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There were four choices of preparation offered for the Dover Sole and, although her natural conservatism inclined her to the straight meunière, Rachel took advice from the waiter (what's his secret?) and risked the version dressed with citrus fruits. She was rewarded with a beautiful, proud, muscly fish, served on the bone, but finless, headless and tail-less, essentially meunière in style, with some orangey fruits working very well with it, not against it.
I had a confit of lamb that was faultless: two chunky roundels of boned, rolled shoulder, slow-cooked and finished with a mustardy breadcrumb crust, whose amber grit fell beautifully into the soft, juicy meat and punctuated the lovely molten fat. Underneath it were creamy, young, garlicky flageolet beans enjoying the sticky lamb run-off and, on the side, portions of excellent minted peas and runner beans that were three times the size of the portions I grumbled about last week at Skylon, and a pound less at £2.50 each.
A good-looking deep-fried haddock went by with the nine fat chips stacked in a cube that I first saw at Marco's widely-scoffed-at (but also widely scoffed at) Titanic restaurant in Piccadilly Circus in 1998, and soup, venison, steak and lobster all came four ways. For pudding, we had an irreproachable raspberry soufflé.
And so, a couple of pints, a spritzer and a bottle of Mercurey to the good, we pottered out to the campervan, which, having been left unattended for over an hour, we half-expected to find surrounded by local police, baying Tory-voters with pitchforks, and Richard Littlejohn with a megaphone shouting, "Gyppos go home!"
But nobody seemed to have noticed us yet, and so we turned on Radio 4 long wave for Test Match Special and clambered into bed for a snooze before the march to the party. Which it doesn't look like we'll have time to talk about here. Nor the glorious Wellington Arms, where we lunched the next day. That'll have to wait, I suppose. So let's leave Rachel and me asleep in the pub car park, in our monstrous motorised carbuncle, until next week.
The neighbours are going to love that.
Marco Pierre White's Yew Tree Inn
Hollington Cross, Highclere, Newbury, Berkshire (01635 253360)
Meat/fish: 7
Cooking: 8
Campervan parking: 10
Water: 5 (Blenheim British, but still unnecessary)
Score: 7.5
Price: Very good value for cooking this good — set menus from £13.50
Mike Rice from Solihull writes: "Flying from Istanbul to Frankfurt by Lufthansa, imagine my surprise at being given, with my dried-out cheesy pasta, some 'Natural Alpine Spring Water' sourced not from Mount Blanc or the Matterhorn, but from 'The Mountains of Tennessee'. Called 'Crystal Geezer' bringing to mind a young Eastender, halfway to becoming a Diamond Geezer the water was 'Bottled at the Source in the Cherokee National Forest', and then flown to Istanbul, where bottled Turkish water is sold at traffic lights instead of a windscreen wash and tastes just fine."
E-mail feedme2@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere good, and maybe we'll go there together
Giles Coren has been a columnist for The Times since 1999. He began as a feature writer before becoming restaurant critic in 2001. His reviews appear in The Times Magazine on Saturdays
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