· Meal for two, including wine and service, £60-£90 (01277 216 104)
Because you are a loyal bunch, and wouldn't dream of looking at another newspaper, you will be unaware that Gordon Ramsay recently opened a pub. This is because I haven't reviewed it. God knows I've tried, but when I called all they could offer me was a table in 2011. At 5.45pm. No matter. Multi-Michelinstarred chefs are keen on opening food pubs and, oh look, here comes another one. It's called the Headley, it's in Brentwood in Essex, and it's owned by Daniel Clifford, who has two Michelin stars at Midsummer House in Cambridge.
It's not hard to see why high-end chefs would want to wade into these cheaper operations. For a start, they can be a money-spinner. Although chefs rarely admit it, the very top end of the restaurant business is less than financially viable. It is accepted, for example, that a three-star restaurant will have a staff-to-diner ratio of one to one. So for 44 seats you will have 44 staff on hand, which is the sort of thing to give any owner-chef nightmares and nosebleeds. The gastropalace functions best only as the cornerstone to a brand, a loss-leader which justifies everything else that follows.
But fancy-pants chefs also like trying their hand at food pubs because they establish their credentials through reverse snobbery. 'Look!' a pub food menu shouts. 'I am not merely pithiviers of this and tians of that. I am grounded. I can do classics. I've got soul, me.' It certainly worked that way when Heston Blumenthal of the whizz-bang Fat Duck opened the Hind's Head in Bray, with a menu of potted shrimps and steak and kidney pudding, and I think it works that way here, too, at the Headley.
At Midsummer House, Cliff ord does curious things with seawater jellies, and puts together ingredients which previously were thought to have no business socialising with each other. Here at the Headley it's Welsh rarebit, fi sh and chips and apple pie. And, from what I ate while dining by myself, it does this stuff very well.
The Headley, which sits on the rural outskirts of town, is not a pretty pub. Much like your critic, it is solid and rather large. Handsome would describe it (ditto), and at the moment it needs a bit of living in: the walls are too white, the black-beamed low ceilings too perfect, the slate-effect tiled floor too shiny. The scuff s and smudges will come in time, courtesy of the odd punch-up at last orders. But what matters is that the food is accomplished.
There is also a lot of it. The dinner menu has nine starters, ranging from the boiler plate (potted shrimps) to the ambitious - smoked black pudding and ham chou farci, sauce tomate a l'Ancienne. I counted over a dozen main courses, with nods to France, Britain and Italy. There is also a reasonable-looking children's menu and on Sundays another menu full of roasts.
And then there is the lunch menu, which for the most part is made up of simpler dishes, including doorstep sandwiches and some great old-school numbers. I started with one of these, the much neglected Scotch woodcock: a thick piece of white toast (don't mention the bloody non-carbs diet), smeared with anchovies, layered with a pillow of exceptionally good scrambled eggs and sprinkled with olives and a few more anchovies. It is a simple idea but, as ever, it takes skill to get the simple things right.
A pork chop was a solid piece of meat with a good ribbon of fat. There is always a choice to be made when cooking a slab of porker like this: do you crisp up the fat and risk drying out the meat, or forgo crackling for tenderness? They did the latter, which I think was right. It came with a chorizo stew, full of seasonal broad beans and peas, the whole sprinkled with smoked paprika. So far, so basic, so (modern) pubby.
It was at the sweet end of the meal that one began to sense the Midsummer House influence. An accomplished lemon and lime cheesecake came topped with a turban of lemon foam, clearly sprayed from one of those shiny aluminium soda siphons that top-end chefs love these days. With it was a scoop of lemongrass ice cream, which was perfectly judged, and came studded with shards of candied peel. And then at the end a good espresso, with what here we will call home-made chocolates and at Midsummer House would be called petits fours.
Service was on the ball. My only doubt is over the pricing, which is enthusiastic, even for Brentwood. With most starters in the evening at around £9 and main courses leaping away into the teens, bills here can quickly mount up in a non-pub way. In their defence, the lunch menu makes it possible to eat for £15 a head or less. At which point I should compare it to the pricing at Ramsay's pub, but I really haven't got a clue, have I? Come back to me in 2011. Just after tea time. I should know something by then.
