4-5 Crown Walk, Newmarket (01638 665 314)
Meal for two, with wine and service, £90
Earlier this year, Birds Eye launched a major ad campaign emphasising the health benefits of freezing over the kind of artificial preservatives which they do not use. The ads focused on its premium ranges, the 100 per cent beef burgers and prime cod fish fingers. But Birds Eye still makes a crispy chicken product which is more fat than protein (16.5 per cent to 15.4 per cent) and chicken burgers that are only 53 per cent chicken.
The point is this: when a food business promotes itself not according to whether what it sells is nice to eat, but via some other principle, be it health or ethics, it runs the risk of empty sloganeering.
And so to a restaurant called Steven Saunders in Newmarket, where above the door is the legend 'Simple, fresh and organic food'. Saunders, a sometime television chef who made his name at the Pink Geranium in Cambridgeshire, has long banged the drum for organics and the quality of his ingredients really shines through. Lovely things go into that kitchen; sadly, courtesy of the cooks working under his name - he is not actually there - some really awful things come out.
The room, like most of the dishes, is a master class in how not to do it. The walls are sea-green; there are black-and-white photographs of ingredients with little bits picked out in colour and huge white sheaths of linen over the chairs, like they're all wearing condoms. It has been designed with confidence, but no sense of style.
The menu is one of those modern tapas sharing jobs, but very little worked. The asparagus in a tempura of vegetables were models of their kind, but the batter was as heavy and dense as a winter duvet. A saffron risotto had an unpleasant sour edge, as if somebody had forgotten to cook off the white wine. Slices of peppered tuna, just seared on the outside, were from a good chunk of fish, but they were scattered with cold brown chunks of fried garlic which tasted like they had been made hours before service. Lamb chops spoke of a fine animal, but one was completely overcooked and neither had been rested for long enough. They came with lumpy mashed potato. At the end there was a tart rhubarb and peach crumble, the topping to which was a dusty mess that could be raked with a fork, like a gravel path.
There were a few things we liked. A slice of loose, fibrous duck confit terrine showed that someone out there knew how to make at least one dish, though it was served too cold. A salad of Cromer crab, the white meat mixed with fresh herbs and a lemon dressing and returned to the shell, was exemplary, and my pudding - a weird bread and butter 'banoffee' made with brioche and caramel sauce - did hot, sweet and chewy in an obliging manner.
But the rest really was disastrous, and nor was it cheap. Most dishes are at least £7.50, with some at £11, and the bill quickly mounts up. It is too often the way in this country. The virtues of organic, seasonal and local ingredients are shouted from the rooftops. And then a place like this goes and buggers them up. Until that ethical approach is coupled with a clear understanding of how to prepare those ingredients, the issue will remain an empty middle-class fetish.
