Woodbridge, Suffolk (01394 460 310). Meal for two, including service, £100
The British Larder is a seriously ballsy name for a restaurant. It bellows "agenda" and "virtue". In a food culture where the words "local" and "seasonal" are too often used to cover up for a lack of imagination, technique or good taste it sounds like a serious declaration of intent: look! We may not know how to cook, but at least we didn't go further than the end of the road to buy our overpriced ducks.
The thing is, without something substantial lurking behind the words, it doesn't mean much. I have a British larder. It's in my house in south London. It's full of couscous, sesame oil and jars of odd-sounding chutneys I have no intention of ever opening. There are tins of chickpeas and tuna in there, bags of pasta and boxes of muesli packaged to look like they were harvested by scrofulous characters from a Thomas Hardy novel when they were really made on an industrial estate off the arse-end of Basingstoke. See? Completely British.
Happily, in the case of this pub, a hunk of a grey-painted building just outside Woodbridge in Suffolk, it does mean something. Their local produce is the kind to make you sigh with pleasure and hug people. Just behind the pub, for example, are the producers of the ludicrously named Dingley Dell Pork, favoured by the likes of Jason Atherton, among others. Further away on the coast at Orford are tar-stained smokehouses turning out some of the best cured products around. This corner of the country is practically England's market garden. The soil here is engineered for the good stuff.
None of this would make any difference if there weren't people in the kitchen who knew what they were doing. Madalene Bonvini-Hamel and Ross Pike know what they are doing. For here's the thing: if you really want to do justice to the British larder, you'd better be sodden with French technique; the food revolution in this country is pretty much down to people who first learnt how to cook the food of another country. Maddy is a case in point. She was part of Gordon Ramsay's original brigade at Aubergine, when his food was worth eating, and later at Claridge's and Royal Hospital Road. She cooked at Le Gavroche and Kensington Place before eventually setting up a recipe website. The pub is that website made out of bricks and mortar.
That classical training is evident in both the Smokehouse and Dingley Dell piggy tasting plates. Sure, there were some ingredients to which nothing had been done, perfect folds of soft smoked salmon, for example, or smoked shell-on prawns. But there were other things which depended upon serious kitchen nous – among them a still-warm Scotch egg with strands of ham hock in the sausagemeat casing about the still-warm soft-yolked egg. There was a picture-perfect old-school smoked ham and chicken terrine with the sort of slippery jelly you have to chase around your plate with bread. There was a shotglass of deep, luscious pea and ham soup, an impeccable smoked-mackerel pâté and a very effective salad of ham hock and puy lentils.
Their main courses are designed for people who have proper jobs out in the fields. They're big. A trio of lamb chops with properly crisp ribbons of fat probably didn't need the company of a croquette the size of a hockey puck made from long, slow-braised shoulder, but we weren't sorry to see it there, or for that matter the bronzed disc of boulangerie potatoes. The curly kale was there to make you feel virtuous. A big, fat, slow-cooked Barbary duck leg with crisp skin spoke of a bird that had covered quite a lot of the county. The roasted beetroot and end-of-season broad beans kept it very good company indeed.
Somehow we found space for a loganberry meringue mess, which was bright and fresh and bad for you, on account of all the cream and sugar, but in a good way. The only letdown was a chocolate fudge cake which was more of an overcooked fondant, with cubes of caramelised white-chocolate jelly that didn't taste of much. But this was like the single fault that Niles and Frasier Crane so liked to niggle at in a great meal. It was merely proof that, despite being slapped around the chops by some seriously good ingredients treated with affection and wisdom – despite being invited into their impeccable British larder – my critical faculties were (almost) still intact.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
