Tyddyn Llan
Telephone: 01490 440264
Address: Llandrillo, near Corwen, Denbighshire
Rating: 17/20

'Perhaps you can now lose some weight," was my mother's characteristic comment when I told her I was giving up reviewing restaurants and moving on to writing the cookery side of things. I stared down at my tummy. It wasn't that bad. I could see my feet. I could even see my knees, if I bent over. Anyway, there's bound to be some collateral if you've troughed in the finest eateries for 15 years.

Almost from birth I have loved restaurants, their theatre, their civility, their rhythm, their food. Of course, I have suffered my fair share of bum places, but even the most disgusting experiences have provided food for thought, if not food I wanted to eat. And I was only too happy to put the boot in to places I felt were overhyped, a con or that offended me in some way.

But, on the whole, I tried to avoid such places. I have always thought that people want to know where to go to have a good time, not the reverse: if you're going to part with a good deal of money, you may wish to know you have a fair chance of not regretting it. As a critic, you welcome the rotten restaurant because bad reviews are far easier to write. The accepted vocabulary for accurately describing good food, taste, texture and flavour is pathetically poverty-stricken. When it comes to indicting bad food, however, suddenly the full panoply of language and literature is at your command. No comparison is too far-fetched, no metaphor too odious, no comic turn too outrageous.

I still had one tour of inspection to carry out, and decided to go to Tyddyn Llan, a restaurant with rooms near Corwen, north Wales. Why? Well, it's a bit off the beaten track, and I have a thing about beaten tracks. Byways have always seemed to me more interesting than highways, and these particular byways run through the spectacularly beautiful hills and valleys of a part of the country I had never visited before. Second, it is owned and run by a husband-and-wife team, Bryan (chef) and Susan Webb (front of house), and I warm to such family-run enterprises rather more than hyper-restaurants. And third, because I admired Webb's cooking when he was the heart and soul of Hilaire in London, so I was inclined to think that I'd get a decent feed.

I had not bargained for how decent that feed was to be. For £23.50, the cost of the three-course fixed-price lunch (I could have had two courses for £17.50, but I've never been a two-course man), I ate salad of pig's trotter with foie gras and celeriac remoulade; roast pigeon with butter beans, girolles and spiced peaches; and wimberry crème brûlée. (I also had a cheese course, but that was extra.) However you look at it, that's good value for money. There were other temptations (leek risotto with summer truffles, griddled scallops with vegetable relish, rump of lamb with artichokes, peas and broad beans, and summer pudding with Jersey cream, to name just a few), but each dish in the sequence I chose turned out to be more than even its advertised parts.

My first course did not call for far-fetched comparison, odious metaphor or comic outrage, but rather for cultured appreciation and the expression of deep pleasure. The trotter was warm and stuffed with nuggets of its own meat and sweetbreads set in a mousse of the utmost delicacy and richness. A generous slice of seared foie gras piled sensuality on sensuality. The remoulade added its own creamy crunchiness. There were girolles, too, and mixed salad leaves (the healthy part). But it was the sense of sumptuous, velvety textures glossing my mouth, the gentle merging of flavours, that gave this dish its formidable delights. It was tiptop tucker - and if you can't stomach pig's trotter or foie gras, you are a poor, benighted soul.

Do you know how much skill it takes to cook a pigeon's leg so that the skin is crisp, almost crunchy, and the flesh succulent yet still detached with ease from the bone? Oodles and oodles. It is one of the reasons why we go to restaurants. And to eat tender, velvety breasts with it. And giant butter beans, vivid green broad beans and girolles like orange trumpets, all sloshing around in grade-A pigeon juices sweetened with spiced peaches, which brought a hint of the exotic to an otherwise earthy combination.

Restaurants such as Tyddyn Llan are clear evidence that the industry is in a far healthier state than when I first wrote about it. What's more, there are better and more interesting restaurants outside London than in it. Off the top of my head, I can name the Fat Duck in Berkshire, 5 North Street in Gloucestershire, Juniper in Lancashire, L'Enclume in Cumbria, Hibiscus in Shropshire, Vanilla Pod in Buckinghamshire, all of which produce food of great individuality and panache; many more are working in the same vein. Only Tom Aikens, Rasoi Vineet Bhatia, Thyme and Richard Corrigan in London work at a remotely similar level, though that may be because the cost of setting up a London restaurant - around £2m for even a modest gaff - means the proprietor/chef is in thrall to investors or banks from day one, so can't afford to take risks with anything so recherché as originality.

Or course, culinary originality is not the only criterion for judging a restaurant, or even the most important one. People go to different restaurants for different reasons. We do not necessarily want to take our mothers to the same places we'd take our lovers, say, and few of us are likely to treat a Fat Duck or Connaught as a neighbourhood restaurant. Thank heavens that eating in restaurants is no longer seen as the prerogative of the rich or the snobby. I like to think that restaurant criticism has played a part in this, though in truth it owes more to the energy and vision of restaurateurs.

And so I came to my final pudding, as a reviewer, which I was talked into by Mrs Webb, wimberries being native to this part of Wales (my instinct had been for the summer pudding, largely on account of the Jersey cream). It was a model of light elegance, the custard quite liquid, the sugar-glazed top like the rime of frost, and the wimberries with an unassertive autumnal flavour not unlike blueberries. And, with a sigh of contentment, that was that.

Will I stop going to restaurants now that I have rejoined the ranks of ordinary punters? Most certainly not. I can't think of a form of human activity that is capable of giving so much pleasure in so many diverse ways over so long a period. My only wish for my successor, the ebullient Victor Lewis-Smith, is that he gets as much pleasure out of it as I have had.

As I wound my way home, I passed a butcher's. "Local lamb", said a sign in the window. I'd have stopped and dashed in for - what? A brace of chops? A shoulder? A kilo of mince? But there was a queue behind me, so I drove on, playing with ideas, combinations, flavours in my head, trying to remember what was in the fridge. What would work well? What would work best? What could I cook to write about? Oh, the sunny upland beckoned. Well, supper did, at any rate.

· Open: Lunch, Tues-Sat, 12.30-2.15pm; dinner, all week, 7-10pm
Menus: Lunch, £17.50 for two courses, £23.50 for three; dinner, £29.50 for two courses, £35 for three, £40 for four.
Wheelchair access and WC.