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 to 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

We still need people in hospitality for a bit of market research, paying £100 for an hour of your time if you qualify, all done online. Sign up here!

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.

Thyme, Southrop

The weather forecast was not good. The BBC predicted heavy showers, albeit with one of those confusing "sun-rain-cloud-lightning" combo icons that makes you wonder if they're not just covering all bases. 90% chance of rain my iPhone said, another only vaguely useful bit of information, for in the event that it didn't rain they could always just say "ah, but we also said there was a 10% chance it wouldn't!". So we peered out nervously from the windows of our train as it powered west from Paddington, eyeing each dark patch of sky suspiciously, fingers and toes crossed.

Because it is possible to enjoy yourself in London whatever the weather. Instead of a walk around Hyde Park or the South Bank you can mooch around the National Portrait Gallery or the Victoria and Albert Museum; instead of lunch in the garden at the Drapers Arms or the terrace at Pont de la Tour you could, well, just watch the weather bash the windows from inside or get above the clouds at Duck & Waffle or Galvin @ Windows. There are always options. But the only reason to go to the countryside is to enjoy the countryside, and I've had quite enough weekend breaks sheltering from the elements in the nearest pub or killing the time before dinner in the hotel room, thank you very much. I want sun, or at the very least an absence of precipitation.

So as the sky, dense and dark with moisture, threatened to break and spoil our day at any moment, the taxi pulled up in front of the stunning 17th century converted farmhouse at Thyme, in the tiny Cotswolds hamlet of Southrop. And once we'd dumped our bags and had a quick tour of the main buildings (a cozy bar decorated with life-size fake sheep; vast, gleaming new kitchens used for masterclasses and lucky resident chefs; a cavernous events space for lucky guests), we headed down the road for lunch.

The Swan at Southrop is part of Thyme, and you can see the family resemblance. Cleanly and precisely restored but still retaining enough of the original Thomas Hardy-country charm, it's the quintessential ideal of the quiet country pub, but unlike many country pubs you may wander into for a pint and a snack, the food offering here is well above par. A Scotch egg was faultless, solid white and a dark-orange, runny yolk, surrounded by chunky, loose sausage meat and seasoned well. And crab tagliatelle had plenty of seafood, good thick bouncy pasta and leaves of fresh basil artfully wilting on top. We ate them in the garden outside, that strange pre-storm air hanging heavily around us, wondering when the heavens would open.

After lunch, expecting to have to dash inside any minute, we tentatively wandered around the immaculate gardens attached to Thyme house, the Toad Hall annexe with its galleried dining hall in honey coloured stone, which housed our room for the night. Lawns so bright green and perfectly cut they looked like laid carpet, a dinky orchard of head-high apple trees surrounding a large metal brazier. Then down the gravel path and away from the main buildings, to a field of wild flowers and in its centre a vast oak tree with a trunk so thick you could drive a road through it. On any other day this would be a deeply surreal journey but today, with the dark, low clouds and strange syrupy air that played tricks with your eyes and sucked all the contrast out of everything like some low budget sci-fi camera trick, it took on a particularly bizarre turn. It was like walking through the illustrations in a Lewis Carroll book, everything neat and tidy and precisely drawn and somehow other than natural.

But whoever came to the Cotswolds for reality? This is escapism as only England knows how, an Anglo-Disneyland of picturebook stone cottages and ancient moss-softened stone bridges over babbling streams, a way of life that the rest of the country hasn't known for 500 years, if it ever did at all. It's not so much that time has stood still here that just bypassed it completely; from my attic bedroom window I saw a couple of people in brown overalls lazily tending to their immaculate front gardens outside a similarly perfect building just over the way, and wondered for a moment what they did for a living, what life choices led to this moment of them taking part in this strange open-air theatre. Or even if they were real at all, and the moment we and our luggage were packed back off to Swindon station they would flicker briefly into black and white and then disappear completely.

