superior brand. If a pub will take such pains over its Bloody Mary, beer and lemonade, you need have no fear about lunch, that's my feeling.
The chef is a young fellow by the name of Graham Grafton, who got here by way of The Greenhouse, The Ivy, Le Caprice and Bibendum, a CV that suggests that he knows how to cook sensible food seriously, which is what you want in a pub. You may quibble with the pedigree of a dish such as smoked mackerel Niçoise, but you couldn't, according to Room-for-Two, complain about the result. The smoked fish, he said, really benefited from the Niçoise treatment, and the smoking actually did things for the salad, too.
Ben and Philomena's grilled sardines were as fresh as you could wish, splendidly cooked, and some baked pepper and tomato (a bit of a Delia touch) helped flesh out the dish intelligently. I, meanwhile, had been drawn to a dish of chicken liver and black pudding hash. The job description was a bit misleading -hash, I thought, meant that everything was mashed up together. Here, the hunks of liver, the chunks of soft, French-style pudding and the fried potatoes were arranged separately around a tussock of salad. Still, each element was well-sourced and very well cooked, and the salad was dressed for the occasion.
I didn't get quite such a kick from the duck-plums-and-noodles business with which I followed this up, largely because I am not convinced that this is the best way to serve duck. I could have done without the noodles, for one, and the slop of soya gravy. The duck breast, on the other hand, was superbly rich and juicy, while the gently tart plums were on hand to discipline any sense of over-indulgence.
Ben declared his steak to be the best he had ever had. I noticed that he passed on the creamed leeks, but I put that down to the natural aversion of a 15-year-old boy to all vegetables except chips (which were very good, incidentally). Room-for-Two's Moroccan beef casserole looked and tasted a hit. It was massive, black and glossy; sweet, soft and fibrous; genial and broad-shouldered, with a hint of the exotic. In short, it was very fine eating from every perspective. Philomena was just as entranced by her sea bass, which demonstrated the benefits of not mucking about with a good piece of very fresh fish, other than to cook it with precision. It gave her a lot of pleasure.
She was not, however, so voluble about her fish as she was about the coffee crème caramel. This is a very difficult dish to carry off because texture is almost everything in the crème caramel universe; that, and the bitterness of the caramel. The delicate, just-holding wobble was perfect and the coffee flavouring marked but not unbalanced - perhaps it didn't quite have the second-strike bitterness from the burnt caramel that distinguishes my mother's peerless version, but it was pretty damned fine whichever way you ate it. The pannacotta was not in the same league, unfortunately: a shade too much gelatine in the mix had turned it rather too solid for my liking, though this is not a major-league complaint.
Indeed, such small quibbles aside, I have nothing but praise for The Village Pub. Aside from the care taken with the beer and the Bloody Mary, there are 17 wines available by the glass from a short, well- chosen and sensibly-priced list - we put paid to a bottle of silky Sedara Donnafugata Rosso Sicilia at £16.95, as well as a glass of Vina Carmen Insigne Sauvignon Blanc for Philomena. There are no bar snacks, but a couple of interesting sandwich items appear on the menu. The service had a diverting charm. The food was as above. And the bill was £101.85, or about £25 a head all in. You can take that down to £17 if you strip out drinks, coffee, etc, which is pretty fair value all round. Make that very good value
Small helpings
Telephone: 01753 855370
Address: Al Fassia, 7 St Leonard's Road, Windsor, Berks
16/20
Food: Moroccan
Price: £10-20 per head (excluding drinks)
A short haul from mainstream, tidied and twee tourist Windsor lies a treasure house of North African cooking: Al Fassia has the warmth and informality of a family-run place, and the scrupulous attention to detail of serious professionalism. The couscous has the dry, light, airy quality of a dandelion head. The tagines unleash a sequence of seductive, euphonious riffs. Mellow is right. Order specialities such as m'hummar, trid, mechoui and sharia madfouna a couple of days ahead. Proto-wine list, but decent enough.
Telephone: 020-7636 2833
Address: Passione, 10 Charlotte Street, London W1.
16/20
Food: Italian.
Price: £15-25 per head (excluding drinks).
It's small, it's cool, it's smart, but it buzzes with real passione. Chef Gennaro Contaldo (Jamie Oliver's guru) was the man who came up with all the wild things for Antonio Carluccio's TV series, and now he is doing the same at Passione. So there are, natch, wild mushrooms here and there, but also wild sorrel in a risotto, wild garlic in a pesto variation, wild broccoli as a veg doused in olive oil and lemon juice, real wild rocket for salads. Unwild meats and fishes are treated with notable precision, and with the lightness of touch redolent of southern Italian cooking. Short, sharp wine list. Dextrous service of great charm.
Telephone: 01227 751360
Address: The Dove Inn, Plum Pudding Lane, Dargate, Near Faversham, Kent
14/20
Food: Modern European.
Price: £10-25 a head (excluding drinks).
Pub with a restaurant, not a restaurant posing as a pub. Red brick and flower-girt without. Comfortable, unmucked-about within. The bar is still a bar, where you can murder a pint of tip-top Shepherd Neame and properly prepared bar snacks; or head for the dining room if it's more serious tucker you're after. Chef/proprietor Nigel Morris is a man of Kent with a real cooking pedigree. He brings the skills of the big professional kitchen to bear on local ingredients with notably happy results. Most dishes are in the mainstream European tradition - viz saddle of lamb with tomato and basil jus; pork rillettes with chutney; brown shrimps with ginger and garlic. There's a potent wine list, to boot.
