Little Bedwyn, nr Marlborough, Wiltshire; 01672 870871.
Lunch: Wednesday to Sunday. Dinner: Wednesday to Saturday

5 stars: Greed is good; 4 stars: Supersize me; 3 stars: What’s for seconds?; 2 stars: A light bite; 1 star: You want more?

There’s a local delicacy they serve during the summer months at the Bell in Ramsbury, Wiltshire. Huge, moist, pink piles of River Kennet crayfish steaming on a plate, boiled for five minutes and tossed in olive oil with shallots, parsley and maybe some garlic. You can feel good about eating these crayfish, too, because they’re the large, right-wing, pro-Bush American crayfish that are taking over our southern rivers; murderous robo-crayfish introduced by accident and now apparently wreaking destruction from the Tamar to the Trent.

I bought some to cook once; you boil your pan of water and tip them in, just as they begin to rouse from their nap in the fridge. Never again. Believe me, they go effing wild – as would I, I suppose, if some mouthy media slag tried to boil me alive. I felt so bad about it that I had to stop and let a whole bunch go free; just tipped them out the back door into the garden. I assumed they’d die anyway – we’re miles from the nearest river. At least they would have the illusion of freedom, and be a little snack for the owls. And then, the next day, we took our daughter to see the lovely gee-gees in the stables half a mile away and came across the Moldovan stable hand staring, wide-eyed in astonishment, at something moving in the hay. “Look – eet eez miracle,” he kept saying, over and over, scratching his head. There, in the corner, waving its little pincers about, was one of my liberated crayfish. Adaptable little bastards, you have to say.

Crayfish isn’t all the Bell has to offer; there’s a fairly short but imaginative menu, extremely well cooked by the young and clever chef, Paul Kinsey. You would call it a gastro-pub were it not for the fact that the term makes me dry-heave, having endured things called gastro-pubs in London: all that mimsy, cack-handed faux-fusion toss served up incompetently by sour-faced mingers with an air of superiority. The Bell does it much better than anything you will find, I would suggest, in Notting Hill or Clapham. When I moved back to the country, some friends, dropping in for the weekend, would say: “Where’s the nearest decent place to eat out, then? Ealing? Ha-ha.” Well, you can walk the four miles to the Bell without being stabbed, importuned, choked by fumes or run over. And within 15 minutes by car are two single-Michelin-starred restaurants (of which the Harrow is one) and a two-Michelin-starred place. It’s not just the bourgeoisie who are getting the hell out of London – gradually, it’s the bourgeoisie’s indispensable infrastructure, too.

The Harrow is in a place called Little Bedwyn, a hamlet perched above the Kennet and Avon Canal on the Wiltshire/Berkshire border – exactly halfway from Islington to your second home in the south Cotswolds or Somerset. (You don’t have a second home yet? Oh, come on. There are still plenty of villages left to be strangled by weekenders in those parts of the country that were once “the west” but have somehow become, these past two decades, “the southeast”.) The Bedwyns – Great Bedwyn is a mile or so down the lane – seem to me to be Wiltshire in name alone; there is about them the whiff of the closely mown gallops of west Berks and the manicured neatness of suburbia. Yet, despite all that, the Harrow is a gem.

There are at least three dishes on the menu that are as good as anything I have ever eaten. The first, a scallop, foie gras and black pudding construction with a caramelised sweet wine; the next, a tuna carpaccio of improbable pinkness, wrapped in nori; and the last, a squid and belly of pork confection, oozing salt and fat and sweetness and everything else you’re not allowed to enjoy eating these days. None of those three dishes strikes me as being wildly, surreally imaginative – like, say, smoked otter and Caramac parfait in a sherbet jus. All three have been done elsewhere, I suspect – but a vague familiarity with the combinations shouldn’t put you off. The squid and pork, particularly, was about as perfect as it gets.

Of course, being possessed of a Michelin star, the Harrow feels itself justified in offering up a tasting menu. Sooner or later, McDonald’s or the Botulo Burger Bar in Peckham will offer their customers a tasting menu: a tiny little patty of ground-up cow udder and gruel, resting upon a tiny molten plastic “bun” and smothered in acrid mayonnaise, followed by three french fries, à la maison, immersed for 24 hours in thick grease. And then one of those thick shakes redolent of breast milk and polythene, served in a thimble. Believe me, this tasting-menu business, this braggadocio, has gone way, way too far.

Even here, I find it a lot less impressive than the à la carte. There was, for example, shin of Welsh black beef, which had apparently been braised by eunuchs and worshipped by sluts for most of the preceding week – and it was, you know, fine. It came on a camp bed of mashed potato. I didn’t read the menu properly, so maybe it was a rare Himalayan potato mashed by relatives of the Archduke Ferdinand and lubricated with butter drawn from virginal cows, who knows? Beef and mash, though – I need to “taste” that? No, I don’t. I could eat it, sure, but I know pretty much what it tastes like. Before the beef came fillet of turbot with wild mushrooms, which was very good indeed – I could have done with a lot more of it. But I was only tasting it, you see, rather than actually eating it. And one swallow does not make a dinner. Maybe that’s what we should do when faced with tasting menus: swill the stuff around our mouths for a few moments to savour the brilliance of the cooking, then spit it out onto the floor, saying in an enthusiastic manner, “Absolutely excellent, succulent and sweet. Now, bring me a kebab and a Lion Bar, I’m hungry.”

Everything else, however, was delectable – a sweet ceviche of yellow fin tuna, scallops and shrimp. The shrimp was what used to be called prawn, mind, in the days before prawn became as risible as, say, Lembit Opik. And there’s gentle venison or sea bass, belly of pork or aged beef: nothing terribly surprising, but everything cleverly thought out and properly cooked. If I make it sound boring, it is because you might have become used to menus where the bravado overreaches the food.

The Harrow’s USP, incidentally, is its wines – it has won best award of excellence three years running with Wine Spectator, and won restaurant of the year 2007 in Decanter. You can eat your meal here with “icon” wines – that taste like Madonna or Winston Churchill, presumably – but it’ll cost you a few bob. I stuck to an Inniskillin Riesling Icewine, which may have hailed from Germany, or Northern Ireland, or perhaps somewhere in the new world, who knows? It was lovely. Drank so much of the stuff, we drove back in seven minutes flat, maiming three badgers and a muntjac and a horse. Ha, only joking.

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