The Anchor, Walberswick

Walberswick. What a thoroughly satisfying word that is. Go on, try it. Try rolling it around for a minute. It’s like a fine wine, with that lovely, open-mouthed wal, the puckering ber and then that gorgeous finish, swooping and stiffening into the k, full of rigour and chutzpah. 

I imagine the people of this coastal village absolutely adore it. I certainly did. There’s the sea, the beach, the river and the beer, to name just four. And for a fifth, there’s The Anchor.

Few things afford more delight than walking into a pub and not only seeing some of your favourite beers on tap (Meantime and Adnams), but also receiving a beer menu, listing more than 20 bottles, carefully sought and sourced from the great brewing nations of the world.

First impressions count, and The Anchor could hardly have made a better one. We drank for a while, enjoying the comfortably comfortable atmosphere, then took our seats. The menu is fish-heavy, as you’d expect, and each dish has a suggested beer match as well as wine.

I started with confit cod cheeks, alongside a glass of San Franciscan Liberty Ale. The cheeks, meaty and rounded in both senses, were notable for their richness, playing off a perky tomato, fennel and leaf salad. It was a marvellous start. Three of us had the cod cheeks, leaving just one to branch out with chilli squid, superbly cooked and sweetly sauced. 

Mains continued mostly fishy. Mine, a simply cooked whole lemon sole in butter and lemon, melted on the tongue, fresh and a lot naughtier than fish should be. It was hardly an unusual combination, but still provided a reminder of just how brilliant it is to take something very healthy (fish) and render it superbly unhealthy (lashings of butter). Battered cod and chips did something similar, the crispy batter undermining all the good work of that chunky cod fillet. 

One of us went for meat: short rib of beef on a truffle mashed potato. The rib had been slow cooked, stripped and remoulded into a little patty, texturally satisfying and pretty tasty too. The truffle mash, an oily, buttery number, was a good as it sounds. Flying Dog Gonzo Porter was a brave beer choice, but proved somewhat foolhardy. At 8.7%, it rather ruined one of our number for the rest of the evening, though we could occasionally make out approving noises through his drunken babbling. 

Desserts followed, as is their wont, sweet and sticky. Ever the unorthodox, I plumped for a cranberry and walnut tart with cranberry ice cream. I have no idea why. I don’t really like cranberries, and I certainly have no truck with desserts that carry the stench of virtue about them. I shouldn’t have worried. This was not in the least bit virtuous. The tart cranberry proved an ideal mediator, moderating and translating the rich caramel and walnut of the filling.

I didn’t try the other desserts. They looked good, if that’s any help – a chocolate pudding with coconut and a something-or-other panna cotta (I lost the receipt, so can’t remember what it was). Coffees all round brought the bill to about £40 per head. For what we ate, and especially for the quantity and quality of delicious beer, it was excellent value. We returned the next day for lunch, when beef rib and Yorkshire puddings reached a similar standard. 

You may never go to Walberswick, but if you do, visit The Anchor.

Phil Letts’ take: 8/10

The Hinds Head, High Street, Bray

Every truly brilliant chef faces a choice sooner or later: refine, improve and experiment by focussing on what already exists; or expand, whether in the form of more restaurants, more TV appearances, more endorsements or more cookbooks. Most try to tread a middle path, wary of Gordon Ramsay-like dilution of standards and public profile on the one hand, and becoming the answer to a quiz question that nobody’s ever asked on the other. 

Heston Blumenthal ran The Fat Duck in Bray for several years before he had any significant personal profile. During that time, those lucky enough to attend the restaurant spoke in tones of bemused awe when asked to describe it, as perplexed by the dishes as they were delighted. The Fat Duck is still an unutterably glorious restaurant, with a menu that perfectly combines high magic and low wit. But this is not a review of that, so to the point...

After that initial period of propelling British cooking to previously unknown heights, Blumenthal expanded his portfolio. Rather than go big and brash, he took over a pub just down the road from The Fat Duck, promising old classics cooked brilliantly, with occasional modern twists if and when it aided the flavour. So far, so low key. When it opened, the Blumenthal Hinds Head seemed to have everything right, from the spectacular quail’s-egg-scotch-eggs in the bar, to the marvellous steak and kidney pudding in the restaurant. It very nearly managed to disguise itself as a proper pub too, especially if you were fortunate to bag a table downstairs, in sight of the bar.

Since then, the Blumenthal empire has continued to grow. Heston is on TV more or less every week, he’s producing cookbooks by the series, he’s revamped the Little Chef in public, he’s made an expensive Christmas pudding, and he’s about to open a massive restaurant in Knightsbridge. And you can hardly blame him for that. He clearly deserves every reward, if only for being the absolute best chef around. But...

The Sunday before Christmas, I had an unsettling experience. I had a meal at a Heston Blumenthal eatery that wasn’t excellent. Indeed, elements of it were no more than adequate.

My ham hock and foie gras terrine proved a case in point. It was decent enough, though the primal flavour of the foie gras was entirely overwhelmed by the ham, to the point where ‘foie gras’ looked suspiciously like menu dressing, rather than adding anything desirable to the dish. Cute Letts’ soused mackerel left a better impression, sharp and oily. 

The steak and kidney pudding remains, and remains excellent, but the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding were both pretty disappointing. The beef could have come from most carvery trolleys in the country, while the Yorkshire was dry and larger than necessary. 

