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