After expressing my disappointment with the food I had eaten in Cape Town, I received dozens of e-mails from furious South Africans. The reason they were furious is that all the restaurants I ate in were bad ones (which was precisely the problem). Their point, as far as I could gather, was that if I had known anything at all about Cape Town I would have eaten in better restaurants. They claimed that the ones I ate in were “just for tourists”.
Now, that’s a bit silly. I was a tourist. I had the latest editions of the Time Out and Rough Guide guides to the city, and went to the places they recommended. What else can a foreigner do? Admittedly, Time Out might have been an unwise move. Two of the things their reviewers seem to care most about (at least in London) is that a place is cheap and that it isn’t “full of suits”. In South Africa, however, everywhere is cheap, and nobody has worn a suit since Cecil Rhodes died. So perhaps the Time Out guys were just too delighted with everything to be objective.
With this in mind, though, I had widened my research to include the hotel concierge and a couple of fat men by the swimming pool. But I guess I should have known better. Concierges only recommend places they are paid to recommend, and fat people will eat anything. The only lesson we can learn from this is: when travelling abroad, take sandwiches.
There is an upside, however, to the hammering of restaurants, which is that nice people often write in to offer commiseration and to suggest better alternatives. After I wrote about my awful plate of mutton at the Priory Inn in Gloucestershire, for example, I got a very helpful e-mail from a reader called Mark Taylor, the restaurant critic of The Bristol Evening Post.
Here is what he wrote: “I had Sunday lunch yesterday at the King William gastropub in Bath, and all six of us had the roasted leg of mutton, served with goose fat roast potatoes and greens. It was superb – the mutton had seemingly been cooked for months, it was pink, gorgeous and nothing like the Artful Dodger’s hat.
“The chef used to work at Anchor and Hope in Waterloo, so he knows what he’s doing. He buys the whole sheep and hangs it for a further two weeks himself. The fish/meat rating is very high in this kitchen so if you find yourself heading west again, do give it a go. Other dishes on the menu included rib of beef with goose fat potatoes and béarnaise for four people and Yorkshire rhubarb crumble with custard. All real ales are from West Country micro-breweries – Icarus from Blindman’s Brewery and Great Bustard from Stonehenge were excellent.”
I defy you to resist a recommendation like that. That’s why I do this “write to me” thing. Because I can’t be expected to know where is best to go in your neck of the boondocks. Mark, on the other hand, can.
And, by God, he was spot-on. The King William is a very small pub on the corner of a busy main road and was formerly, I gather, the worst pub in Bath. Today it is a gastropub to bring a tear to your eye, a pub so good that it is truly worth the hour and a half train journey from London just for lunch, and if you live any nearer than London, I don’t know why you aren’t in there now.
The worst I can say against it is that the nice golden ale I had when I arrived was called Gone with the Whippet, which is as embarrassing to say as any of those daft-arse cocktail names you used to see in town – the West Country equivalent, I suppose, of the dear old Long Slow Comfortable Screw up against the Wall of sainted memory.
There can’t have been more than 20-odd covers in the little room that made an L-shape round the bar, and in the evenings there is none at all, for the bar is turned over to the exclusive use of drinkers, and the small upstairs dining room is opened instead.
There’s lots of natural light and unglossy wood, with a higgle piggle of the usual school/church chairs and tables, with warmth and a bit of glitz bolted on in the burgundy paintwork and red and gold curtains. The windowsill by our table contained all the morning’s papers and a blackboard above it offered two dozen wines mostly in the £11-£25 bracket.
To my mind, the ideal gastropub menu offers six starters, six mains, five puds and a ploughman’s. And that is what the King William does. I ordered crab on toast, which was three big slabs of toast heaped with very fresh crab, lightly dressed and with an exciting kick of chilli. Mark, who used to edit the official Smiths fanzine, ordered the devilled kidneys. But I won’t tell Morrissey if you don’t. Meat is murder? That’s sooooo Eighties.
The kidneys were gorgeous: served quite well-done (which I prefer) in a gravy rich as chocolate that soaked the middle of three more slabs of toast and left golden crunchy edges to chomp on. (The other four starters were beetroot and baked goat’s cheese; game terrine; scallop, bacon and split-pea purée; and razor clams with thyme and chilli oil.)
My mutton was everything I had dreamt of weeks before in Gloucestershire, and of which I had been deprived. The two big chops were just a little chewier than winter lamb (the almost-hogget that we’re still eating until the new spring lamb farrago begins any day now), but with a browner, beefier flavour. More animally, but not in a barnyardy way. In a fieldy way. And that effect was squared in mouthfuls that contained the sweet, aromatic, fat. I have rarely eaten more exciting meat.
The accompaniments were perfect: boiled new potatoes in their skins, long slivers of barely boiled carrot and a heap of leeks, all creamy and rich, underneath the meat, mingling their cream with the gravy.
Mark had a big dark bowl of pot-roasted brisket with mash and carrots, and we shared, or shared some of, a third dish, the veggie option, a lovely cauliflower cheese with greens, which would have gone well with both our dishes, if there had been less of everything. Steak and kidney pudding, wild sea bass with shellfish risotto, and the aforementioned rib of beef were beyond us.
But we did have the Seville orange tart with marmalade and cream that was a flowery improvement on the g-pub standard lemon tart, and the Yorkshire rhubarb crumble. Desserts do not get more seasonal (in February, as we were) than those.
The King William is a paragon of everything British eating is heading towards, and we cannot get there soon enough for me.
The King William
36 Thomas Street, Bath (01225 428096)
Meat/fish: 8
Cooking: 8
Other: 9
Score: 8.33
Price: starters £5.50-£7; mains £9-£12; puds £5
The Fighting Cocks
Stottesdon, Shropshire (01746 718270)
Jacky Davis writes: “I live in south Shropshire (it’s a very long way away from London and there are more horses on the road than cars), in a village served by the best pub in the world. Sandra the landlady served us mutton pie (with mutton from Heath Farm in Bagginswood) when we first moved to the village. It was the first time I had eaten mutton in living memory and was fantastic! Tender, rich, and very, very tasty.”
The Pink Pig
Holme, Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire (01724 844466)
Sally Jackson writes: “As I write, lots of my customers are sitting in my 90-seater organic restaurant near Scunthorpe eating home-grown eggs, bacon, sausages and wearing their pyjamas. We are open every day selling our own organic pork, eggs, chickens and veg, plus all other organic (much local) produce. We are FARMA farm retailer of the year 2006 and Farmers Weekly alternative farmers of the year, and proud of it!”
E-mail feedme@thetimes.co.uk and maybe we’ll go out for lunch
