The Royal Oak, Whatcote

There are so many different types of restaurant, so much variety in the ways and manner and styles that we eat out, that sometimes it's amazing we find anything in common about the experience at all. And yet somehow we do, and restaurant critics and food blogs exist because, by and large, if one person enjoys a place there's a pretty good chance another person will enjoy it too. I'm generalising hugely of course, but as much as there exists the concept of a Good Restaurant - and I'm pretty sure there is - then there is value in someone telling you about it.

But I have to be very careful when talking about the Royal Oak at Whatcote, because if I had sat down and written a list of all the things I personally wanted from a lunch out, from the culinary method of the kitchen, through the attitude to sourcing of ingredients, to the style and manner of service, I could hardly have ended up with a more perfect representation on earth than this charming old pub nestled in the Warwickshire countryside. And although it pains me to even consider the idea, perhaps not everyone would fall as madly and deeply in love with the place on first visit than I did.

But honestly, they had me at "hello". On a blackboard on the wall in the dining room at the Royal Oak are listed everything in season, and everything you might expect to see on the menu at some point, a menu that sometimes changes a few times a day based on availability. Crab, crayfish, grouse, lobster, muntjac, quail, rabbit, roebuck, snipe... it's like they reached into my brain and saw all my favourite things to eat and then wrote them down on a piece of paper, and paper, by the way, that is not only recycled and recyclable but literally contains wildflower seeds that you can soak out and grow in your own garden.

After a fresh and summery house aperitif that involved orange and fizz and had a single giant square ice cube in (a presentational flourish I always appreciate in short drinks), the first element of the lunch proper was a shot of roe buck consommé. The Royal Oak receive venison from the hills surrounding the village and break down the animal themselves, meaning they get to use the bones and various other bits to make this incredible broth, beautifully balanced between meaty richness and a slight tang of alcohol, with a thick, glossy texture that coats the lips. It was an absolute joy.

The next two snacks arrived together - a silky duck liver parfait sandwiched between delicate pastry, a prune chutney and a layer of ginger gel studded with herbs. And that was beautiful in every way, but the smoked eel with apple was enough to elicit gasps - inside more exquisitely crafted pastry was a smoked eel and apple sorbet, dissolving in the mouth to release distinct and decadent notes of smoked fish and summer herbs alongside the bright fresh wash of frozen apple. It was, also, miraculously good.

Sweetcorn had been teased into a kind of flower-shaped mousse, filled with some powerful wild mushrooms (with an earthy powdered element I couldn't quite put my finger on but which added another autumnal dimension of flavour) and then bathed in a light butter and sweetcorn (I think) velouté. Presentation at the Royal Oak is, as you can probably tell even from my terrible photos, easily at the multi Michelin-starred level but never at the expense of accessibility or flavour - it surprises and delights, but never shocks or jarrs.

Like every modern British restaurant worth its salt these days, bread and butter is presented as a course unto itself, in order to sufficiently showcase the effort that had gone into the various elements before the rest of the savoury courses arrive and steal the limelight. The bread, a near perfect sphere of supremely airy wholemeal loaf, was the perfect vehicle for the butters, not as filling or as powerfully flavoured as the more usual sourdough, but so light and easy to eat it invited you to load up each mouthful with even more butter than you would normally. The butters, by the way, were a 'normal' deep yellow churn, a salty, rich pork fat version and a goats' cheese, and they were all world class but I think, somewhat predictably, my favourite was the pork fat which had little bits of puffed rind on top.

Incredibly, the main body of the tasting menu had yet to start. That kicked off with this pretty circle of rainbow strips of courgette - pickled and grilled alternatively I think they said - draped over some beautifully cooked slices of roe-buck loin (I think it was) and fluffy curd. There was a lot to love here in every different technique and stunning seasonal ingredient on display, but the star - understandably - was the supremely local venison, which had a dark smoky crust and rich, deep pink gamey interior.

Monkfish tail, dense and meaty, came dusted with pine which was a lovely little combo. With it, a cylinder of roast celeriac topped with crunchy, herby breadcrumbs, a dollop of apple purée with nasturtium oil, and what I think was a chestnut purée. And that was all fantastic. But my God the sauce poured on top - buttery and crabby and bursting with flavour, so complex and light in texture but with an extraordinary depth of flavour - was an absolute masterclass, a reason to make the journey out to Warwickshire on its own. We talked about this sauce all the way on the train home, and I was thinking about it as soon as I woke up the next morning. This was a world-changing crab sauce.

