Blackstones
2-3 Queen Street, Bath (01225 444 403)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £40-70
Have you ever, while traipsing about a British city centre, found yourself overwhelmed by the urge to run in to a branch of Garfunkel's and scream at the customers: 'You fools! You bottom-dwelling idiots! Don't put this stuff in your mouth! Don't even lift the fork. It is to food what Bernard Manning is to poetry! It is to good taste what George Bush is to world peace. AND IT ISN'T EVEN CHEAP!'
You haven't? Oh. Maybe it's just me then.
Still, what always strikes me is the dead-eyed expressions of the suckers seated in the windows of these places. Never do they look happy with giddy anticipation. If they did, if they looked like they really wanted to be there, I wouldn't give a toss. To hell with them and their violated taste buds. Instead, they merely look relieved. They have gone somewhere that won't scare them. This is what they want: not good ingredients well prepared, not even a nice lunch, but nothing bad to happen.
The view through a restaurant window can tell you a lot about a place, and it was the view through the window of Blackstones in Bath which first suggested to me I was on to a good 'un. It occupies a series of airy, knocked-through rooms on a narrow cobbled lane, not far from the main shopping drag. There are large communal tables in a vivid, shiny shade of green, or smaller tables in lurid pink, and in the window, a bar where people can sit side by side, or alone, to eat and admire the view. The thing is that everybody eating lunch the day I went - and it was full - looked really happy to be there. They were smiling. It made the place look like a club, of which I wanted to be a member.
Blackstones Restaurant is an offshoot of Blackstones Kitchen, which was opened across the road two years ago by Rebecca and Daniel Blackstone (the shameful lack of an apostrophe is, apparently, deliberate. And that's the best I can do by way of criticism.) It was a simple idea: takeaway ready meals done really well. Think shepherd's pie or beef and prune tagine, daube of pork with leeks and apricots, or balsamic braised chicken with porcini. With experience both front and back of house in London restaurants, opening their own was the next logical step.
As with the ready meals, there is nothing prissy about the food here. It is solid, butch and warming stuff. So a warm onion tart is not one of those thin, crisp Provencal jobs, but something deep filled, more akin to a quiche, with a high crumbly rim of uber-buttery pastry and a loose filling thick with a tangle of sweet onions. Smoked haddock fish cakes are - praise be! - actually full of smoky fishw and have a satisfying crust to them that works well with their coarse home-made sauce tartar. These two together should have been - indeed were - enough but, eating alone, I felt a responsibility to somehow find space for their well-executed panna cotta. Afterwards Rebecca, who heads the kitchen, told me she believed a good panna cotta should 'move like a woman's breasts'. I checked with the wife, and it did.
The menu changes regularly and is keenly priced, with starters at around £5 and mains topping out at £12. It also uses local and often organic suppliers but doesn't make a big song and dance about it. The food - and the sight of happy people eating it - tells you all you really need to know.
