Now, this is what I call a restaurant review. You’re always banging on about how I never get out of London (actually, you’re not, it’s just a little voice in my head that gives me grief about it, when it’s not telling me to clean the grate, floss my teeth, get a pension, extend the kitchen into my garden’s miserable north-facing side return…) and then you find I’ve written the last two reviews from Suffolk and now, this week, I’m offering four restaurants in a single piece: one in Hampshire, one in Berkshire, one in St John’s Wood and one in Islington.

What a globetrotter. You can hardly call me an unadventurous, bourgeois dodger of wild and crazy places when I’m coming at you hard from the true, raw, bleeding heartlands of, um, Islington, St John’s Wood, Berkshire and, er, Hampshire.

Oh, God, I’m a pointless suburban twat, and there’s just no getting away from it. But then you don’t want some flak-jacketed, sunburnt, hard-muscled, alcoholic wife-dodger who speaks 18 languages telling you where to get comfy chairs and a decent panna cotta, do you? No, you want a pointless suburban twat. So, then. All good.

I’ve included four restaurants in a single review really only because I haven’t got much to say about any of them. Sorry. I know it’s not a very exciting trail for the words you’re about to read. But what can I do? I went to each place full of excitement and hope and they were all, sort of, fine. Blah. Ho hum. Nobody died. You know what I mean? It’s like when the aforementioned flak-jacketed wife-dodger parachutes into a war zone only to find that it was just a spat over who was going to be banker in Monopoly, but the foreign desk wants 1,000 words anyway.

So, the Crab at Chieveley. They did have lots of good seafood, all with its provenance very thoroughly documented and priced accordingly, and they killed a big crab for me and served it cold with mayonnaise, and it was really very fine indeed and a thing you don’t get that often, but the food was otherwise unmemorable.

Also, I had been looking for a quiet weekend in the country, but the Crab was surrounded only by giant arable fields, and wherever you went you could hear the M4. It wasn’t a bad place at all: quite jolly service, pink chintzy dining room with clackety-clack brasserie attached, and absolutely rammed with locals. Perfectly nice, but just not much to write about.

Likewise the Old House at Home, a not especially posh pub-cum-restaurant I dropped into on a Saturday night the other week, while staying in a hotel nearby, on the recommendation of a number of locals.

I say “not especially posh” because pub restaurants in the country have been tending more and more to make themselves up like Notting Hill gastropubs in the last few years – reclaimed slate floors, leather banquettes, big square plates, edgy modern British cuisine, the odd cheeky foam – but not this gaff.

Here you still get the slightly overlong menu (8 starters, 11 mains), which you so often find in pubs where there is not much else around, so that people might have to eat here more than once a week. For the same reason you find that there is no real logic to the menu: Thai vegetable wontons, spinach and lamb shank curry, a burger, lasagne, duck with foie gras, etc. I guess because if you live round here, it doesn’t matter much whether you fancy Indian, Thai, Italian, American, French or English, you’re going to the Old House come what may, and can decide when you get there.

But it was all done fine: nice little twice-baked cheddar soufflé (not cheap at £8, mind), harmless old-fashioned prawn cocktail with crab and crayfish, actually pretty decent spinach salad with avocado, bacon and quail’s eggs; curry done quite well but not as well as my local Indian; calf’s liver overdone and served, misguidedly, in a tower alternated with bacon on top of beetroot mash.

I mean, fine. A perfectly decent Saturday night scoff in a country pub, but not worth a 50-mile drive or 1,000 words.

I could have done 1,000 words on Osteria Stecca, though. I could have done the full 1,500. But it would have been a mean piece. One of those ones everyone seems to like so much, where the critic mocks and scoffs at the misguided dreams of a restaurant doomed to failure, comparing each dish to progressively more grotesque mammalian effluvia – but I didn’t want to do that. It makes me sad doing those.

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