5/10
Telephone 01328 738777.
Address The Green, Burnham Market, Norfolk.
Open All week, lunch noon-2pm, dinner 7-9pm (last orders).
Price £40-50 a head for three courses with wine.
It is one of the less celebrated facts about the great sea lord that, almost 30 years before Napoleon was banished to Elba, Horatio Nelson endured a self-imposed exile of his own. Suddenly without a naval commission, he returned to his native north Norfolk and spent 1789 to 1793 unemployed while on half pay. The idle, scrounging wastrel. Whether Burnham Market was a jollier place than Elba either side of the turn of the 19th century I cannot say, but given the choice today between an island in the Tuscan archipelago and an East Anglian town peppered with wilfully twee arts and crafts shops, many of us would take the staring-dolefully-out-to-sea option like a shot.
Apart perhaps from a Barclays bank with a startling baby pink exterior, Burnham Market's leading attraction is the Hoste Arms, to which Nelson would go every Saturday to collect dispatches and read a newspaper. In the intervening years, this handsome 17th-century building enjoyed stints as a court of assizes and a brothel, but after buying it from a brewery some 15 years ago, owner Paul Whittome has recreated it as quite a curio - a hybrid of studiedly traditional coaching inn, modern art gallery, snazzy hotel and ambitious restaurant.
Anyone who tries to inject some flair into the dull business of eating in English coastal towns should be feted as a noble soul, if not a national hero, so I doff my tricorn to Whittome for his efforts. His dining room is an attractive, relaxing space (dark wood panelling, high-backed leather chairs, antique light fittings and colourful paintings of coastal scenes), and is presided over by friendly, attentive young people. Everything hinted at a good meal, in fact, until my eye landed on an entry in a self-consciously eclectic menu. Cooked oysters with tomato chutney and Emmenthal isn't the yuckiest-sounding dish I've met lately (the watermelon carpaccio with feta cheese and black olive tapenade at La Noisette brooks no rivals for that honour), but did raise the spectre of the Masterchef contestant more concerned with looking clever than producing something edible.
I tried to coax my cousin, Nick, into ordering them, but this veteran of such outings wasn't falling for it, so we shared a dozen raw Brancaster oysters instead. "My God, they're enormous," he said when these Goliaths arrived (apparently it's the silt that makes them so huge). "They remind me of the Slitheen - one of them's going to undo the forehead zip at any moment and emerge." None did, as it happened, but anyone who perceives oysters as delicate little things that slip insouciantly past the throat should be warned that the only way these flabby horrors will slide down effortlessly is with the aid of a plunger.
What followed was generally disappointing. Nick liked the creaminess of a truffle and wild mushroom velouté served with seared scallops, but it tasted like a Caramac bar to me, and although my tuna sashimi was fresh enough, its zinginess was dulled by the overly sweet dressing on a spring onion salad.
Overcomplication is one of the habitual curses of provincial restaurants, and so it proved with my main course. Braised shoulder of Norfolk pork - two thick spheres of good meat, very slightly overcooked - came with a black pudding hash, the two wildly distinct porcine flavours doing each other no favours at all. Nick's rack of lamb tasted a bit muttony for a supposedly young animal ("If you like the taste of old slippers," as he put it, "it's very good indeed"), and the accompanying broccoli roasted with lemon and cumin was more minor irritant than cunning disguise for poor meat.
The portions were almost as off-puttingly large as those oysters, so we shared a pudding, a sensationally good banana tart tatin with passion fruit seeds and liquorice ice cream being by many nautical miles the highlight of the meal. Buried somewhere here, I suspect, lies a good restaurant struggling to escape, but a fair bit of digging is needed.
Whittome has the right to expect every chef to do his duty, as that workshy bastard Nelson so nearly put it, and should think about delivering a firm lecture on the perils of trying too hard.
