Pizzas galore!

Market is an absolutely spot-on example of the great new thing in England where a really good chef gets hold of really good ingredients and cooks simple, mostly British things in a room that looks cosy enough – simple without being quaint or egregiously pared-down trendy – with an A4 menu offering six to eight starters and six to eight mains, staff who have an idea what’s going on in the kitchen and a tight little one-page list of wines mostly under £30. “Gastro” comes out of the pub and goes back into the restaurant.

Most of the dishes are classic modern British – I had a great Yorkshire pudding filled with rare roast beef, which was chewy but tasting fully of bull, with lovely coarse horseradish, sticky devilled kidneys on toast, perfectly filled chicken and ham pie (free-range chicken from Haughley Farm, Suffolk) and an excellent jam sponge and custard – but not xenophobically so. They do that old Froggy favourite, the onglet (beef skirt) grilled very rare, wet and red, slick and a little sinewy, with very good fries and aïoli, and the pappardelle with pheasant and chestnuts was better than you’ll find it in most Italian restaurants in this country – the pasta was wide and firm, deep yellow with egg and a lovely twang to it, the sauce rich and foresty, and the whopping portion a purely British touch.

There’s originality, too. I had my first ever slice of salt lamb, served with Jerusalem artichokes and caper sauce. I’m not saying it is suddenly a mystery why we have been salting beef all these years instead of lamb – the way the fat marbles through cattlemeat makes it much more resistant to the drying effect of the brining – but it was good fun and well worth a try.

This kind of place can often lapse into cliché and become a pastiche of the St John-led Britfood thing. But Market doesn’t. They've gone for old school chairs, as such places so often do, but with all the classy Fifties and Sixties chairs claimed by poncy gastropubs years ago, they’ve got those yellow-brown stretched plywood ones from the Seventies (the ones that are murder on the underneath of your thighs when it’s hot and you’re wearing shorts). These pulled up at classy little zinc-topped tables – a cute mismatch.

You’d expect a blackboard here, and you sort of get one. For the front of the half-exposed kitchen (which you’d expect to be steel) is itself black, and is where the specials are written in chalk, right there on the wall. The variety of that day’s cabbage (January King) had been scribbled, for our benefit, on the door.

Love this place. Love it to bits. Sustainable approach without preachiness, all round excellent cooking without showing off, but enough adventure to set it apart. A little bit pricier than you might expect, but with the money clearly going on all the right things. And they’ve put it in Camden Town, the mad, mad fools, a mile from my front doorstep, where we’ve never had anything like it before. I just can’t believe my luck.

Market
43 Parkway, London NW1
020-7267 9700

Meat/fish: 8
Cooking: 7
Location: 9
Water: 10
Score: 8.5
Price: £30 a head before booze.

Ferrari’s Country House Hotel & Restaurant
Chipping Lane, Thornley, Longridge, Preston, Lancashire
01772 783148

Alan Ashworth writes: “Lancashire not London! Superb three-course lunch for £9.50. House wine approx £12. Water on the table from the start. Family run, great welcome. We have tried them all and this is the best. Derby Arms next door is good too but more pricey.”

E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere good, and maybe we’ll go there together.

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