In all my many years of writing about restaurants - and my first piece concerned the opening of the inaugural Lyons Corner House in 1909 - I have never written a review quite like this one. In fact, it isn't entirely a review at all, being as much a preview of what I suspect The Hole In The Wall is like on an average night as a report on a slightly disappointing meal.
The reason for the unwontedly unstrained quality of mercy is the presence, as one of its owners, of Stephen Bull. Bull is such a hero of British cooking that, were chefs treated with the same reverence as literary novelists, Sir Salman might not be the only refugee from advertising to feel Her Majesty's sword on his shoulder this year.
In the mid-80s, when Bull opened up on his own in London, this erstwhile "creative" did more than anyone to create the style of cooking known as modern British, bringing simplicity, imagination and a commitment to first-class ingredients to an industry in which such concepts were still thoroughly alien.
Some 20 years later, exhausted by the ridiculous quest for Michelin stars, he sold up and became involved with a gastropub in Herefordshire. Such was his reputation as a major player in the capital that I assumed his involvement ended with lending his name and advising on the menu. I was pompously explaining to the small boy who went with me how big-name chefs routinely prostitute themselves like this, when the waiter came over.
"I don't suppose you see much of Stephen Bull," I said.
"Well, we do, actually," this middle-aged guy replied.
"Oh yes," I said, winking smugly at the five-year-old opposite, "and when did he last show his face?"
"Today - I am Stephen Bull."
The meal was spectacular, the Lough Pool Inn duly became the Good Food Guide's Pub of the Year, and a few years later Bull joined his manager and chef in the quaintly named Cambridgeshire village of Little Wilbraham. It's a lovely, bucolic setting for a handsome, oaky, firewood-scented, 15th-century pub, and the four of us couldn't think of many places we'd rather eat on a crisp summer evening than on a neat lawn surrounded by meadows and the sound of birdsong.
What we didn't know was that Sod's Law - not the old Act, but the new legislation as toughened up by a steering committee including "Dr" John Reid and Michael Howard, and chaired by the late Judge Jeffreys - was in operation. For a critic to turn up on the night chef and co-owner Chris Leeton, who produced that brilliant meal in Herefordshire, was too crippled by a bad back to work really is hideous luck.
What followed was far from a disaster, and the understudy had his moments. Anyone who can avoid displeasing that champion complainant my mother clearly has a future, and the woman who once returned a portion of broad beans because she considered two of them disarmingly narrow was delighted first with a seafood cocktail in a zingy Marie Rose sauce and then a portion of "wonderfully melt-in-the-mouthy" pan-fried calves' liver.
The rest of us weren't so thrilled. What was listed as a "coarse chicken liver, potato and shallot pâté" turned out to be a terrine, which is an entirely different thing and a minor phobia. Umbrage was taken (clearly it was an unusually stressful night) when I asked to swap it for a plate of Serrano ham, which was good itself but came with tasteless beefsteak tomato. My wife loved her main course, a beautiful piece of monkfish cooked to perfection, but my sirloin steak, although the meat was of excellent quality, had been grilled for too long (the cost was voluntarily stricken from the bill). We didn't stay for puddings.
Mixed bag though this was, Stephen Bull has a long and lustrous record for providing outstanding food at decent prices, and if I had a reputation I would happily stake it on predicting that, on any medical crisis-free day, this place is every bit as good as his previous ventures and very well worth a visit.
