The New Inn, Pembridge, Herefordshire; 01544 388427

Lunch, noon-3pm; dinner, Mon-Sat, 7pm-11pm, Sun, 7pm-10.30pm

5 Stars: New look 4 Stars: New deal 3 Stars: New man 2 Stars: New Labour 1 Star: Newspeak

My local newspaper recently carried an article headlined “Are gastropubs killing off traditional bars?”, the supposition being that the former are too sterile and chichi, the latter all authentically stinky and muscular and special. It is a class argument: gastros for the bourgeoisie, normals for the proles. (Actually, in London, there is a third category: gastros for the bourgeois people who want to be proles and read their Guardians while eating something authentically working-class, like chanterelles.)

Personally, I have no problem with gastros. I prefer a clean lav, food I might conceivably want to eat, decent wine, and no “amusing” local characters yakking within my earshot - the office tosser transported to the pub, his marvellous sense of humour magnified a hundredfold by drink. But then, I'm not a sixtysomething man with a nose like a strawberry and an inexhaustible line in bigotry. Happily, London is a big place, and the gastros and traditionals coexist quite happily on the same block, as do their clienteles: you go to the gastro if you want to eat, and to the old-school boozer if you don't, or if your taste buds have died.

Things are different in the countryside, where people feel quite violently about the subject, and about breweries imposing blond wood floors and recherché crisps to lure in the weekenders. The New Inn, a freehouse with two landladies, came heartily recommended by locals, who praised its authenticity, its old-fashioned charm, the fact that “it's as far removed from nouvelle cuisine as you could possibly get”. It is a very pretty wattle-and-daub pub, parts of which are 14th century, in a very pretty spot, near the Welsh border and about half an hour's drive from Hay-on-Wye. Having driven past a couple of times and liked the cut of its jib, I was looking forward to my dinner. I don't much like eating anything overly faffed-about with, or that rudely demands I stop talking and pay it an inordinate amount of worshipful attention. I like things that taste good, such as the entire menu at Le Café Anglais. I also like 1970s food, and have a fondness for the old-fashioned, so I had high hopes.

There were no blond floors or fancy crisps in sight: the pub, for all its chocolate-box exterior prettiness, is hugger-mugger old-school inside, with carpet to match. The tiny, cosy dining room was more like an old lady's parlour, with flower pictures on the walls - a nice old lady, though, who had left books lying about, made the seats comfy with an abundance of cushions, and dotted surfaces with family photographs (including, weirdly, one of Priscilla Presley, looking like she'd been stunned prior to slaughter). The nightlight holder on our table was greasy with fingermarks, the table itself not as pristine as it might have been, which is fine, provided you share the rural disregard for the ludicrous urban horror of honest dirt. The menu was exactly as expected: ploughmans and lasagne for lunch, fancier stuff for supper.

I had chicken liver pâté, on the basis that you can't go that wrong, and Andrew had mussels. My pâté came all whizzed up into a sort of mousse - way too much orange in there - rather than as a butter-topped slab, but it tasted fine and came with an abundance of (plastic) toast and a giant pile of old-school salad, which included a random wodge of watermelon. It may have looked absurd, but the tomatoes, cucumber and cress were deliciously fresh and, I would guess, locally grown. Andrew's mussels - those green-lipped New Zealand monsters, disappointingly - were overcooked and floating dismally in a sea of warm cream, with nothing to cut through the nauseating blandness except a dash of alcohol. (Cider, I think. There was so little, it was hard to tell.) This came with a warm baguette, like one of those part-baked jobs you get at Tesco.

I ordered a very rare steak in pepper sauce for my main course, having optimistically forgotten that, although I am the most carnivorous person I know, badly cooked meat literally makes me sick and want to become vegetarian. I knew my steak was badly cooked without having to taste it, because it was grey, and therefore cooked on too low a heat. It's not hard to cook a rare steak properly: very hot pan, couple of minutes and you're done - brown and crusty on the outside, deliciously bloody within. Instead, even the thick napping of (sweet, gloopy) brown pepper sauce could not conceal the fact that my steak was the uniform grey colour of a dead person - or a dead cow, I suppose - so I couldn't eat it.

We swapped plates, and I got Andrew's beef and ale pie, which was very good indeed: home-made pastry, long shards of melting onion, properly stewed and seasoned, and falling-apart meat. He struggled valiantly with the steak and, by closing his eyes and painstakingly scraping off the mess of a sauce, managed to eat half of it. “It's actually a good piece of meat,” he said, “but they've messed it up and the sauce is horrible.” Bowls of vegetables appeared - a little overcooked, but pinging with flavour and freshness and, again, I would guess locally grown.

Puddings were the best thing on the menu - predictably traditional numbers, and none the worse for that. We had profiteroles, which would have been better had the cream not been over-whipped into froth, a hefty almond and lemon tart (not the delicate creature it sounds, but rather the pastry-heavy school-dinner version, although nice enough) and an excellent warm pecan and (crystallised) ginger cake served with custard, an entirely successful variant on the sticky toffee pudding theme. The bill for two, with a bottle of Spanish rioja, came to £61.55. Portions are enormous - they do that strange English restaurant version of generosity, where your plate is piled high with things you neither asked for nor want - and service is friendly.

A traditional English pub, then, and one to please purists, who would rather starve than countenance mizuna or pea shoots, with the traditional English pub's raison d'être: it's a place for drinking in, with stodge to soak up your excesses before the drive home.

I'd call it a wasted opportunity, since the kitchen might, with some relatively minor tweaking, produce good, consistent pub food. I expect the locals see The New Inn as a no-nonsense haven in an area generously endowed with Michelin stars. (Another pub nearby has one, and Ludlow, within striking distance, is foodie heaven.)

I wouldn't be so sure. Mediocre food is mediocre food, no matter how lovely the setting.

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