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