Rating: 8/10
Telephone: 01202 485123
Address: 66 Stanpit, Mudeford, Christchurch, Dorset
Open: All week, lunch, noon-3pm; dinner, 6.30-9.30pm
Price: Three courses with wine, around £35 a head
Although the rest of you are welcome to join in, this one is aimed directly at that elite corps of Guardian readers planning to attend the Conservative party conference, beginning in Bournemouth tomorrow, as delegates. According to the latest demography, this amounts to six people, up from five a year ago, this 20% hike illustrating exactly the sort of creeping inflationary pressures, Madam Chairman, to be expected when the chancellor spends more time plotting and scheming than ... I'm so sorry, I seem to have lapsed into little George Osborne's keynote address.
To you brave half-dozen, I say only this: if it's a disbelieving laugh and an anecdote for the family you're after, make haste to Restaurant Sixty One, a few minutes' walk from the conference centre - the worst restaurant I have ever reviewed, and one that responded to the article here in February with a quasi-legal letter claiming to have CCTV footage proving that I'd never been at all. So show them a copy of this magazine and they may chuck in an airline paper bag at half price.
If what you want, on the other hand, is an excellent, unpretentious meal in a really charming pub, I recommend the short drive to The Ship In Distress in Mudeford, a coastal village on the outskirts of Christchurch. It's a great name (the place once catered primarily for shipwrecked smugglers) for what struck my friend and me as a great pub, with a large outside dining area and a slightly unnervingly mauve restaurant, as well as a determinedly maritime bar in which we ate.
Models of galleons and jolly seascapes fight a desperate battle for space on the walls with a bewildering array of sextants and other instruments, and squishy Edwardian sofas meld nicely with all the naval stuff, gentle folk rock on the stereo and a couple of indolent spaniels.
Although there's also a bar menu full of hotpots, liver and bacon, and the like, the main menu is almost exclusively piscine and we ordered from this. Fish soup with all the trimmings was pretty good, if "a little on the zesty side" (one squeeze too many of lemon), but my risotto of crab and lobster was magnificent, the rice cooked perfectly in a strong, gutsy stock gently infused with white wine and laden with big, juicy chunks of white meat.
Unusually, I backed the winner in the main course as well. It is a grave insult to lemon sole - one of the princes of the deep - to mess around with it in any way, and this large specimen came as it should... unfilleted, unfussed and grilled quickly at a high flame so the skin was brown. The flesh was so incredibly fresh, it might have been caught five minutes before.
My friend's choice was more imaginative but less impressive. Three fat fillets of sea bass glazed in acacia honey and Dijon mustard, and served on a bed of crunchy root vegetables seemed a lovely idea, and he cleared his plate with relish, but "it isn't bursting with life like your sole". Thin, crispy chips were faultless.
Long before the pub became popular with smugglers in the 18th century, Oliver Cromwell used it during the battle of Iford. There was nothing remotely puritanical about our approach to the pud, however. Enticed by the line Dessert Pub Of The Year at the bottom of the menu (alongside Seafood Pub Of The Year; it doesn't say which year), we ordered three of them - a gooey chocolate cake with crème fraîche and berries, a collation of ice creams and sorbets, and, most lustrous of all, a glazed fruit kebab that saw cherries, grapes, peach and pineapple glazed and baked in sugar until they were as crunchy as the coating on a fairground toffee apple.
Throw in immaculate service from a friendly young waitress and a notably Babs Windsorish landlady, internet reports that the beers are excellent and the most powerful hand-drier a lavatory has ever known (the sticker on it reading "Feel the Power!" gives little warning; really, you want to be tied to something secure, as Odysseus was when he sailed past the Sirens), and The Ship In Distress is a gleaming beacon for the Guardian-reading Tory delegate in search of shelter from the adrenaline-laced thrills of the conference chamber.
