Telephone: 01452 740547
Address: Arlingham, Glos.
Rating: 14/20
The Consort and I don't get an evening alone together quite as often as we might wish. Anyway, the other day we were gifted an evening of blissful solitude, and so we headed for the Old Passage Inn, which you will find at the end of a long, winding road that leads to the very banks of the River Severn. The inn, and its pleasant, well-lit dining room, is set back from the bank, but not very far back, and commands fine views up, down and across Britain's second river.
The Old Passage Inn has built up a reputation locally for serving tip-top fish dishes. This is still something of a rarity in this country; less so inland than it is on the coast. Somehow, it is easier to get fine fresh skate with black butter and capers 200 miles from the sea than it is 200 yards from it. There are exceptions, of course, such as the Seafood Restaurant, but not enough of them.
In point of fact, we didn't go for the skate, but for a Caesar salad and then tuna with Mediterranean vegetables for the Consort and, for me, home-smoked salmon with avruga caviar and then roast turbot with pea purée, peas and a saffron and caviar sauce.
The Caesar salad was generous in the measure of Romaine lettuce, less so in croutons, Parmesan or even marinated anchovies. On the other hand, you could say that any anchovies were too many. To get technical for a moment, there shouldn't be any in a Caesar salad. According to Caesar Cardini's original instructions, the flavour of anchovy in the Worcestershire sauce used in the dressing is all that is needed to provide the necessary fishy element. This dressing was altogether too creamy and anodyne.
My salmon, on the other hand, was quite the opposite. It was distinctive and delicious, simple and silky, with the herring eggs (avruga) just lending a salty, fishy charm to the slices. What else can you say about smoked salmon? It is well done or badly done. This was well done, correct in texture and mildly cured.
Such pleasing simplicity was missing from my main course. The sauce was heavier and richer than was good for the dish, and the combination of pea purée and peas, and the cloying sauce, did not sit easily on my tongue or tum, even as second fiddle to a fine piece of turbot.
The Consort, meanwhile, had asked for her tuna to be well cooked, and so it was; which is why it was dry and why it was her fault. It is a problem with this fish (and with swordfish, marlin and others of that ilk, come to that): if you cut them thick and cook them thoroughly, they will be tough, so we try to persuade ourselves that half-cooked (ie, seared on the outside, raw on the in) is delicious, which it isn't. It is pretty unpleasant. The answer is to cut the fish much thinner - say, about 1-2cm thick at most- and then to cook it very quickly at a very high heat. The meat will then be cooked through, and remain tender and tasty right up to the end. That said, the vegetable accompaniments were very fine, and the chips were very fine indeed - the best I have had recently, in fact.
So, on reflection, it would have been wiser to have stuck to the plainest dishes on the menu - fish soup, moules marinières, cold lobster with mayonnaise, fish and chips with tartare sauce, and that skate - than the more recherché items. The strength of the kitchen lies in the buying and handling of fish, rather than in the creative department.
Then it was time for some indulgent white chocolate ice cream in a brandy snap basket, which might be a little ancien régime by metropolitan standards but which still slipped down a treat. As for the bill, it was £75.85; £49.40 for the food and the rest on drink (two pints of soothing Bass, a bottle of very decent St Veran and mineral water). The service was charming, but that didn't quite compensate for a slightly offhand, haphazard quality. None of this dented the harmony of the evening, however, and we tiptoed out into moonlight shining down through a mackerel sky.
· Open Lunch, Tues-Sun, 12 noon-2pm; dinner, Tues-Sat, 7-9pm. Wheelchair access (no WC).
