Cabbage Hall, Little Budworth, Cheshire (01829 760 292). Meal for two, including wine and service, £110
The first item on the menu at Cabbage Hall, a pub restaurant in Cheshire, is Potage Yehudi Menuhin. Oh God. Where do I start? With the gross affectation of the use of the French for the word soup? Too easy. I could have a go at the self-aggrandisement of naming a soup after a musician, in the manner of Escoffier and his Peach Melba, as if Menuhin's patronage were a recommendation of any sort rather than just proof that chef Robert Kisby has famous friends. But that would be cheap of me. Instead, let me dwell on the menu description: "Rich chicken and vegetable broth liased [sic] with a garlic olive oil emulsion". At which point the pretension meter goes critical and explodes.
The use of the L word here is not merely another affectation, the menu writer thundering about in the English language like an elephant on heat. It's so much worse than that. Liaison is a musty, old-school gastronomic term which refers to both a thickening agent for soups and sauces, and the process of thickening. (Long before it was applied to meetings in the English language, the word was used here solely for its culinary purpose.) There are two problems with this. Firstly, while you could thicken a soup with olive oil by creating an emulsion, this soup had not been thickened in any way, so it hadn't been liaised. And secondly, as you can see from my direct quotation above, they misspelt the bloody word. Where was the second "i"? I wanted to run into the kitchen and do damage to someone with the business end of a fork. For the record, the soup was the sort of thing you would admire if someone had knocked it together from leftovers.
I could bring this review to a halt right here, for the soup tells you everything you need to know about Cabbage Hall. There is an overweening self-regard, an emetic preening about the place – the chef has hung framed certificates for his culinary diplomas on the wall – which is out of all proportion to its accomplishments, not least because dinner for two will easily cost more than £100. Everything and everyone is trying too hard.
It started with the very first enquiry, as to whether we would like a glass of Champagne, a gratuitous attempt at upselling dressed as bonhomie, so that you are made to feel cheap from the start by declining and ordering the Prosecco. The waiter then kept trying to refill our glasses, leaving me bewildered as to whether he had understood the order or was just trying to get away with flogging us more. Challenged on this, he said he was being friendly. There are other words I could use, but the Observer style book doesn't allow them.
Two dishes were worth their price tag: a starter salad of lightly pickled wild mushrooms with dollops of celeriac purée, micro greens and a Madeira jelly looked pretty, was texturally interesting and made sense. At the other end, a slice of sticky toffee pudding was properly executed. Other things made my eyes ache from rolling back in my head repeatedly. Underseasoned scallops in a slippery cream sauce that obliterated their flavour were crowded off the plate by armed battalions of unseasonal green vegetables, as if the oval side dish of veg usually found in these parts had simply been upended on to the plate. Hard, overcooked pheasant breasts stuffed with a mousseline of the leg – though on this menu, the breast was, naturally enough, "enveloping" that stuffing – came in a cloying Cognac-bloated sauce, studded with hard nodes of chestnut.
We finished with the assiette of their desserts, which, sticky toffee pudding aside, was lots of fancy words for clumsy cookery: a leathery bit of choux pastry with caramelised bananas which simply weren't, a floppy, stodgy pancake stuffed with graceless apple purée, and so on. And all this to the sound of Take That's greatest hits booming occasionally from the sound system.
What drives me nuts about all this is that it gives restaurants of ambition, and therefore expense, a bad name. I try to eat outside London as often as possible, but the truth is that it's the gaucheness of restaurants like Cabbage Hall which mean that, too often, I embark upon those journeys with bitter trepidation.
