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 Pack Horse, Hayfield

I don't know if there's anything I could say that would seem suitable for this occasion. How on earth do you strike the correct balance between celebrational and sombre, full of relief and gratitude for having made it through the last few months, whilst at the same time acknowledging the countless number that haven't been so lucky, and for the countless more that feel in no way inclined to celebrate. Yes, being able to get back into restaurants again is lovely, but you can't shake the knowledge that we've been here before, and though it feels like a lifetime and a half ago, we thought we were out of the woods then, too.

So I'm not going to even try. Like most people I wish the last four months hadn't happened, and so I will pretend they haven't and just barrel straight on into a review of a lovely gastropub in the Peak District because look, what on earth else is there to do?

Hayfield is an astonishingly pretty old mill town, its elegant grey-brick buildings rising out from the banks of the river all the way up the steep sides of the Sett Valley. In many other parts of the country, in fact in many other parts of the Peak District, it would be insufferably twee and touristy, bloated with fudge shops, postcard-sellers and tearooms. But Hayfield remains resolutely unpretentious and no-nonsense, a proper little community where normal life goes on largely unaffected by the beauty all around.

In the centre of it all stands the Pack Horse, first and foremost a friendly local but one that also just happens to be serving some of the best food in the area. It's the gleaming ideal of a pub, the kind of place, alongside the Parker's Arms in Lancashire or the Draper's Arms in Islington, that have absolutely nailed-on precisely everything that makes a great pub great, serving exacting, intelligent comfort food whilst also being somewhere you could pop in with your muddy boots and dog after a walk on Kinder reservoir and nurse a pint of mild.

And that's all you need to know, really, except I imagine you're going to want to read a bit of detail out of sheer curiosity. Our evening began with 3 Lindisfarne rock oysters, neatly shucked and presented alongside a nicely sharp mignionette sauce. Funny, isn't it, how most of the best pubs serve fresh oysters, and none of the bad ones do?

Crab came as white meat incorporated into a salad of crisp spring leaves and radish, and as brown meat spread liberally on toast. Both elements were superb but the brown meat on toast was particularly good, full of grungy flavour with the spray of the sea.

A breadcrumbed and fried egg, boasting a marvellously timed and runny yolk, came served on a bed of buttery wild mushrooms and studded with pickled walnut, an unbeatable combination that covered all the pleasure points from rich dairy to hearty fungi.

And Yorkshire asparagus, great big thick things like only the best examples are, served with a silky hollandaise and various toasted seeds and nuts, tasted as good as they looked, a riot of colour, flavour and texture. If sourcing great ingredients is 90% of the battle (and I think it is) then the Pack Horse can count themselves lucky they have this side of things absolutely down pat.

Mains continued in the same vein. If I'm going to be brutally honest, my own selection of hare was a tad on the dry and chewy side, being rather too lean a meat to survive the slow braising method. However, the port, pancetta and mushroom sauce it came in was beautifully rich and glossy, and the mashed potatoes were right up there alongside those served at the Parker's Arms. And if you've ever eaten at the Parker's Arms, you'll know how much of a compliment that is.

Lemon sole, served grilled on the bone, was generously proportioned and beautifully cooked, and worth the price of admission even without the mound of mussels, samphire and sea kale on top. I don't want to get into the whole business of London pricing vs Everywhere Else pricing, but can you imagine anywhere within the M25 serving this huge slab of premium fish for £22? No, neither can I.

Or how about this giant chunk of halibut for £21? Boasting a satisfying meaty texture and with an incredible depth of flavour, it would have been a bargain at twice the price. It was presented with cute little parcels of breadcrumbed and fried oysters, and with a fantastic sauce they called "smoked roe & oyster cream", which was every bit as good as it sounds.

Oh, and a word on the chips - triple cooked, golden-brown and basically perfect, they encapsulate everything that's good about the way the Pack Horse goes about its business. They reminded me very strongly in fact of the ones served at the Parker's Arms, and as I've mentioned before, this is a Good Thing.

The chocolate and hazelnut delice, in fact, was a suggestion that the connection with the place in Newton-in-Bowland was more than just coincidental. I'm reliably informed that the chef at the Pack Horse is - amazingly - entirely self-taught, but perhaps has been inspired by a trip to Lancashire and, entirely reasonably, has decided that the Parker's is as good a template as any to base your gastropub on. Or maybe I'm reading too much into things. Either way, this was an excellent dessert.

As was this, the "summer berry mess" with attractive shards of meringue dusted with some kind of powdered fruit, and plenty of raspberries and strawberries folded into sweet whipped cream.

Every town deserves a Pack Horse, and every pub in the country deserves to be this good, but the fact that places as good as this, mature, respectable operations serving rewarding food at extremely reasonable prices and still be recognisable as a pub, are still so vanishingly rare is not due to lack of demand for them but to how incredibly difficult it is to perform the balancing act of offering elevated gastropub food without alienating your loyal customer base, and pitching prices at somewhat under "fine dining" levels whilst still turning a profit. I don't blame certain "gastropubs" for ditching their walk-in bar and going full restaurant-mode, but if you can't just rock up for a pint and a bowl of chips well, that's not a pub.

The Pack Horse is still, unmistakably, gloriously, a pub. You can sit with a group of mates (Covid caveats apply) and drink pints of local ales, or settle down for a four-course seafood extravaganza bookended by sophisticated herb-infused cocktails, but whichever path you choose you'll be served by the same smiling staff and you'll all be using the same loos. And you will, I'm absolutely sure of it, all be trotting home after your time there wanting to do it all over again, just like I was.

