Pecks, Nr. Congleton, Cheshire

[Harters]

It’s a while since we were last at this long-standing Cheshire restaurant. There’s been some changes in that time. There’s new owners. There’s a sense that food quality isn’t quite what it was. Yet, oddly, it makes its first appearance in the Good Food Guide this year, with a rather generous Cooking 3.

Some things haven’t changed. The cuisine remains the same. The same menu style offering a very short choice at each course. The same single sitting commencing at 8pm. And, the bit that folk will either love or hate. At Peck’s you don’t order your meal in the conventional way, at the beginning, but course by course. The servers bring a sample of, say, each starter to your table, briefly describing what it is. Your order for that is then taken. The course is then served to the whole restaurant. When that’s been eaten, the process starts again for the main course. It does mean you can avoid the envy of seeing a better looking dish being served to another table, but the whole process adds to quite a long evening. That said, the kitchen is obviously geared up to this and there is minimum delay in the actual food arriving once the orders have been taken for the whole room.

Service is efficient and brought to you in a style of what we always call the “girls from the village”. Not professionals, but well trained to deliver what they have to deliver. They all seem to do this in a breathless, slightly too high pitched voice and you have feeling that if you asked them a question that wasn’t in their script, they’d be lost.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, there’s four courses (plus coffee) on offer for £35 – soup, starter, main and dessert. You can bring your own wine those days for which there’s no corkage, although, like us, many seemed to be buying Peck’s offerings. Later in the week, an “appetiser” and cheese course is added, knocking the price up to £40 -£45 depending on which day you go.

Once we’d been seated, the girls from the village ignored us and only a bit of waving attracted enough attention to order drinks but we then seemed to be on their radar. Bread was fine and came with butter and tapenade (neither in sufficient quantity).

We both kicked off with a decent onion soup, rich in the flavour of long cooked onions. It had been strained so the consistency was quite thin but this was a good start. A starter of courgette roulade followed for my wife. It was a thin slice of roulade, with no discernable taste of courgette, which encased a mix of cream cheese and wild mushroom. Could have been quite tasty – but wasn’t. In the event, this was bland, underseasoned and an almost classic example of the poor quality “vegetarian option” offered by places that know they have to offer one but have no interest in doing so.

I went with sashimi tuna. The fish sat on some rocket, surrounded by few halved cherry tomatoes and a little puddle of what I guess was supposed to be the lime and coriander salsa. My criticism here isn’t of the food itself but the quantity. What might have been fine in a multi-course tasting menu, seemed plain mean-spirited here. This mean-spirit had been there with the bread and the other starter and would seem to run through the whole of the meal.

Main course #1 was bouillabaisse. Short on flavour and, again, short on quantity. Three matchbox sized pieces of fish, including rather incongruous salmon, and a couple of mussels. Came with foccacia.

Main #2 was lamb shank. A decent piece of meat sat on mash, with carrot and cabbage. Nothing to “WOW” here on this plate and it would have been fine on any pub lunch menu.

Pecks makes a “big thing” out of its desserts. Perhaps eight were on offer and paraded round the dining room. And, because it makes a “big thing” of it, you’re invited to sample half portions of two separate ones. Frankly, their enthusiasm is misplaced. All were of the cheesecake/gateau sort and, based on the two we had, tasted of little more than “sweet”. This was the sort of quality you’d be impressed with if it was served up in the works canteen, but that’s as far as it goes.

The meal was rounded off with good coffee and petit fours. And, entirely in keeping with the spirit of Pecks, the cafetiere served exactly two cups.