Tuddenham Mill, High Street, Tuddenham, nr Newmarket, Suffolk. Tel 01638 713 552. Meal for two, including wine and service, £120
Stand back. I'm going to propose a theory: that the most innovative cooking in this country happens not in London, but outside it. The capital obviously lays claim to having the greatest concentration of professional, solid, occasionally thrilling restaurants in Britain. I won't lie about that just to make people in, say, Swindon, feel better about themselves. But, with a few exceptions – Jason Atherton, Nuno Mendes – it's not where the chefs are pushing boundaries. In big cities, chefs are too busy competing with each other for custom to turn in on themselves. For that you have to get out into splendid culinary isolation: think Sat Bains in Nottingham, Simon Rogan in Cartmel, David Everitt-Matthias in Cheltenham, even (in the beginning) Heston Blumenthal in his little pub on the Bray high street. Only away from the herd is it possible for chefs not to notice that what they are doing might, elsewhere, be considered odd.
And so to Tuddenham Mill, a restaurant in a smart Suffolk boutique hotel, which looks like a slice of chocolate-box England, but where the food is so firmly on the gastronomic cutting edge you could slice your hand off on it. I mean that in a good way. It's very easy to be different. Timmy Mallet was different, and that right there is an argument for involuntary euthanasia. (Wouldn't you have loved someone to put him out of our misery?) It's much harder to be good at being different and Paul Foster, who may well be one of the best young chefs you've never heard of, is doing different very well indeed. His ideas are controlled. His flavour combinations make sense. The smartest bits of kitchen kit are used not simply because he's got a new toy but to add something. On top of this is a more than passing interest in the agenda set by Noma, the famed Danish restaurant which is big on the foraging of very local ingredients. If you want a plate of food that shouts 2011, which is the word "now" fashioned from calories, go to Tuddenham Mill.
A starter described as pork neck carpaccio, and which sounds like a short cut to trichinosis, brings very thinly sliced piggy that has been marinated and rubbed in spices and then cooked sous vide for most of a weekend. It is served on a warm plate with curls of puffed pig skin – scratching to those of you in the cheap seats – and crunchy slices of pickled turnip. It's faultless. Boned out and roasted chicken wings join hands with tiny brown shrimps in a cross-cultural marriage that is astonishingly successful. Alongside are the hearts of baby cucumbers and a chicory purée that brings a welcome thump of bitterness.
The dining room – wood floors, big beams, the attentions of an expensive modern architect – sits astride the waters that used to work the mill. The main courses are an expression of that river. A perfectly cooked tranche of hake is served on a bed of bright green tapioca flavoured with a purée of watercress foraged from the banks outside. The swollen tapioca pearls look much like fish spawn, a notion followed through by the addition of clams and the lift of confit garlic. Right now that same river is swarming with the cutest of fluffy ducklings, pumping their dinky little breasts up by paddling after their mums. Well little birdies, I can tell you it's worth the effort if you end up on the plate here. Duck breast, again cooked sous vide, had the sort of caramelised fatty skin I dream of but so rarely get. It was accompanied by crisp leaves of wild spring onions and the crunch of peanuts.
One dessert – a mixture of rhubarb, toasted meringue, crisp rice and sweet-sour peaks of a purée made from rust-coloured sea buckthorn – was a plate of textures; another brought squares of banana bread with a coriander ice cream, which made a curiously tropical kind of sense.
None of this is cheap, but then each dish is so intricate, so evolved and elaborate, it feels like good value. A word too for service: we were the only table that lunchtime, which is the hardest kind of service to get right. With too little to do, the staff can end up loitering in a corner like Banquo's ghost waiting to pass on a dirty family secret. Our waitress did brilliantly; there when needed, unseen when not. But what really matters here is Paul Foster's food. Tucked away in this quiet corner of a quiet county, he is doing something very much worth travelling for. And I can't say much better than that.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit
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