The next course, then, had a lot to live up to, but absolutely did. There was a little slice of roast plum topped with sage, next to a vegetable purée of some kind I couldn't quite put my finger on, but which was silky smooth and full of flavour. There was a dainty little pastry case of immensely rich and gamey offal bound by another masterclass in saucing, studded with more root veg and topped with a generous pile of black truffle. But best of all was a quail breast stuffed with apricot and sage, juicy and packed full of flavour, with a fantastic faintly bitter touch from the sage and a salty, golden brown skin. Like everything else it was beautiful to look at, seasoned perfectly, intelligently constructed and a delight to eat. Absolute heaven.

Even an ostensibly simple cheese course managed to impress in a number of different ways at once. The cheese was a new one to me - Yordale from Curlew Dairy, which was a bit like a more creamy and complex Lancashire, a really good bit of cheesemaking. With it, a dollop of local honey and a golden brown Banbury cake (Banbury being the nearest town, and where you're likely arrive if getting to Whatcote by train), sort of like an elongated Eccles cake, sweetly glazed and addictively crisp. It was paired to great success with a South African port, The Bishop of Norwich 'The Liberator'. Wines at the Royal Oak have a heavy (though not exclusively so) South African lean as Solanche (Craven, Richard Craven is the chef) hails from there, and her enthusiasm for everything she serves is extremely infectious.

I'm sure the Oak wouldn't mind me describing the first dessert - blackcurrant sorbet on top of a clever blackberry leaf mousse - as Roganesque, as it had the same light touch and attention to striking visual detail as anything to come out of the kitchens at l'Enclume. It was a dish that reminded you how good blackberries are when in peak season and treated with supreme skill, and how lucky we are in this country to have them on our doorstep.

Damsons, from a tree just next to the pub, came prettily arranged on a sponge cake which had more damson compote inside. But the star of this dish was something they called Honington hay-brown butter, which I think had been smoked and salted and who knows what else to produce the most amazingly rich brown butter ice cream, the kind of thing I think I could polish off pints of at a time.

You will have noticed I have completely failed to be even the least bit "careful" about my enthusiasm and love for the Royal Oak. From the first sip of glossy venison consommé to the final bite of buttery, warm chocolate ganache (above), this was a meal without fault, made with love by people at the top of their game (no pun intended... or maybe slightly intended), and involving a succession of all of my favourite seasonal British ingredients. But what makes the whole operation even more special is that the nimbleness of the kitchen matched with a tireless effort to find what's good at any given moment means the menu constantly shifts to be the best it can possibly be. You'll notice that even in the time they took to print the menu that morning, guinea fowl had been swapped out for quail, to stunning effect. All of which means any given repeat visit has the chance to be bewilderingly brilliant in a whole new series of ways.

I don't know what else to tell you, other than the Royal Oak is as close to my ideal restaurant that exists in the actual world and that you should make every effort under the sun to go. Oh and if you think rural Warwickshire is a bit inaccessible, my whole journey from Battersea door to door took 2 and a bit hours, and that included a 25 min cab ride (£25 each way) from Banbury. So it's just as enticingly available for a leisurely Saturday lunch out of town than anywhere else outside the M25. Oh, and there's a lovely terrace for good weather. Oh, and the toilets are nice. Oh, and there's a good big space between the tables and there's a "pub bit" with a pool table if you want to linger around afterwards. Oh, and... never mind. Just go.

10/10

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I was invited to the Royal Oak and didn't see a bill, but if you want to do it properly, with tasting menus and matching wines, you're looking at about £220pp. And given everything you get in return, I consider that a bargain.

Mamapen at the Sun and 13 Cantons, Soho

There are a few pubs in London notable for their hosting of fledgling food businesses, giving talented but cash-strapped teams a chance to test their market and their cooking skills without the risk and stress of opening a completely brand new restaurant. Over the years, you will have possibly read about a few of them on this blog - The Prince Arthur in Dalston, the Spurstowe Arms in London Fields and the Newman Arms all played the part of startup host at some point in time, and some still do.