That evening, in that grand dining hall, now lined with fine glassware and candles and stirring with smart staff offering English sparkling wine, we ate a fine, Modern British menu cooked by the only chef in the country who could look like he belonged somewhere like this, Jeremy Lee. Canapés of cod's roe and peas, a dainty teacup of chilled lovage soup, a delicate artichoke and Berkswell tart, a bold, firm fillet of trout in a lawn-green sauce. It was a supremely intelligent menu, accessible and friendly but still with enough odd twists and turns to keep you guessing. There were matching wines from France and New Zealand, and a rice pudding for dessert studded with elderflowers and rhubarb. It was all quite wonderful.

And the rain? It never came. In the morning, the peculiarly dreamlike atmosphere of the day before had been replaced by a different kind of fug - persistent and powerful hangovers. And after a short stroll and a brief lie under the shade of an oak tree to regain our strength (where I was only once woken by a dog licking my face), it was soon time to repack our bags and head out of town into cold harsh reality. Or, as it's otherwise known, Swindon rail station. Back in London now, it's quite hard to believe I ever was in that strange, serene place, with its lawns and its orchards and its old oak trees. And I'd recommend you go yourself, have a Chase martini in the bar, chase the chaffinches around the herb garden, wake up to a breakfast of summer fruits and local yoghurt, if it weren't for the distant sneaking doubt that Thyme, and Southrop, in this idyllic corner of the Oxfordshire countryside, ever existed at all.

We were guests at Thyme but paid our way at the Swan at Southrop. Thyme hosts a series of guest chef dinners (called Thyme's Table, quite brilliantly), more details available here.

The Kingham Plough, Cotswolds

On the first evening of a weekend out of London, lulled into a false sense of security by the general comfortable loveliness of the Cotswolds, I broke my own golden rule - "do your research". Perhaps in Madrid, or Istanbul, or Bangkok you can wander travel-sore and weary from your hotel/AirBnB/tastefully-restored-14th-century-farmhouse (delete as appropriate) to the nearest bar and be happy with the results, but this has never been true of the UK and definitely isn't true of Shipton-under-Wychwood. The pub we found ourselves in on Friday night was certainly handy, being barely 50ft from the front door of our accommodation, but the expensive frozen rubbish they served, reluctantly and only vaguely in relation to what was ordered, was a timely reminder that good food is never guaranteed no matter now nice and low and oak-beamed your ceilings are. Lesson, for the umpteenth time, learned.

So Saturday lunchtime had a lot riding on it, but from the very first moment it was clear the Kingham Plough, a brisk 5-mile walk away across some of the more spectacularly lovely scenery this country has to offer, was altogether a far more worthwhile affair. In the tradition of fine old country gastropubs there is an a la carte menu, with starters around £11 and mains around £25 geared towards the kind of budget you find in these parts. But far more exciting was a truly vast "snacks" menu, ranging from Scotch quails eggs to a steak & ale pie, and covering pretty much any item you'd ever wanted to see on a pub bar menu inbetween. George Orwell's perfect pub The Moon Under Water may not have ever existed, but had he been alive today this would be his point 6 met entirely, surely as perfect a pub snack menu as anyone's ever written.

Writing it is one thing though, making a reality of it quite another, but it's my pleasure to report that the Plough walks the walk just as well as it writes a menu. It's the little things you notice first - house "cereal" bread (not entirely sure of the definition, maybe they meant the bran flakes on the crust) came warm from the oven and accompanied by Holmleigh Dairy butter, which was so rich and orange it looked like a slab of Red Leicester. This is a part of the world obsessed with dairy - Stinking Bishop, Barkham Blue, Berkswell and the various lovely goat's products from Brockhall Farm are all not a million miles away, and in fact Kingham itself, a tiny village home to no more than a couple of hundred people, has its own artisan cheese maker Rodger Crudge. Oh, and the Plough has a milk vending machine in its beer garden. For emergencies, like.

