26 West Street, Marlow, Bucks 01628 482 277
Meal for two including wine and service, £140
I am sitting eating impeccable bread in a pretty riverside town. The low late-summer sun has broken through. The butter is unsalted and comes on slate with a pinch of saline crystals. A complimentary coneful of whitebait is crisp and lightly seasoned. Our carafe of red Rhône is as good as I'd hoped. My wife looks happy. But then hell lets loose and the fat man speaks.
"I slap my wife so hard my hand still hurts," he booms. "When I get home her arse is still wobbling." He holds out a fleshy palm; the large group at his table collapses with loud laughter. And our evening turns to ash.
But not quite yet. First there are starters. Mine is a salt cod scotch egg, with a slice of chorizo and a slick of harissa to emphasise its Spanish inspiration. The fish is delicately salted, light and wrapped round a quail egg, a smart reinvention of savoury pub grub, but my wife's parsley soup with smoked eel, bacon and parmesan tortellini, both at £8.50, is a more accomplished plate of food. Intensely green, like a saltmarsh pond, studded with blue borage flowers, this is a stunning bowl of English summer flavours, rich and deep, spiked with salty ham and eel, perhaps parsley root, too. We relax a little. Then the fat man kicks in again.
"I've got a Chinese bloke who works for me who allegedly speaks English," he leers, "though I've never heard it." Cue more ugly laughter. My non-English wife flinches. My heart sinks. I realise that chef Tom Kerridge's Michelin-starred Marlow inn, The Hand & Flowers, is channelling a 70s comedy club and we are trapped in a small room with Bernard Manning.
I have wanted to eat Kerridge's food for two years, since watching him on the BBC's Great British Menu. I loved the way he cared so much, how he was encouraging to the other chefs while secretly looking to crush their hopes. I liked that he is a true trencherman who I felt would feed me royally and understand hospitality. Most of all, I loved the pride in his wife's eyes when this year he won the main-course round for the second time.
The two dishes that impressed the judges are on the Hand & Flowers menu. But 2011's roast hog with salt-baked potatoes and apple sauce has a minimum order of £50 for two, and my wife has beaten me to 2010's slow-cooked duck breast with peas, duck-fat chips and gravy at £22.50. The duck is good, the gravy sweet and sticky; the chips are outstanding – among the best I will ever steal.
As a tribute to Kerridge's legendary meat-cooking skills and as a nod to the note on the menu that "Some of the meats and fish are served medium rare," I opt for steak and chips, aka fillet of Lancashire beef with Hand & Flowers chips and Béarnaise sauce, priced at a hefty £27. The chips are floury, fluffy, fine, but shaded by the duck's. The meat is well sourced, well aged, but it is medium and not medium rare as I asked. I toy with sending it back, I tell the waiter it is wrong, but the table of eight has turned to noisily trashing "northerners". Deflated, defeated, wishing the maître d' would intervene, we order dessert.
My choice of Willie's 100% cacao hot chocolate tart with malted-milk ice cream is a sublime mix of adult and childish flavours: bitter cocoa and caramel matched with a bag of Maltesers. But again my wife wins out (I hate having menu envy) with English blueberry soufflé accompanied by blueberry sorbet and verbena sauce. The soufflé is ethereal, the cooling lemony sauce a clever touch, but the sorbet is the star, with an otherworldly intensity of colour and taste.
For a few moments even now our evening may be saved, but a rat-faced man on the fat man's table starts bleating about why the Scots "don't use toilets when they can piss outside". Saddened, we pay our bill and head outside, too, and home.