A joyous smoked chicken and mushroom pie made sure that Cute Letts stayed happy – small but perfectly formed, it looked liked the kind of dish you’d photograph for an advert. The smoked chicken taste was intense, while tarragon buzzed around the periphery most pleasingly.

Our final tablemate went for fillet steak on the bone, with a bone marrow sauce. This came pretty much as expected: very good, but not as good as Hawksmoor, though triple-cooked chips helped it along.

Dessert provided a highlight and a lowlight: my apple and blackberry crumble was beautifully sweet and tangy, with crunchy crumble near-saturated with butter and sugar, and bubbling, sticky fruit; Cute Letts’ rhubarb trifle just didn’t match up, drenched as it was with unadvertised rosewater flavour. When will people realise that rosewater’s disgusting? No one really likes Turkish delight, do they? 

Now I’m not saying that Heston Blumenthal has allowed himself to be distracted from his primary business (serving food to paying guests) by all the fame and all the tie-ins. That would be premature. But The Hind’s Head felt neglected just before Christmas. The awful upstairs seating could have been a Beefeater, given a salad bar, and this is surely not the aim, even allowing for Blumenthal’s love of all things nostalgia. The food, though generally fine, was simply not up to the impeccable standards we’ve come to expect from his restaurants. At £250 for four including wine, it needs to be better. For about half the price, you can and should go to The Magdalen Arms in Oxford.

Phil Letts’ take: 6/10

The Magdalen Arms, 243 Iffley Rd, Oxford

Is there a less appealing word in English than gastropub? It’s infuriating. There’s that horrible appeal to notions of gastronomy (or gastronomie, I expect), the related implication that there is something special about gastropubs ahead of normal pubs, and the unbearable all round smugness of the phrase. You’d even credit it with pretentiousness, were it not for the laughable idiocy of the Greek prefix gastro in the context, which makes the word mean ‘stomach pub’, more or less. What would one of those look like, I wonder?

The point of all this is merely to highlight that pubs are pubs are pubs. Some of the best also serve excellent food. Others don’t. You wouldn’t know it to look at some of the miserable places that use the moniker though. Many are not pubs at all; rather, they’re overpriced mediocre restaurants, or reasonably priced decent restaurants. My rule of thumb is that a pub, gastro or otherwise, is somewhere you could go for a drink, ideally of warm ale and nothing else, on your own, without feeling awkward.

Happily, The Magdalen Arms in Oxford is precisely such a place. Despite really outstanding food, it feels like a location for nursing a quiet pint, or a loud one for that matter, without provoking comment. In this particular instance though, anyone doing that would be missing out.

The food at The Magdalen Arms is brilliant. It’s easily the best food I’ve eaten in a pub, and I’m including the wonderful-but-possibly-not-a-proper-pub Hinds Head in that.

We were celebrating a friend finishing his DPhil, so started with a glass of quince Prosecco. I wasn’t very keen on the idea of quince Prosecco, but it tasted excellent, with a surprising subtlety of flavour and the right mix of slight tanginess and sweet. At £3.80 per glass, it was also wildly good value.

Starters of deep fried brawn with gribiche (quite like tartare sauce) and hanging courgettes with Wigmore were highlights. The brawn was crispy, not too greasy and preposterously piggy, while the Wigmore and courgette concoction had more flavour than a non-meat dish has any right to. Six rock oysters were delicate and tasty, and most importantly, served at the right temperature. I can’t stand places that, whether through paranoia or stupidity, serve oysters so cold they could give you neuralgia. These were cool, but not very cold, and all the better for that.

Snail and bacon salad made up the starter numbers. The lightly and deliciously dressed salad was slightly overwhelmed for me by the bacon flavour, though others at the table disagreed. Either way, that was as bad as things got. The snails were cooked to perfection.

Then, and oh my gosh, there was the lamb shoulder: only available for groups of four or five, priced at sixty four pounds, and accompanied by dauphinoise potatoes the likes of which you wish you could eat all the time. It was truly superb, giving but not at all sloppy, tender enough to be eaten with a spoon but robust enough for you not to want to, flavoured with mint, sherry (I think), possibly some thyme and bay, and accompanied by all the carrots you could ask for. If it’s possible, the potatoes were even more extraordinary, all garlic and cream and cooked just right.

I realise I’m descending into hyperbole here, but this was simply marvellous: better than a similar dish at Hereford Road, better than the one I cook at home, and generous enough that we had both lamb and potato to take with us for breakfast the next morning. The house red was a more than decent accompaniment.

You’d think we’d have left it there, but dessert followed – an English cheese plate and a buttermilk pudding with stewed apples. Both were very good indeed, though I didn’t much care for the texture of the goat’s cheese (the name of which I was too lazy to discover - sorry).

Were there problems with it? Well, it was a little too hot, and the windows only opened a fraction.

When I last wrote about eating in Oxford, I said that there is a little more leeway than in London; that establishments can afford to be worse than their capital counterparts. That may be true, but The Magdalen Arms would be absolutely excellent anywhere in the country. At about 35 pounds per head for three courses, some wine, coffee and an aperitif, it’s well worth the effort. I urge you to go as soon as you can. A stomach pub indeed.

Phil Letts’ take: 9/10