My niece, Sophie, was a bit surprised when a smartly dressed young man stepped towards her with an umbrella as she got out of the car. She wasn't used to such thoughtful treatment, and leaped back like a startled deer. It's a pity that she didn't make more of it, because it was just about the last evidence of good manners that we encountered.
When I last reviewed the Vineyard, I described it as looking like Southfork on the A4. That's a reference for the older reader who can cast a mind back to the dear, dead days of a soap called Dallas. Sophie said that it reminded her of a garden centre in France. I knew what she meant - false rocks by the entrance, careful landscaping and bushy planting wrapped around a spreading two-storey building that resembled a modern golf club. The inside, however, is still a bit Southforkish, albeit with a wash of just-short-of-vulgar British taste and that bewitching combination of uncomfortable luxury - seats just too low, too deep and cushions just too soft - and corporate blankness.
So we sat in the antechamber to the dining room, and we sat and we sat. The first glass of champagne (at £8.50 a glass, no less) arrived speedily. The menus and wine list arrived less quickly, and the maître d' - there were at least three of them - less quickly still. We declined an offer of a second glass of champagne. Other guests arrived after us, had their orders taken and went to their tables before us. It crossed my mind that we might never be called to our table at all.
We had arrived at 1pm, punctually. At 1.50pm, I stopped a passing maître d' and asked if we were ever going to be fed. He looked pained, and said the kitchen wasn't quite ready, but that we could go to the table if we liked. I know we looked like a couple of sparrows among birds of paradise, but if the word hospitality means anything, it has to embrace even sparrows. I must excuse the junior service from any criticism. They were attentive, pleasant and efficient. But the senior service were everything that gets up my nose: self-important and fawningly attentive to customers who buy wine by the price, chilly, supercilious and dismissive of everyone else. Had the food been ambrosia and the wine nectar, they would still have tasted like ashes in the mouth.
The last time I ate at the Vineyard, the chef was a fellow called Billy Reid, and I had a meal that seriously punched its weight, matched to some very classy wines. Reid went on to other things, and his place was taken by John Campbell, who had built up a high-profile reputation at the Lords Of The Manor hotel in Upper Slaughter, but I had never reviewed his cooking. There were items on the menus here - Parmesan sherbet, roast anjou squab with black treacle, and red mullet, fennel and honey purée - that suggested an intriguing and original sense of taste at work. The trouble was, nothing turned out quite as interesting as it sounded.
I tried the roast squab with black treacle and celeriac, and then an organic salmon dish described con fusingly as home cured-hot smoked, with horseradish velouté and caviar. Niece Sophie went for roast diver scallop with homemade black pudding and squash panna cotta, a 1980s dish if ever there was one, followed by slow-cooked fillet of beef with mushroom ravioli. She finished with apple tart and I with cheese. They make a bit of a thing about their cheese menu at the Vineyard.
Well, the scallop was a first for Sophie, and she enjoyed it very much indeed. She enjoyed the black pudding, too - "Really good black pudding, Uncle Matt. Quite squidgy, but nice" - and she enjoyed the squash panna cotta, too. And she quite enjoyed the apple tart - "But it's not as good as mum's" - which didn't surprise me because her mother is one of the most sublimely gifted makers of pastry that I have come across. The beef with mushroom ravioli she found plain dull - "And I thought ravioli were plural."
My squab with treacle was decent, but nothing rip-roaring. The sauce was very sweet, and had none of the slightly burned quality that I'd thought treacle would give it. The tastiest thing on the plate was the very fine, velvety celeriac purée. In view of the confusing menu poetry, I am not quite sure how the salmon was cooked, but it was very soft, so much so that it was almost without texture at all. The horseradish velouté had no pep to it, and the caviar in the other, buttery sauce displayed the pointlessness of including it in a dish description unless you are going to load on the fish eggs with a generosity that the rules of economics make impossible without a £50 supplement. The cheese plate was fine, but no better than the one chez Fort on a Saturday night. It was all decent stuff, and beautifully prepared, but pretty conventional. There was no wowser factor, as we say in critical techno-babble.
Oh dear. I hate putting the boot in, but when I'm faced with a £151.50 bill, which included only two glasses of champagne, two of white wine, and tea and coffee, and service that was long on airs but short on graces, nothing but the boot will do.
· Telephone 01635 528770. Address Stockcross, Berks. Open All week, lunch, 12 noon-2pm; dinner, 7-10pm. Menus Market menu, £17 for two courses, £23 for three; à la carte, £45 for two courses, £55 for three. Wheelchair access & WC.
