Telephone: 01451 830670
Address: The Royalist Hotel, Digbeth Street, Stow-on-the-Wold, Glos.
It's not that often that the Fort family heads off for a Sunday lunch on field research missions. I am something of a traditionalist when it comes to Sunday, and like long and uproarious eating sessions in the comfort of my own home, after which I can retire to the hammock or bed, depending on the time of year, without being haunted by the fear of Breathalyser or public disapproval. However, we are between kitchens at the moment, and so we upped and offed to Stow-on-the-Wold, a shortish haul away.
In a week, the scrubbed traditional Cotswold decencies of S-on-the-W (all a bit too decent and preserved in aspic for my taste) will be enlivened by the bustle and odours of the annual British Cheese Awards and attendant jamboree (September 27-29, to be exact; members of the public cordially welcomed on Saturday 29, Guardian readers especially), but on this particular Sunday there was only the fragrance of passing charabancs and posses of "ruin-bibbers, randy for antique" and people looking for lunch. Those with prior knowledge headed for the Eagle And Child, the gastro-pub end of the Royalist Hotel.
To be truthful, I had intended to go to the Royalist's senior restaurant, AD947, so named because the licence to provide meat and strong drink on these premises goes back to that date, but the dining room had been taken over for some function or other, and so we were exiled to the conservatory of the Eagle And Child next door.
It turned out not to be such a deprivation. Both the Royalist and the Eagle And Child are the province of Alan and Georgina Thompson, who abandoned established culinary glory at 755 in the Fulham Road, London, for the cleaner airs and more haphazard business of a Cotswold town. I never ate Mr Thompson's food in London, but it was highly rated by many. With the present arrangement, of course, he can get to play with the simpler dishes as well as the fancy stuff - and, if the simpler dishes are anything to go by, then the fancy stuff should be very good indeed.
We passed on the classic Sunday lunch menu (roast beef and Yorkshire pud, then bread-and-butter pudding, if you're interested, for £13; and I don't think that you'd be up for a marathon after that lot, to judge by the helpings I saw sailing past our table). The female members of the Fort family also passed on first courses, deciding to reserve their firepower for the puddings. The First Lady wanted the sticky toffee pudding at that stage, and so chose a roasted wing of skate with salsa verde to precede it. The Second Lady wanted creamed rice pudding with raspberry jam, and chose chicken with mashed potato and vegetables to precede it. And, on an afterthought, she needed a helping of garlic bread with hummus to precede that. More orthodox in every respect, I wanted an omelette with crab and spring onion to start with; a confit of chicken with beans and chorizo as a second course; and a baked apple with caramel and hazelnut ice cream as a pudding, which is not what I would have had at home.
I won't say that it was a meal without blemishes, but the satisfactions far outweighed the glitches. The skate had to be sent back because it wasn't quite cooked through, and my baked apple suffered a bit from the same under-heated treatment. Once the skate arrived for the second time, however, it was dispatched with ferocious enthusiasm and fulsome praise. The chicken, mash and vegetables, all serious bits of cooking, wilted and vanished under an onslaught that would have done credit to a restaurant critic. The crab and spring onion omelette was light, properly colourless on the outside, packed with sweet, white crab meat and cheerful with spring onions. The chicken, beans and chorizo was a tremendous plateful - soothing, filling, rich, mellow flavours just rolling through each mouthful. The puddings simply brought a long silence of pleasure broken by the odd "Oh" and "Aaaaahhhh" and "Do you think I could ask for some more raspberry jam?" and "No".
"That was really fabulous," said the First Lady as she tried to remove the glaze from her plate. I felt a bit put out that my pudding had not given me the same sense of strength through joy.
However, charming service and a bill of £44.90 restored my faith in human justice. We Forts are, naturally, modest drinkers. We managed two and a half pints of beautiful Hook Norton beer, a glass of sprightly Valpolicella and a couple of lime and lemonades between us, which amounted to £9.75. So that's £35.15 on grub. Call it £36 for the sake of easy arithmetic, which comes out at £12 a head. Great Scot, it'd cost me more to feed them at home. I must go out for Sunday lunch more often.
· Open All week, lunch, 12 noon-2pm; dinner, 6.30-9pm (bar snacks, 10.30am-10pm). Menus Weekdays, first courses/puddings £4, main courses £6; weekends, first courses £6, mains £9. All major credit cards. Wheelchair access and WC.