But perhaps nowhere is as influential on the London food network as the Sun and 13 Cantons in Soho. Not all their partnerships have been successful (to say the least) but then that's not always the point - when you open your doors to anyone with an idea untested in the marketplace, not everything will find an audience. But if you can say your humble city centre pub was responsible for the success of the brilliant Darjeeling Express, well, that's a record to be proud of.

I am not going to make any predictions about what lies in the Sun and 13's latest resident Mamapen's future, because I am notoriously bad at predictions (I thought Café Kitty would be a surefire success; it closed last week after barely a year open). But I can tell you that the appealing, reasonably priced food served by their enthusiastic and energetic team is doing almost everything right, and they deserve to go far.

Dinner kicked off with a plate of pickles, tasting as vibrant and multicoloured as they looked. My particular favourite was the almost fluorescent yellow daikon, which had a fantastic punchy pongy-ness.

Next, mushroom skewers, nice firm shiitake in a gently sweet glaze, licked with smoke from the coals. At least, I assume they're cooking over live fire because it certainly tastes like it. They came with a little clear chilli-spiked dip, as did the...

...pork neck skewers, equally deftly cooked with a nice dark crust from the grill. If this is Cambodian cuisine, I'm a fan.

Prawn crackers were notable not just for a remarkably addictive "sour soup seasoning" but because they came with a fantastic "burnt chilli and pineapple" dip which actually went with most of the menu not just the crackers.

Sorry if it seems like I'm rushing through these descriptions a bit but although most of the dishes felt like a lot of work had gone into them (thanks to nice balancing of fat and salt and sharp and sweet), not knowing the first thing about Cambodian cuisine I'm a bit of a loss to explain in more detail why. Our favourite of the snacks was pan-fried tofu knots, soft and meaty-tasting (despite being vegan), soaked in rich green chilli and with fried shallots for extra crunch. Cambodia seems like a very nice place to be vegan.

"Panko pork toast" was more elevated comfort food - accessible and even vaguely familiar to London tastes but still interesting, topped with a fried egg and homemade XO sauce. Oh it was good pork too, greaseless and with plenty of flavour.

We were finally defeated by this generous portion of chicken but fortunately Mamapen happily provide takeaway boxes. And so I'm happy to report that even the next day this was a fine piece of poultry, moist right to the bone thanks I think to a clever marinade and with another sweet, sharp and citrussy glaze. Charred broccoli were also beautifully crunchy and soft in all the right places, with an extra note of exotic toasted sesame.

It's probably right to assume that Mamapen, despite their announced title of "London's Only Cambodian Restaurant", aren't trying to be the last word in the cuisine. It doesn't feel like some deeply authentic slice of Phnom Penh transplanted into the UK - it is after all pub food served in an English pub, albeit food of a style and flavour the capital largely hasn't seen before.

But is in that very process of balancing authenticity and commercial success that so often produces extraordinary results. Stick rigidly to authenticity and you won't be more than a sideshow for a handful of ex-pats. Give the people what you think they want and you're no better than any other chain restaurant in the country. But if you can be accessible and interesting, using Cambodian cuisine as inspiration while still serving a menu full of dishes people want to eat in a country 6,000 miles away (and believe me, you'll want to eat all of it), then you end up with something quite special. I said I don't make predictions, and so I won't. But let's just say if "Chef's Table: Mamapen" appeared on my TV listings in a couple of years' time, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised.

9/10

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I was invited to Mamapen and didn't see a bill, but a realistic amount per head including a drink or two is probably about £40.

The Blind Bull, Little Hucklow

A large menu is rarely a good sign, and I have to admit a part of my heart sank when I sat down at the Blind Bull and counted 12 items in the starters section, 6 mains, 3 sides and 5 desserts (even if I'm being kind and counting all the ice creams as one) - fully 26 dishes overall. This would be quite a lengthy list for a Chinese takeaway never mind a gastropub in the Peak District, but despite this there were some fairly interesting ingredients and some fairly interesting techniques, and so alongside a glass of homemade lemonade (a lovely little summery touch) we admired the view and hoped for the best.

Pickled cucumber with harissa, tahini and flatbread was a good start. Nothing world-changing or ground-breaking but some nice ingredients treated well, and looking the part. I've long since stopped worrying about a kitchen trying to master too many styles of world cuisine at once - as long as it's done sensibly and conscientiously, like here, nobody loses.

