Matt has been working like a maniac, through the weekends, for the past month or so. And so I decided we should take a little break from London last weekend. It had to be somewhere relatively close, no more than an hour and a half away. Somewhere small, with good food and fresh air.
Some searching on the internet turned up a place called The Kingham Plough, which is a pub with rooms and a great reputation for food. Apparently the chef used to work with Heston Blumenthal and every paper from The Guardian to The Times has given it the thumbs up. They were fully booked so I worked through the list they gave me and the third establishment had a room available. I booked two nights and dinner on Friday at The King's Head Inn in Bledington, with dinner at The Kingham Plough on Saturday. Our weekend awaited just an hour and a half from Paddington.
We arrived at 7.30 on Friday night and after a short but pricey taxi ride we pulled up at a stone building on the edge of a pretty green. The air was crisp and smelled of wood smoke. We had a courtyard room, which is apparently larger and quieter than the ones over the pub.
After dropping our bags off, we headed into the pub for a pint beside an open fire. It's a lovely low-beamed space with plenty of nooks and crannies. Locals sit at the bar with their dogs and exchange pleasantries with the staff, while diners occupy heavy wooden tables where they eat large plates of fish and chips, saddle of rabbit and Cotswold sirloin.
Our waitress asked us where in New Zealand we are from. It transpired that she's a kiwi, from Pukeohe. When we asked her how long she has been in the UK and remarked that her accent has vanished, she laughed. She said she's been here six years and was astonished that we have been here for ten and still have ours, mate. Apparently she heard us from across the room declaring that the fireplace was "awesome".
We ordered our meals, both choosing the Windrush goats cheese & mixed beetroot salad to start. For mains, Matt had the roast skate with caper butter and I had the whole lemon sole with Anya potatoes, greens & lemon butter. The starter was huge and both mains were excellent.
After several pints and a few glasses of Malbec, we relocated our heavy stomachs to bed.
The next morning we had a delicious breakfast of juice, coffee, muesli and yogurt, followed by a full English. I told Matt how amazing the bread was - so light and crunchy - only to discover that it was fried bread (I immediately felt my jeans tighten). Then we wandered around the village for a while and through some fields and ended up at The Tollgate Inn in Kingham, where we indulged in a lazy afternoon of beer and wine in the sunshine with the papers.
That night we headed to The Kingham Plough which is like a posh caricature of a country pub - it seems to cater almost exclusively to Londoners who probably buy spray-on mud for their 4X4s. Three women sit at the table behind us talking about "tits", Pandora's hens party at Soho House and how 'the children' know not to venture downstairs until at least 6.45.
AA Gill reviewed The Plough with equal measures of mocking and admiration: "You may not have heard of it, but if you lived in Notting Hill, you would have. I grudgingly have to admit that the staff are charming and not remotely local. Well, they were local to Sandhurst and Andalusia".
Matthew Norman from The Guardian found it smug and separatist: "At The Kingham Plough the embers of that infantile inverted snobbery were fanned by the noise from the adjoining bar, where female voices lowered in pitch by three decades of Silk Cut and male ones raised by three hours of overly tight mustard cords melded into one monotonous bray of merriment".
Indeed, the Cotswolds seem to be full of visitors with money - later that night we met a sozzled Goldman Sachs banker back at the King's Head who told us how he loves the countryside, hates London, recommends The Cow and Bumpkin in Notting Hill (the stalwart favourites of flush Hillbillies) and that it is dangerous for him to go to Walmer Castle as his girlfriend is likely to cost him a packet in the Diane von Furstenberg across the street.
We ordered the 1999 St Emilion, starters of venison ham and mushroom mousse, followed by a main of Hereford beef, triple cooked chips and salad. Unfortunately, everything seems to be cooked in a sous-vide and so the steak was not as we like it - tasting of flames or embers - and was curiously one dimensional in texture and flavour.
I'm a bit concerned by the whole sous-vide movement - it seems to be the default mode of cookery of the moment for anyone with Michelin aspirations. Apparently this low-temperature water bath ensures that the integrity of each vacuum-packed ingredient is not compromised. I'm not convinced. I am sure it has its place, but The Kingham seems to have adopted it carte blanche. I've just looked sous-vide up on Wiki and found this somewhat incongruous fact: "It has also been used to quickly produce significant quantities of meals for hurricane evacuees". Odd, given that the entry also says it is a long cooking process and "72 hours is not unusual".
Hopefully we can squeeze in a visit to Jamie Oliver's meat restaurant in the next couple of weeks. Barbecoa's website says it's a "celebration of the relationship between fire and food" - just the antidote to sous-vide overkill in the Cotswolds.
All in all, it was a nice little weekend away, the last we will have while we still call London home.
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