Has the birth of the gastropub really changed anything? By way of answering, let us look at a description of pubs as they were before, and then look at a new one and see if we can spot the differences. The year I have plucked at random to serve as our "before" scenario is 1587:
"In all our inns," writes William Harrison in his Description of England, "we have plenty of ale, beer and sundry kinds of wine, and such is the capacity of some of them that they are able to lodge two or three hundred persons at ease, and thereto with a very short warning make such provision for their diet, as to him that is unacquainted withal may seem to be incredible. And it is a world to see how each owner of them contendeth with other for goodness of entertainment of their guests, as about fineness and change of linen, beauty of rooms, service at table, costliness of plate, strength of drink, variety of wines…
Everything, at first glance, appears to be in order: beer, wine, big dining room, flexible menu, pukka cutlery… but did you notice what’s missing? Yup, children. Or rather, as people who take children to pubs call them: kids.
The only good thing about the old kind of pubs was that children were not allowed in, and after a childhood spent in the car parks of Hampshire pubs while the grown-ups had lunch inside it is a terrible injustice that I am not to reap the benefit of nice quiet child-free pubs in my maturity, or enjoy the Schadenfreude of seeing a new generation suffocating in its turn in the back of locked Volvos parked on the road outside.
Taking children to the pub is a uniquely futile activity, since it makes everyone involved - children, parents, staff and all the other guests - less happy than if they were not there. They don’t rack up much of a bill, they get in the way, they make a noise and they don’t like the food or the atmosphere (I feel as sorry for the children as I do for myself when I see them sitting at the table - imagine a world where half a dozen people shout "ice-cream!" when the waiter brings your pudding).
The first time I went to The Greyhound the table next to me contained an American family with two children under three who only stopped shouting the names of dishes at each other in sing-song voices to turn round at smokers and scowl with the deeply furrowed-brow and low-slung prognathic jaw that their President reserves for saying words like "Saddam", "Anthrax" and "France".
Then one of the toddlers fell off the chair it had been standing on and landed on its head with a loud clunk. As the table fell silent with horror I let out a loud involuntary laugh. They all turned and scowled doubly hard, like a group of lowland gorillas enraged by a Discovery Channel cameraman. "Sorry," I said. "It was just funny." It was funny. Pubs are where English people go to fall off their chair. The child was the only one doing it right. It was like 1587 all over again.
At first sight the parquet floor and spots and trestle tables of The Greyhound struck me as faintly comical - for while they are the signifiers of tasteful neo-rusticity in London, here, among the dark beams and buxom dairy lasses, they look futuristically urban. Like a plasma-screen TV in a Cornish hotel room. There are still parts of Hampshire, after all, where if the dishes are written on a blackboard people assume it is because you can’t afford nice laminated menus in velveteen folders.
But that sense of dislocation passes in a trice. Barry Skarin who bought the place a couple of years ago, and Darron Bunn, his chef, cite a fearsome catalogue of Nicos, Marcos and Schragers in their professional background (Bunn was head chef at Incognico, no less) and they have managed to bring most of the good things about London eating to Hampshire, and none of the bad. As well as the brilliant cooking there is a handful of rooms for them as mun tarry o’ the night if the way be dark and the horses tired, and fishing rights to a lovely stretch of the trout-full (indeed, trout-filled) Test, which winds through grounds which by the summer will be positively Waltonian in their prelapsarian gentility and Compleat Anglertasticness.
And the food really is brilliant. Smoked venison is head-shot New Forest deer from the "famous Mrs Tee" (which conjures images of some dead-eye Mrs Pepperpot figure who only has to roll over in bed for the forest fauna to scatter in panic) smoked on the premises: three slices of red meat seared dark at the edges from the heat of the smoker, and then partnered with a perfect salad of haricots blancs with a cute tatin of dark, rooty shallots. Tart fine of red onion, beetroot and goat’s cheese is brilliantly done, the sweet potato soup was rich and sweet (like the American version our fecund neighbours no doubt float marshmallows in on Thanksgiving) and the fishcakes utterly undisappointing (which is as good as fishcakes can get and thus high praise indeed). The Spanish charcuterie is good too, and prettily served on a wooden palette, but it’s a bit odd, if cussedly English, to serve piccalilli, chutney and pickled onions with what is already very sweet meat.
The fish has been excellent every time I’ve tried it, good seabass fillets from a big wild fish with very light olive oil and excellent fried turbot with leek and truffle oil gratin. Roasted saddle of rabbit with pearl barley was also fine, and there is potent, tangy sauerkraut with the pheasant. Best of all was herb- crusted cutlets of beautiful lamb from Romney Marsh (unless he said Rodney Marsh, the former QPR hero who I have no reason to suspect is now a butcher) with a little navarin of carrots, shallots and meat trimmings sloshed in a stock juice bubbled down to Marmite-like stickiness and strength.
With a very modern wine-list, sun streaming in from the lovely high street, an Ibiza chill-out album murmuring from the speakers, and bassoon-voiced chaps in dark-blue jeans coming in to order Bloody Marys "rarely rarely spicey" this could almost be Notting Hill on a Sunday morning. But then the air is so clear and grassy, the waitresses are wearing those short-sleeved white blouses nipped in to the sternum that you only get in the countryside, and you know you must be in Hampshire, and you can kick back in the snug by the fire to mull over the morning’s fishing and doze off to the sound of babies’ heads clunking on the parquet.
Food: 8
Location: 9
Inn-tune: 9
Price: sixty quid should do the pair of you
Restaurant Guide
The Flower Pots
Cheriton, Hampshire (01962 771318)
A small pub with a saloon bar on one side of the front door and what appears to be someone's front room on the left where regulars are made to feel welcome. The attached brewery makes the best ale you'll drink within a hundred miles of London. I had a lamb stew there once that was OK. Locals speak highly of curry night. Wednesday, I think or maybe Thursday.
The Angel Inn
Hetton, North Yorkshire BD23 6LY (01756 730263)
The Angel became what is considered the first gastropub in the late Eighties, serving innovative Anglo-French food and very good wines. Locals say it has been treading water for a while but on my last visit a couple of months ago it was still charming: very friendly, a stonking confit of Swaledale lamb and the wine list still a major bonus.
If you know a better rural "gastropub", e-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk and maybe we'll put it to the old 1587 test
