The Lamb Inn, Little Milton

Most visitors to the Lamb Inn will approach from the car park and be greeted with the sight pictured above - an achingly cute thatched countryside pub in whitewashed stone looking like it hadn't changed much in the past few hundred years. And this is, of course, a great way to start. But being a few minutes early for our lunch, we decided to do a little tour of the area and ended up walking past the front of the building where a giant exhaust vent from the Lamb kitchens is heaving out sweet-smelling clouds of charcoal and animal fat into the pretty medieval street. I stood in front of it for a good few seconds, trying to work out what might be on the menu that day, intoxicated by the mix of aromas until my hair smelled of bonfire and I realised if I spent any longer there I may end up not being allowed inside. It's hard to describe, but the Lamb Inn kitchen vent smelled serious, the product of a high-end kitchen doing all the right things.

This was, I'm pleased to say, borne out by the food served inside. I always find chicken liver parfait to be a pretty solid test of a kitchen's skills, and they passed with flying colours, smooth and salty and full of earthy offal flavours without being bitter or grainy. This would have been more than worth the paltry £9.50 they were asking for it by itself, but it came alongside an incredibly lovely bacon jam, with little tiny bits of crunchy pig studded into sticky sweet onion, and a slice or two of top-quality grilled sourdough. I don't remember it being purple though, so blame my weird old camera for that particular effect.

Smoked eel is a good example of the kind of ingredient that only confident and accomplished gastropubs usually serve, as it can be a bit of an ask of your more timid pub-goer (I know a few people that won't go near it, however strange that sounds to the rest of us). The garden greens and baby beetroots brought some nice textures and earthy/bitter flavours, but the star was obviously the eel, so soft and salty and full of flavour that it could be mistaken for chunks of halloumi cheese. This is a good thing, by the way.

But the star of the starters, and in fact one of the best dishes overall, was this single giant crab and scallop ravioli. Not only did it contain a generous portion of bouncy fresh seafood filling, all encased in delicate handmade pasta, and dressed in an irresistible frothy Thai green sauce, it was also on the menu for an incredible £11.50, almost certainly about half, and in some cases less than half, of what you'd pay in most restaurants even attempting to offer a giant crab and scallop ravioli. And apologies - I took the above photo before the sauce was dropped in, so you're going to have to imagine what that looked like.

Enoki tempura suffered just slightly from an excess of grease, as the brush-like fronds of the mushroom can really soak up the stuff, although that's also possibly because it was such a generous portion. It was still all polished off quite happily.

We only had one of the "big" mains, this huge pork chop, expertly grilled and sliced into portions each of which had a morsel of firm but moist meat attached to a melt-in-the-mouth bit of fat and a delicate thin crunch of crackling. The sauce was rich and herby and gently apple-y and the celeriac remoulade studded with (I think) wholegrain mustard for a bit of heat. Doesn't it look beautiful? Well, let me tell you, it tasted even better.

Oh, and the Lamb do very good chips, too.

We nearly didn't order desserts as we were so stuffed from the savoury courses, but these conspired to be some of the best items on the menu. Crème brûlée had a deeply vanilla-y filling and an extra-thick crunchy top which had been spiked with spices of some kind I couldn't quite put my finger on - an improvement on the usual at least, and I'm already a huge fan of crème brûlée. There's an argument to be made that the blackberry ice cream was perhaps an extra flavour too far, but it was absolutely superb home made ice cream, so who cares.

Finally, a kind of reimagined sticky toffee pudding that appeared to be constructed largely of caramel and stewed fruit - at least, if there was a spongecake base there it was incredibly low-key. It was brilliant though - so ridiculously easy to eat with its soft vanilla ice cream topping I practically inhaled it despite the huge amount of food I'd had already. Alongside the seafood ravioli (I think technically I should call a single ravoli "raviolo" but nobody in this country ever does this so I won't either) it was an instant classic, and a Lamb Inn absolute must-order.

It's an incredibly difficult balancing act a lot of these country pubs have to perform - go too haute cuisine and unapproachable and you end up alienating your local audience who will be the core of your customers. Go too cookie-cutter and pub-standards and you're competing with every chain boozer in the area, most of whom have the resources to serve the same stuff a lot cheaper. But get it right - find a balance between accessibility and quality and value for money and with a seasonal menu that without being too overwhelming has something that almost everyone could enjoy, and the rest takes care of itself.

Raymond Blanc's Manoir aux Quatre Saisons is just up the road in Great Milton. We had a little wander round earlier the same day. It seemed very nice, and I'm sure their £230pp lunch has much to recommend it. But if you want local, seasonal, intelligently constructed food for somewhat less than the price of a return to New York (see above) then I would say there's only one choice in the area. The Lamb Inn are doing pretty much everything right, from the service (charming and knowledgeable although obviously given this was an invite feel free to take that observation with a pinch of salt) to the design of the menu to the execution of the dishes themselves. Add in a low-beamed dining room in a 16th century building in the middle of the Oxfordshire countryside and you have all the ingredients of a perfect day out. Thoroughly, wholeheartedly recommended.

9/10

I was invited to the Lamb Inn and didn't see a bill. We weren't drinking that day so expect to pay £50pp-£60pp for a "normal" lunch. Still an absolute bargain.