In seeking the genesis of my pathological fear of the rural hotel dining room - if you'll pardon me using this column as a tool of psychoanalysis - I can source the phobia to the grandson of that discipline's founder. Long ago, at the inception of a brief career as a radio presenter, my very first guest was Clement Freud, and perhaps predictably he wasted little time in sniffing blood. "You keep looking at the clock," the Pedigree Chum proselytiser intoned, gleefully noting the mounting panic on the other side of the desk. "You seem very nervous. Is there something wrong?"
Passing swiftly over the horror of hearing such words going out live four minutes into your presenting debut, I should mention that the old goat was there to plug a coffee-table book about gracious country house hotel dining. Thus was the phobia born, and an intervening 18 years peppered with meals of gruesome pretension, bewildering incompetence, snotty service and larcenous wine mark-ups have done little to abate it.
Thankfully, however, there is one effective form of remedial therapy, and its name is the Arundell Arms. Perched on the River Tamar in bucolic Devon, it is most celebrated as a fishing hotel (it owns stretches of the river, and its two long-serving resident tutors have taught thousands how to land trout and salmon), but its restaurant should be used as a teaching module for anyone in the business. "That's one of the things I love about this place - it's so gloriously unpretentious," said my wife, pointing out a stereo system resting on a piece of furniture. "You wouldn't care at home that it's a magnificent oak side table, you'd just stick the hi-fi on it. It's just like someone's house, and that's marvellous."
Freebie cups of scintillating asparagus soup had come and gone before we got stuck into a meal that relied on that simplest yet least well observed of all culinary formulae: local ingredients of the highest quality cooked with precision and technical excellence. Pan-fried Cornish scallops with wild garlic were "bursting with flavour", and my crab ravioli in a champagne sauce was elevated by unbelievably flavoursome pea shoots that constituted, according to an unwontedly lyrical wife, "the taste of spring". A small-ish boy of our acquaintance became increasingly irritated by attempts to distract him (perhaps 10 is a bit old to fall for the "Oh God, look, there's a rhino behind that curtain" trick) in order to thieve bits of his salad, a sparkling collation of Denhay cured ham, asparagus, avocado and Parmesan shavings in a vibrant, walnut oil dressing.
One of the Arundell's delights is its owner, Anne Voss-Bark, a globally revered fisherwoman who's run the place for almost 50 years, and she popped over during the hiatus between courses to reminisce about the night she and her late husband, Conrad, had dinner here with Ted Hughes and James Lovelock, who lives two minutes away. We did a bit of ritual tutting about climate change, and returned to the more urgent matter of the food. My tournedos of Devon beef was two fat chunks of indecently tender, ruby red meat enriched by a potent peppercorn sauce. Better still was a duck fillet, cooked pink and served with squash, that worked well enough with a "slightly sweetened" rhubarb compote to draw some Meg Ryan-esque oohing and aahing. Plain grilled chicken (the kitchen's child-friendliness is treasonably un-British) came with great thin chips.
Puddings were predictably terrific, especially a gooey chocolate fondant, the service was charmingly friendly (a Romanian called Stefan did a little jig of pleasure at the choice of a delicious and oddly reasonably priced South African red), and overall this was one of those meals that leaves the critic flailing around for a moan. The best I can do is that the room, done out with yellow panels depicting scenes from ancient Rome, is slightly over lit by hanging lamps, which isn't much but will have to do. If only there were more rural hotel restaurants like the Arundell, my wife playfully observed as we departed, there might almost be enough material for a bestselling coffee-table book.
The Arundell Arms 9/10
Telephone 01566 784666. Address Lifton, Devon. Open All week, lunch 12.30-2pm, dinner 7.30-9.30pm (last orders). Price No-choice four-course set menu, £38, including VAT, coffee and truffles; à la carte, £42 for three courses.