Hot and sour cod broth was, by general consensus, the standout dish of the lunch. A bright white lump of perfectly cooked fish came in a mesmerising tomato broth dotted with olive oil and topped with leaves of mint from the garden. It was everything you could hope to ask for on a day like this, and a must-order for as long as it remains on the menu.

Soda bread was fantastic, moist and moreish, and came with malted butter just the right consistency to spread easily. None of these things, I have discovered over the years, are a given, in even the fanciest joints. But is £4 for two slices barely 2 inches square a bit mean?

And it was this sense of not-quite-value that took a bit of the shine (and, blog-wise, a point or two) off proceedings from then on. Clams in 'nduja were decent, with plenty of flavour from the broth (albeit with no sign of the advertised Pernod) and good plump (and grit-free) bivalves, but about 12 clams for £14 is not really value, and having to wait until the broth was nearly cold until someone decided to bring me a spoon wasn't much fun either.

Ah yes, the service. I like to think I'm a fairly relaxed diner (some may disagree) and can easily look past little transgressions like missing spoons, and usually I can. But not many of the dishes arrived at the same time, we had to ask twice for a few things, and for most of the afternoon the front of house found it a far better use of their time to standing chatting next to the POS station than look around the room to see if anyone wanted, say, a spoon. It wasn't a great look.

But for all that, the food, as I said, was decent. This whole mackerel had a nice crisp skin and was competently as opposed to perfectly cooked, but fun to eat. The sauce was rather bland (smoked tomato apparently although it didn't taste like much other than blitzed tomatoes) and £31 is a lot to pay even for a whole mackerel, but I polished it off easily enough. Other mains not pictured (sorry, they didn't turn out) included lamb shoulder which was declared "very nice" but the gravy was overthickened and rather gloopy.

Desserts were a Basque cheesecake, a generous portion but you'd hope so at £14, and ice creams, £3 for a teeny scoop and tasting nicely home made but fairly samey. Also, I'd paid 50p extra for a topping of 'white chocolate' which were a strange shape and colour and looked more like croutons. They didn't really taste of white chocolate either, so who knows what's going on there.

So, The Blind Bull isn't perfect. The main issue is that it serves only occasionally exciting food and charges slightly more for it than is comfortable given the ropey service - our seemingly reasonable bill of £51pp is more reflective of the fact that one of us didn't have a main and we shared a bottle of wine. But all said and done, the four of us still had a nice time in this very pretty pub in the Peak District countryside serving food exactly as good as it needs to be given the stunning location, and sometimes that's exactly all you can ask for.

6/10

The Barn at Moor Hall, Ormskirk

In restaurants that offer both an A La Carte and parallel set menu I often play a bit of a thought experiment. If there was no such separation of options, and if all the dishes available were priced evenly on the same list, which would I end up going for?

Set menus (usually, but not always, a lunchtime thing) at places like this are rightly designed to offer slightly cheaper ingredients and perhaps less elaborate preparations while still giving a good idea of what the kitchen is capable of, while the A La Carte will allow a place to spread their wings a little, with fancier ingredients (let's face it, usually shellfish and steak but if you're lucky, game) treated in more interesting ways.

But while the ALC lobster ravioli and sirloin steak were appropriately eye-catching, the fact that all four of our party at the Barn at Moor Hall this last Saturday ended up choosing from the set menu is although, admittedly, partly due to a slight sense of the big ticket items playing it rather safe, it's mainly thanks to the set menu, in its own ostensibly humble manner, being so appealing. And, as it turns out, I'm pretty sure we made the right choice.

First, though, cocktails. My own Towpath Negroni had a number of elements they'd steeped, brewed and/or infused on-site, not least the house Moor Hall gin, and it all added up to a very lovely and balanced drink, served straight up with a little nasturtium leaf floating on top. Other drinks went down equally well, although a gimlet with summer berries came dressed rather bizarrely with fruit syrup on the outside, meaning the table, the hands of the person drinking it and any other glasses it had come into contact with as a result of a toast ended up covered in thick, sticky juice.

Pre-lunch snacks came in the form of a cute little tartlet of chalk-stream trout, which had a lovely deep flavour, and a roll of house-cured coppa. A lot of high-end restaurants try to make their own charcuterie, with results that can vary quite wildly. But this was genuinely impressive stuff, packed full of porky power and with an expertly judged amount of silky smooth fat alongside the salty pink meat.