9/10

The Packhorse Inn, Little Longstone

It's all very easy to swan around the country, as I am wont to do, visiting high-profile ubergastropubs and Michelin-starred tasting menus, and declare self-confidently that British food is the best in the world. I do, for the record, think that British food is the best in the world, but then I go out of my way to target the ubergastropubs and Michelin-starred tasting menus and do my best do avoid anywhere serving chicken pesto panini from a laminated menu. The measure of a proper healthy food culture isn't - always - what's going on at the top end, but the kind of experience you have at your local pub or high street bistro, and the brutal truth is, in this country traditionally much pub food, and most high street bistro food was - and largely still is - not putting too fine a point on it, shit.

But recently I've noticed a few interesting developments. On a weekend break in Canterbury a few months ago, having been spoiled rotten in the Corner House on a Sunday afternoon, we braced ourselves for the inevitable laminated panini menu on a Monday evening with half of the city - including the lovely Goods Shed - closed. And yet the pub we found ourselves in purely because we liked the look of it from the outside, the Thomas Becket, turned out made their own pies, and very nice they were too.

And a couple of weeks ago in Wiltshire, attracted partly by the medieval charm of Shaftesbury's King Alfred's Kitchen and partly because it was bucketing down, and expecting nothing more exciting on offer than some microwaved scones, we were unexpectly served a truly exceptional Bakewell pudding and a stunning treacle tart, made fresh (so we were told) every morning in house. It's worth noting that neither of these places would be on any foodie lists, and barely make a song and dance about their food offering themselves, but are just quietly getting on with serving good, fresh produce with a minimum of fuss. Perhaps I'm imagining things, but I get the feeling it's getting increasingly easy to find places making an effort with their menus, and increasingly rare to be subjected to laminated menu panini.

So to the Peak District and another pub that you probably won't have heard of - the Packhorse Inn, in Little Longstone. Pubs like this - quaint, ancient, dark and cosy - are the single most important reason I couldn't live in any other country (well, that and Bovril) and I would have been more than happy sheltering from the driving rain in their stone-flagged front room even if the food had been, well, laminated menu panini. But what was this? A chalkboard menu with things like "wood pigeon pie", "dressed crab" and "raspberry and almond tart"? Local cheeseboard? Local butchers and bakers name checked? Someone here was trying.

And it was all worth the effort. Dressed crab - probably bought in from a local fishmonger but there's absolutely nothing wrong with that (have you ever tried dressing your own crab? Really not worth the hassle) - had a good amount of brown meat in it and a nice dollop of house mayonnaise spiked with paprika. It was absolutely the kind of thing you want to be given when asking for dressed crab, and well worth a paltry £6.50. I mean, the ones from Waitrose bulked up with egg are £4.

Wood pigeon pie - well of course we ordered that - was quite unneccessarily lovely. Inside a puff pastry casing lay some tender, medium-rare slices of seared pigeon breast, bound with a thick, meaty sauce. There was something vaguely artificial about the texture and Heinz-y taste of the sauce, but rather than being offputting it just gave it the tinge of nostalgia, and anyway I'm pretty sure they weren't using granules. £6 this was, for a proper homemade game pie.

Whitebait were also beyond reproach, a good amount of tiddlers, lightly breaded and enjoyably crunchy, with a chunky tartare dip. I realise it's difficult to mess up whitebait, but still.

The rabbit pie was a thing of beauty. A homemade pastry casing (so we were told), buttery and light, containing a rich, creamy filling with lots of chunks of rabbit. With this, some superb chippy-style chips - because all pies are better with chips - and a thick gravy - because all chips are better with gravy.

Lamb rump with ratatouille and red lentils was nice enough, though possibly not quite up to the standard of the pies. The topping of rocket was the first thing to get my back up, though I suppose they weren't to know I despise the stuff with every inch of my being. But ratatouille is never a particularly inspiring thing when not applied to Disney movies, and lentils can do one as well. However, the lamb was tender, it was all seasoned well, and the person who ordered it had no complaints so let's just leave it at that.

Three huge, excellent local sausages (from New Close Farm, about 10 min drive away) on a mountain of mash was my own main course, and very pleased I was with it too. Like the rabbit pie it was soaked in a straightforwardly enjoyable thick gravy, and a load of peas, and if you can't enjoy sausage, mash, gravy and peas then there's something seriously wrong with you.

Somehow we found room for the aformentioned raspberry and almond tart, homemade (of course) and served alongside Bradwell (10 min drive away) ice cream. And yes, I know not everything local is guaranteed to be wonderful, but anywhere going out of their way to not use the usual Brakes Bros. type suppliers at least has their heart in the right place, and should be recognised.

A lot to like, then, and not much to fault at all. Oh, a side of vegetables was pretty ordinary - slightly overcooked and unseasoned - but that was hardly about to ruin our day. The Packhorse were turning away group after group of ramblers and locals during the course of our lunch and you don't have to be a genius to see why - the food, the setting, the charming service, and the local Thornbridge beers all added up to what for many people will be the platonic ideal of a country pub. True, the food isn't spectacularly world-changing, but it's at the level every pub should at least be - comforting, well-priced, served with heart. In its own way, I enjoyed my lunch at the Packhorse more than many other more elaborate - and more expensive - restaurants, and I've had a lot of elaborate, expensive meals recently. Sometimes I like elaborate and expensive. And other times, I will sit in the Packhorse with a pint and a pie, while the rain hammers down outside.

8/10