16.5/20
Address 36 London Rd, Bath, Avon
Telephone 01225 428096
Open Mon-Sun, lunch, 12 noon-2.30pm, dinner, Wed-Sat 6.30-10pm
Price Dinner, £19.50 for two courses, £24 for three.
All major credit cards. Wheelchair access; no disabled WC
It wasn't a promising start. The daughter took one look at the first courses and said there wasn't one that she could eat.
"What!" I said. "Not lobster cocktail?"
"I don't do lobster."
"Scallops with salad and caper mayonnaise, then?"
"Daaad." You know that drawn-out syllable when your children want you to know you are being really boring or obtuse.
"I hate mayonnaise."
"Roast beetroot and goat's cheese?"
"Beetroot," she said simply with a curl in her voice, and I remembered that I had tried to persuade her of the joys of beetroot a couple of nights before without success. There was no point in trying to interest her in brawn or lambs' sweetbreads. It seemed a pity because I would have cheerfully eaten every one of the first courses. And every one of the main courses, come to that.
We - daughter, her mother and I - were sitting in the dining room above the bar of the King William in Bath. There were crisp white tablecloths. Light from candles in silver candlestick holders gleamed on the plain, pale cream walls on which hung reproductions of the front covers of the epoch-making Observer Guide To British Cookery, written by Jane Grigson in the 1970s. It could have been a bit twee, but none of the chairs matched and the cutlery, we suspected, came from Ikea, and the whole room had a slightly ramshackle, warm, easy-going air.
The King William has been open a few months and it is that ever fashionable item, a gastropub. As with many fine examples, it is owned and run by a husband and wife team, Charlie and Amanda Digney. I have no idea what their pedigree is, but they certainly know how to cook and run a top establishment. Aside from the dining room there are small, handsome bars downstairs where you can eat and drink - or just drink.
In the end, the kitchen did the decent thing by my daughter and provided her with a green salad of such excellence that she praised it at length. Her mother had roast beetroot and the goat's cheese, in which the musky acidity of the cheese bounced off the earthy sweetness of the beetroot to very good effect. And I had the brawn with green sauce and toast. It was beautiful, closer to the old alternative name for the dish, head cheese. Layers of mellow, mild porky bits were close packed with minimal jelly to give it a soft density set off by the sharp green sauce.
The fillet of wild venison that followed had the same marks of a kitchen that knows what it's doing. The meat was sweet and delicate and the port and juniper gravy gave it aromatic support. The runner beans had proper grassy freshness, emphasised by wafers of salty bacon. Mash there was, too, which the daughter remarked on for its silky excellence. It was very good, she said, very, very good with her very, very good rack of lamb and her very, very good gravy.
It struck me that those reproductions of Jane Grigson's Observer series were not just for show. Here were prime English ingredients, carefully sourced and cooked with real brio to bring out their qualities. It doesn't seem so fancy but, by golly, you get the flavours and the textures and the combinations of meat, sauce and seasonal veg are pretty damn smart. That wasn't quite so true of my wife's marrow stuffed with leeks and garlic with chard and aubergine crisps, but I think you have to work a bit harder to pull off that vegetarian compendium and make it sing on the plate. It was fine enough, but without the handsome flavours of the high-protein dishes.
Mind you, she made up for it with poached peaches with basil and vanilla ice cream, while I got by with chocolate cake with strawberry ice cream, and the daughter with baked custard with muscat and raspberries. The strawberry ice cream was the only blot, being inexplicably claggy and devoid of sweetness. Still, that was a tiny blight on a dinner that otherwise brought cheer, pleasure and happiness to the table, and cost a princely £99.20 all in. As that included a bottle of Morellino di Scansano, two pints of fine beer and other sundries, it seemed more than reasonable.
