Eating in and around South Oxfordshire

[Duncan]

Rather than hijack the Hotel du Vin and Bistro← thread any further, I'm starting a new thread for good places to eat in or near South Oxfordshire which might not quite warrant a thread entirely to themselves.

First up, The Crooked Billet in Stoke Rowe.

I'm astounded that anyone should recommend the Crooked Billet. A huge menu of egregiously infantile and misconceived dishes cooked with almost unbelievable incompetence.

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I didn't feel I could fully respond to Muichoi's criticisms in that other thread, after all it had been a while since we'd been to the Crooked Billet, and maybe the quality had slipped, so in the spirirt of investigative journalism, or maybe just hunger, we set off yesterday evening to check it out.

Just finding the Crooked Billet gives you a sense of satisfaction. It is down a small track which so obviously leads nowhere that you begin to doubt the sign that led you off the main road.

The pub itself seems strangely lost in a timewarp. The tables and chairs are as rickety as in any pub, but where is the bar? Supposedly although it has been a pub for hundreds of years, they just never got around to adding a bar. Most of the business these days is based on the restaurant (although the menu calls itself a 'bar menu'), and the emphasis for drinking is on the wine list rather than the short

selection of beers (Brakspear's bitter and some bottles). The wine itself is everywhere, distributed on racks and selves around the walls and filling the fireplaces. For some reason which escapes me there was also a large basket filled with old corks. We went for a Crozes Hermitage which was nice enough, although perhaps a bit lighter than I expected.

The menu is a single sheet of photocopied A3, hand written and frequently updated, with roughly 15 choices each for the starters and main courses. The big question of course is whether the wide choice makes the quality suffer: from our visit not obviously, although you are left wondering whether a shorter menu might allow the chef to scale greater heights.

Another quirk is that bread (with olives and hummus) is an optional extra, although at 95p a head, not one that will break the bank. The pub also does the lunches for the local primary school, and profits from the bread are used to supplement the school meal budget.

For starters Judy went for a salad of rabbit liver an kidneys with black pudding. The green part of the salad contained an interesting selection of leaves (wild garlic and pea shoots being prominent, also some flowers which might have been garlic but tasted more oniony to me). She let me taste one of the cute little kidneys the size of

marbles: it tasted of kidney.

My choice for starter was the local carpaccio of water buffalo, from the village buffalo farm with a rocket salad and parmesan wafer. The meat was meltingly soft and very tasty, the salad and wafer were good too, although not as interesting a collection of greens as on the other plate.

For main course I went for a selection of local game (rabbit, pigeon breast, venison and a muntjac sausage) with creamed cabbage and chestnuts. Judy had a stew of oxtail with shin of beef. Both were good, although Judy thought the caul round the shin crepinette was a bit chewier than it should have been. I wondered a bit about how seasonal the game was: we are less than a week past the end of the venison season so that is probably alright, and muntjac doesn't have a statutory season, but we are well into what is recommended as a close season for them. Maybe the sausage had been frozen, or maybe not. Either way it tasted good.

For pudding, we had Sticky toffee pudding with clotted cream, and Raspberry Cranachan with ice cream made from local buffalo's milk and the pub's own beehives.

When leaving you can continue round the same track which loops back to the main road, but if (like mine) your car has a low ground clearance beware of the central ridge and the scary scraping sound from the underside of the car. Also a few miles further on we had to come to a halt for a muntjac pottering about aimlessly in the middle of the road, oblivious to the culinary tendencies of local chefs.

[Bernice Hurst]

The pub itself seems strangely lost in a timewarp. The tables and chairs are as rickety as in any pub, but where is the bar? Supposedly although it has been a pub for hundreds of years, they just never got around to adding a bar. Most of the business these days is based on the restaurant

The Crooked Billet has never had a bar. The first time I went there, 35 years ago, the front area was a kind of sitting room. Nearly everyone was a regular. Nor has it ever had a bar since becaming a restaurant and "destination". I've eaten there occasionally over the past 10 years or so - as you say, Duncan, largely for "research" purposes but have to admit that I have never understood the rave reviews of either friends, fellow diners or professionals. It has never been bad but never, in my own experience or opinion, great. But I am hugely impressed to know that they supply food to the local school. That is something I shall definitely find out more about as kids, schools and food are subjects as dear to my heart as making sure that adults with spending power choose wisely and well.

[Duncan]

Some links:

School lunch menu

Crooked Billet offers a lesson in dinners

[muichoi]

Duncan, I really don't like to be down on a restaurant in public, but at the simplest level didn't it strike you how awful the bread , tinned olives and adolescent attempt at Hummus were? as I said in the previous thread,if they were interested in beer I wouldn't criticise the wine list, but what a way to store the stuff, apart from anything else. Why on earth do such places need to offer so many choices of such overcomplicated food? Unless such a place has a really top team in the kitchen-in which case it's a restaurant not a pub-they should offer things they can do well, taking advantage of local supplies, which can be excellent. What a great thing it would be to find a place that would offer 2 or 3 choices at each course, nice things like grilled lamb chops, a top class steak, fish and chips, grilled first-class chicken, with simple garnishes made from the best stuff, great beer,well chosen and stored wines-it wouldn't be impossible and would be a hundred times more popular than the proprietors may think. This place made me very sad.

