Telephone: 01256 895 558
Address: The Red House Inn, 21 London Road, Whitchurch, Hampshire.
Lunch for two, about £50.
Ten years ago a magazine gave me a large slab of cash and told me to go to Amsterdam to live my life by the dice, as a homage to the cult American novel The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart. In the book the hero chooses to live his life according to rolls of the dice. Faced by a set of alternative reactions to an event he lets chance choose which one he should take. I can't remember what happened in the novel, but in my case I ended up sitting naked in a bath with a cocaine-snorting hooker. (And yes, I did make my excuses and leave.)
A few weeks ago I found myself in a dilemma. I was so overwhelmed by choice I could not decide which restaurant I should review. My friend Richard Bowron, gifted TV producer of this parish who is always one for a smart format, both on screen and in life, reminded me of The Dice Man experiment. 'Why don't you choose a restaurant that way,' he said. It seemed as good an idea as any. I should give myself - and my stomach - to chance. Together we agreed the rules. The dice would choose which motorway route out of London we should take, and then how many miles from the start we should travel. Once we were heading towards the end of the journey we would be allowed to use whatever guides we had at hand to find somewhere.
It struck me there might be a serious point to this: it was a way to replicate the randomness of the sudden decision to stop for lunch en route. The question was, could we get a good meal this way in Britain? I rolled a two on the dice - or should I say die, for there was only one - which meant we were to travel down the M3 towards Hampshire. We followed that with a four. As I had marked out distance in increments of 15 miles that meant a journey of 60 miles. We set off.
We were about halfway there when Richard, atlas in hand, announced our destination: 'It's Basingstoke,' he said, with a dying fall. A gloom settled over the car. No offence is meant to the good people of Basingstoke, but the town is hardly a foodie Mecca. The map in The Good Hotel Guide is completely blank around Basingstoke. Harden's Top UK Restaurants lists a solitary Chinese which 'is worth knowing about in this thinly provided area'. There is no entry in The Good Food Guide for Basingstoke.
We pulled off the motorway and into the car park of the Basingstoke Hilton. I looked miserably at the dead-eyed frontage of the executive hotel and then at the mileometer. Hurrah! We had overestimated the distance. We were eight miles short. We thumbed furiously through the guides and swiftly chose our destination: the Red House Inn, at Whitchurch, Hampshire, hard by Watership Down where the fictional talking bunnies frolicked.
It was, I will admit, a full 63 miles from our start point, but I hope you will forgive us the extra few miles. For a start there was nothing else available at the 60 mile point and, anyway, the Red House Inn is a lovely find: exactly the sort of place one would hope to come across by chance. Whitchurch is a handsome, rather than pretty village, and the pub is equally so. It is a long, sturdy whitewashed building that sits right on the high street. On one side is the scuffed public bar. On the other is the saloon bar and dining room, with a slightly over-blond wooden floor and lots of huge mirrors that triple the size of the room.
The lunch-time menu is a mixture of provincial French cooking and something far more international and worrying. I will admit, for example, that I ordered the starter of roast Cajun scallops with crab meat and courgettes, specifically because it looked far too ambitious to be successful. That shows what a patronising git I can be. It was one of the best scallops dishes I've eaten in a long time and I've eaten an awful lot of them recently. They were expertly cooked, coral intact, and perched on a little mound of brown crab meat and the disk of chargrilled courgette. The sweetness was offset by a sharp vinaigrette on the accompanying salad. Richard's starter of chicken liver parfait with a fig compote was equally assured: rich, dense and earthy. It was about as good a dish as you'll ever get out of a dead chicken's liver.
Our main courses were straight up examples of good cuts of meat, well prepared. Richard had a perfectly pink roast chump of lamb on a red wine jus. I had medallions of pork on a spiky grain-mustard sauce. They were both good solid dishes for a breezy autumn day. We finished by sharing a smooth pistachio crème brlée which we didn't really need. But then, who ever actually needs a crème brlée? With a few drinks and service - which was cheerful and efficient - the bill came to a neat £50, which is pretty good value for unfussy cooking of this calibre.
So what does this Dice Man experiment teach us? Probably not an awful lot, save that there is a good food pub 63 miles from my house in London, via the M3. Of course, we cheated by using the guides, but I suspect you couldn't do it any other way in Britain. In France or Italy I'm sure you could roll the dice and come up with a good meal almost anywhere. Here chance will only get you so far. This time luck, and The Good Food Guide , was on our side, even if it didn't deliver up a foaming bath and a cocaine-snorting hooker.
Contact Jay Rayner on jay.rayner@observer.co.uk.