A word, too, on the house bread. These days there are very few high-end places that serve a less than impressive bread course, but very few are quite as good as this - a superbly sticky, yeasty sourdough served alongside a kind of butter millefuille, layered with herbs from the garden. I could have easily worked through about 5 rounds of this, it was that distressingly moreish.

As we get to the menu proper though, it's my solemn duty to report on the one and only real misstep of the meal. Parsley and lovage velouté did everything right on paper, and the aroma that filled the room every time one left the kitchen brought about giddy anticipation, but unfortunately it just was... not seasoned. I don't mean needed a bit more salt, or even a lot more salt, but that it felt completely unseasoned, like some kind of interim stage in the parsley and lovage velouté-making process, half-formed and incomplete.

Much better by all accounts was a sea bream crudo with local tomatoes, and whatever opinions you might have about tomatoes not from the south of France, once paired with fresh fish and dressed in lovingly puréed garden herbs, you can't really complain. The clever little tomato sorbet in the middle of the plate in the shape of a hair ring was also a nice touch.

Mains were exceptional - in all areas, hard to fault. An utterly perfect chunk of chicken breast, which cut like butter, came with a treacly nugget of - I think - thigh meat and a roll of charred hispi cabbage topped with light mayonnaise. Binding it all together, a mushroom and whey sauce, frothy and umami-rich, and finally on top a few sprigs of grilled chives (perhaps? or some other alium) providing more texture and vegetal flavour. This is exactly the kind of thing you hope to be served at a place like this, a masterclass in sourcing, technique and presentation.

Cod was equally brilliant in a number of different ways. The fish itself, most importantly, was meaty and clean and fresh, gently bronzed on top and falling into easy, bright white flakes. Jersey Royals were little nuggets of butter-soaked loveliness, and braised fennel was very cleverly treated, with a perfect mix of crunch around silky-smooth flesh. But the star of this dish - star among stars - was the "warm tartare roe sauce", a concoction so beguiling it has us all slightly lost for words. Sort of like a hollandaise spiked with extra rich seafood flavours, although that useless description does nowhere near doing it justice, it really was a standout moment of the lunch. Oh, and (almost forgot) sides were great too - confit potato in the Quality Chop House style are always worth their weight in gold, and a bowl of grilled garden vegetables were absolutely full of flavour.

The Barn cheese course consisted of the lovely Ingot from Martin Gott's farm in Cumbria, a cheesemaker I've been a fan of on these pages since I first tried his St James way back when. So this, obviously, was brilliant. Alongside, Mrs Kirkhams Lancashire and Colston Basset blue performed very decently, and were all served at a good temperature, but really the Ingot was the headline act here. Also, an accusation could possibly be made about slightly stingy portion sizes but in the end they were all good cheeses, so, whatever.

For the set dessert, little cubes of caramelised apple and gooseberry sat underneath a blanket of meadowsweet mousse, all of it working together to great effect. Is it too early to call this kind of dessert something like "seasonal foraged British"? I feel like the top-end restaurants in this country have quietly come up with their own style of ending a meal with a lightness and freshness of touch no longer reliant on heavy French pastry or dense chocolate flavours. Or maybe absolutely everyone is aware of this already and I'm just very late to the game. More than likely.

Before we go any further, I should probably mention that while service overall was charming and attentive, there were a couple of rather weird slipups. Firstly wine took a long time to arrive with the mains, to the extent that if you desperately wanted your drink alongside your chicken (I didn't, but my friend did), the chicken would end up cold. And you will notice that above is a plate of petits fours for 3 people, because apparently they only came alongside hot drinks and not with my (a non caffeine-drinker) calvados. When this was questioned, they quickly (in their favour) brought the missing fudge and truffle (very nice actually) but it still seems like a weird thing to assume we were OK with in the first place.

But I only feel comfortable to point out these little niggles because most everything else had been so wonderful. Sure they could have had another go at that soup, and used a bit more common sense on the service side of things, but this is still a world-class restaurant serving largely world-class food at extremely reasonable prices. The bill, indeed, came to £300 for four people - try getting away with that in London.

And the point is, we all had a fantastic time and would go back in a heartbeat, so perhaps that's really all you need to know. Restaurants like this don't always have to be perfect - they just have to demonstrate that they care enough about good food and good hospitality that if you recommended it to anyone else, they'd go and have the time of their lives too. So here's me doing exactly that - go to the Barn at Moor Hall. You'll love it.

8/10