Telephone: 01494 483 011
Address: Sprigg's Alley, Nr Chinnor, Oxfordshire.
Do not use the term 'gastro-pub' around Julie Griffiths. She thinks it sounds ugly, and ugliness is simply not a part of the deal at her establishment, the Sir Charles Napier Inn. Still it is a useful way to describe the place, if only because it gives the lie to the idea that gastro-pubs, which emerged in central London in the early 1990s and have since spread like a welcome bindweed across the country, are anything new.
The Charles Napier, which sits on the last gasp of the Chiltern Hills above the village of Chinnor before the rolling pastures of Oxfordshire take over, has been doing its thing for 35 years now. It could reasonably be described as the godfather of the gastro-pub revolution, not least because it began life in exactly the same way as its modern counterparts: as an old eighteenth century pub, sold off to somebody whose sensibilities lay less with beer taps and more with what could be put on the plate.
Not that Julie was sold on the idea from the start. Her (now ex-) husband's family had been farmers on this part of the Chilterns for a couple of generations and the pub abutted their land. It came up for sale in the mid-1960s at a knock-down price of £4,000 and her father-in-law bought it, thinking Julie would be the perfect person to put in charge. After all, her parents had been in the hotel trade and she had grown up in catering. That was exactly why she wasn't interested; she'd had enough of restaurants. Still, she agreed to give it a go.
'From the very beginning it was going to be a food pub because my then husband, Kaye, was a good cook,' she says, although she admits it was less than sophisticated stuff: there were Desperate Dan pies and steak and chips and prawn cocktails. 'Terrible, really,' she says, wryly. But Kaye Griffiths was also a showman and he knew how to get the punters in. For Sunday lunch he would prepare an entire leg of beef, roasted overnight and presented on a trolley. Word got around and soon people were coming from as far away as London and Oxford. Some of them are still coming. 'We have people who used to come here when they were students at Oxford 25 years ago,' Julie says, 'and who come here still.'
Kaye eventually left the kitchen and was replaced by Batiste, a Sardinian who cooked only French food because he believed that 'Italian food was for peasants'. He stayed for 19 years, developing and perfecting the menu, keeping up with trends, and helping to put the Charles Napier on the map. Today the chefs are generally French (the present incumbent, Eric Devaux, was previously at the People's Palace in London) and the menu has a robust Anglo-Mediterranean feel to it. In summer there is always whole Cornish lobster. In winter there's game from the local shoots: roast wild mallard with winter vegetables, partridge with red cabbage, woodcock with braised endive. It also has a wine list of great breadth and depth but at startlingly modest mark ups.
Prices are robust at around £40 a head, including wine, though there is always a much cheaper two-course menu, and the cost is justified by the quality. But, as Julie is the first to admit, the food is only part of the appeal. There is the look of the place, which is less decorated than assembled. Chairs in the dining room do not match. Odd bits and pieces litter the place. It is an accumulation of objects. 'We furnished it from junk shops because we couldn't afford to do otherwise,' Julie says. 'It just developed. Years later people started copying us as though we had set out to look this way, but we hadn't.' It is dotted with gorgeously female, rounded sculptures, most of them by Julie's partner Michael Cooper. 'The art thing has always been a part of this place.' All of them are for sale, and they do sell.
Then there is that location, surrounded by beechwoods and with lush gardens and a view that is to die for. It is a particular kind of English landscape that has come to attract a particular kind of Englishman. Ted Hughes once sat under the cherry tree here, writing. John Mortimer, who does not live all that far away, has long been a regular. ('It is never dull when John is in,' Julie says.) The chef Heston Blumenthal, now renowned for his inventive, modernist food at the Fat Duck in nearby Bray, came a lot with his parents when he was younger. 'It's a very quirky place,' he says. 'The kind of place where you go for Sunday lunch and suddenly realise it's gone 6pm and you really ought to be moving on.' The classic sight on a Sunday, he says, is a couple of helicopters out on the lawns and a car park full of Ferraris: 'It's Sloane Street's quintessential idea of being out in the country.'
Fifteen years ago Julie's daughter Caroline, who had trained in the restaurant trade elsewhere, came back to work at the Charles Napier. Julie now credits this rush of new blood with helping to keep the business on its toes in what she cheerfully admits is an increasingly sophisticated market. 'A couple of decades ago, it was easy running a restaurant,' Julie says. 'But now it's a nightmare.' Sometimes, she says, newcomers have completely misplaced expectations. 'We've always been very laid back and informal. Here you can do just as you want.' It is a formula many have tried to replicate but the truth is it can't just be created from scratch. Just don't call it a gastro pub.