Prawns in a branded Hook Norton pintglass were lovely and sweet, with an aioli just garlicky enough. Pork pie was a perfectly formed little thing, generously filled with plenty of pig and summer herbs. I'd have preferred piccalilly to the "ploughman's pickle" it came with (actually more of a chutney), similarly the "homemade ketchup" presented alongside the otherwise stunning sausage roll. Homemade ketchup falls into the same category as homemade brown sauce or homemade hot buffalo wing sauce - it's an awful lot of effort to put into something that will end up still tasting worse than the stuff you can buy off the shelf. So why bother?

Mushrooms and snails on toast was perhaps the most universally admired of the snack dishes - there's something so incredibly right about the marriage of snails and mushrooms; flora and fauna that shared an environment in nature and now share a plate. "Soily" is usually used as an insult when used about food, but the more benign "earthy" doesn't cut it in this situation either - the combination of bread, butter, snails, mushrooms, thyme, was like eating a salty slice of the rolling Oxfordshire countryside. Perfectly balanced, and addictively packed with flavour.

Cotswold Rarebit was another pleasant twist on a classic - a thick mixture of what were (presumably local) cheeses mixed in with (presumably also local) beer. Thicker and less potently alcoholic as some rarebits I've tried, it was still very easy to enjoy. So too were some simple grilled asparagus stalks, dipped into a pot of hollandaise.

Lamb shoulder bun with cucumber & mint relish could probably be accused of being the most left-field, rather knowingly trendy whilst everything else had been so tastefully traditional, but was a hugely generous portion for £6.50 and came in their own glossy house baked buns. And for the sake of curiosity we even tried a couple of dishes from the a la carte, a wonderful chargrilled Cornish mackerel fillet, with various foraged sea vegetables and an impeccably balanced oyster mayonnaise, and a moist, complex Chicken Wellington. This is obviously a kitchen very happy operating at any budget.

The success of the mackerel made us think that there was more on the a la carte worth investigating, so to save any tricky um-ing and ah-ing we just decided to order everything under desserts. And boy am I glad we did, because whoever's on pastry at the Plough is doing a quite remarkable job. House ice creams, made with the same Guernsey cattle milk from the nearby vending machine, were just about as perfect as it's possible for ice cream to be, rich and velvety with not a hint of crunch and in a variety of powerful, seasonal flavours.

Elderflower and goat's curd cheesecake was also very top-end stuff, and wouldn't be out of place on any Michelin-starred menu. The citrussy notes of goat's curd and elderflower are a perfect match, and I liked the clever little jelly they'd managed to get to set on top of the cake.

Dark chocolate & cherry Arctic Roll was a dense and exotic play on techniques and texture, and though chocolate and cherry is hardly a groundbreaking idea, it worked because every element was as good as it can be. The roll itself was particularly interesting, as when you cut a slice with your knife it briefly revealed a shiny frozen interior that changed to dark and matte before your eyes, like in those old school science videos of anonymous lab technicians cutting through a block of pure sodium.

And then the best soufflé I can remember eating in a very long time. Neither too eggy or too light, not too sweet or too greasy, it was an utter strawberry soufflé masterclass, completely unimprovable. Everyone on the table agreed that in a meal of many contenders, this was the winning dish, something that you could have paid €50 for in a 3 star Parisian hotel restauarant and still been happy. So not bad, really, for £9.

In many ways, I'm glad we had that awful first meal on the Friday. I wasn't glad at the time, of course, I wished we'd run a mile in the opposite direction, but now I've put a bit of distance between myself and leathery steak and rancid onion rings I can appreciate that if nothing else, we should never take good food for granted. We may never be a country where the minimum standard is anything more than mediocre - we'll never have the tapas bars of Madrid or the street stalls of Bangkok, and crappy frozen chain pub food may always be a stick for lazy tourists to beat us with. But for a country that for so long could offer nothing more than crappy frozen food to suddenly be home to artisan cheese makers, passionate producers, local breweries and even the odd restaurant as good as the Plough, well, to be honest, that'll do for now. And just think where we can go from here.

Photos by Hannah

9/10