[Duncan]

Duncan, I really don't like to be down on a restaurant in public, but at the simplest level didn't it strike you how awful the bread , tinned olives and adolescent attempt at Hummus were?

No, and I thought the olives were very nice.

as I said in the previous thread,if they were interested in beer I wouldn't criticise the wine list, but what a way to  store the stuff, apart from anything else.

I can't say I noticed how the beer was stored, but it is listed by CAMRA so it can't be that bad and google turns up other web opinions such as Hidden away on a single track road behind the main village, it serves Brakspear's beers straight from the wood.

Why on earth do such places need to offer so many choices of such overcomplicated food?

I think we are both agreed that the menu could benefit from being shorter.

Unless such a place has a really top team in the kitchen-in which case it's a restaurant not a pub-they should offer things they can do well, taking advantage of local supplies, which can be excellent. What a great thing it would be to find a place that would offer 2 or 3 choices at each course, nice things like grilled lamb chops, a top class steak, fish and chips, grilled first-class chicken, with simple garnishes made from the best stuff, great beer,well chosen and stored wines-it wouldn't be impossible and would be a hundred times more popular than the proprietors may think. This place made me very sad.

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But that is the point: it is a restaurant more than a pub, and they do take advantage of local supplies to produce some great dishes which are far more interesting than boring 'grilled first-class chicken'. It isn't a really great restaurant but it has a great rustic character. I'm afraid I don't know whether they do a top class steak: there is steak on the menu, but that isn't something I would usually choose (and I suspect a 1lb rib steak may be a touch over the top). I'm sure you've described your bad experience accurately (and I do generally weight reviews where things weren't perfect as very useful, especially if it gives you some idea how the staff can handle complaints), but I've written what I believe to be an accurate balanced report of our visit. That's all I can do.

[muichoi]

Sorry, I was talking about the storage of the wine, not the beer!

How does 'great rustic character' coincide with the false gastronomic idea that 'grilled first class chicken' is 'boring'?! multi-elemented and over-ambitious plates very imperfectly realised are very, very much more boring,though sadly much less rare, than great ingredients simply but perfectly cooked. This latter regrettably barely exists in Oxfordshire. If it did, I'd be thrilled.

Edited May 5, 2006 by muichoi (log)

[Spam]

marco pierre white has seemingly taken on the talkhouse near lewknor (can't remember name of village). haven't tried it yet.

[Duncan]

marco pierre white has seemingly taken on the talkhouse near lewknor (can't remember name of village).  haven't tried it yet.

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You mean Stanton St. John to the east of Oxford.

The Highwayman at Exlade St, Checkendon has just been taken over by Marco Pierre White though I haven't yet been there.

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Is there anywhere he hasn't just bought?

[Matthew Tomkinson]

Do you know The White Horse in Kings Sutton near Banbury at all?

[Duncan]

We decided to visit The Lamb at Satwell for lunch on Monday. This is (probably the smallest and most rustic) of AWT's pubs: no bookings, so turn up early or late. We arrived at about 12:20 and had no problem getting a table, by half past they were telling people to expect an hour's wait. Some people opted to eat outside rather than waiting, which given the sunshine and showers nature of the weather could be considered either brave or foolhardy.

The main menu is in three parts: starters 'for sharing', stews, and side dishes. There is also a specials board doing the rounds which might be in the vicinity while you are ordering. We went for some 'crispy lamb nuggets' followed by 'Middle White sausages in cep lentils' for Judy, and Spicy pork & chorizo for me, with some accompanying 'mash of the day' (champ). Both of the main dishes turned out to include potatoes, in Judy's case it included some mash submerged under the lentils.

The lamb nuggets (for some obscure reason called 'eppigrammes' on the menu and bill) were pretty tasty: deep fried strips of lamb breast with some herby mayonnaise.

Service was eager throughout although not always perfectly coordinated: when refilling our drinks, I asked staff member #1 for a half, and staff member #2 arrived back with a pint (but #1 spotted this and said I would only be charged for the half, so I did a deal with Judy and got her to agree to drive back). For dessert I ordered a chocolate mousse and Judy decided to skip, #2 turned up to ask what we had ordered and put out spoons for us both to share, then #1 returned with napkins and attempted to hide the spoons she had brought behind her back.

Summary: worth a visit so long as you either turn up promptly, or it is sunny enough to eat outside without counting the black clouds.

[Duncan]

Some news on this morning's local radio: The Crooked Billet is to stop cooking school meals for the Stoke Rowe primary school.

Currently about 70% of the pupils have a hot lunch every day prepared by the Crooked Billet from local ingredients (an example given was honey from the pub's own hives). New legislation is apparently coming in from April next year which will require samples of every ingredient from every menu to be sent off for nutritional analysis, and the pub simply cannot cope with the paperwork involved.

I don't know the details behind the legislation but it sounds completely crazy (or perhaps just an excellent lobbying job by the producers of bulk mush to force all schools to buy in on big contracts instead of sourcing food locally).