Newton-in-Bowland, near Clitheroe, Lancashire (01200 446 236). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £70
Egon Ronay announced late in life that the gastropub was now to Britain what the bistro had long been to France: a place of reliable cooking to be found across the country. The argument may be seriously flawed given the French bistro is now about as reliable as a 1972 Austin Princess, but it's certainly true that gastropub food has codified. Just as the French bistro is likely to have a menu of frisée and lardon salad, steak frites and apple tart, so the British gastropub will offer a terrine, risotto and something involving beetroot and goat's cheese to start; a sea bass dish, pork belly and rib eye for mains; and a chocolate fondant, crème brûlée and lemon tart to finish.
About this menu I have very little to say. Not a word. Zero. There is nothing wrong with it. They are sturdy, trustworthy dishes, the Ronseal of restaurant food. Either they are executed well or they are buggered up. Either way it's just a bit of a shrug. Which is fine. The health of a food culture will always be located in its ordinary, not in its exceptional.
The problem comes when trying to identify a pub which is attempting to do more. At times I feel like a scene-of-crime officer, doing a fingertip search through the available digital evidence – the websites, the blog posts, the endless blather of Twitter – looking for evidence of intent. Is the kitchen involved in acts of grievous bodily harm against innocent ingredients? Or is it a place of safety – indeed, a site of special gastronomic interest?
I got it right recently with the Wheatsheaf in Northleach. I got it entirely wrong with another Cotswold pub a week or so back. A well-written menu, full of gutsy things that spoke of hedgerow and earth and appetite, resulted in a meal of those shrugs and sighs. Not bad, but not worth writing about. I took the £90 hit and moved on.
Which made the prospect of the Parkers Arms – high on a hill above Clitheroe and the Ribble Valley in Lancashire's Forest of Bowland – worrisome. It had been recommended to me repeatedly, though looking at the menu online I couldn't see why. They serve fish and chips and a pie and a burger. Right. And?
Getting there didn't much help. It's a village pub. Quite a cosy one, but just that. It has not been Farrowed & Balled. No one has wandered this space with swatches of fabric and colour charts. There is dark-wood furniture. There is a fireplace. There is a bar with bar stools for people who wish to sit there and drink cask ales. On a quiet Tuesday it is all but empty; the publican looks a little surprised to see us, but is cheery all the same. We are given a menu which has the oily, stained thumb prints of those who have been before, and a little speech about it only being the basic menu this lunchtime. A few things may not be available. My heart is falling, faster than a fat man throwing himself off a Lancashire crag. Which is a thought that occurs.
And then the food starts to arrive and it's clear everything is going to be fine. No, everything is going to be very good indeed. As we await our starters they deliver a bowl of what they cheerfully call "potato scratchings": deep-fried baked potato skins, scattered with flakes of sea salt, which snap between your fingers they are so crisp. Apparently they don't like leftovers here. I like them for not liking leftovers.
There's a black pudding sausage roll, made with a pastry so flaky I expect to be finding crumbs of it in my beard for weeks to come. Alongside that is their own piccalilli, which is crunchy and sharp in all the right places. A mushroom parfait sounds like the vegetarian's bum deal, except this one is luscious and smokey and whipped to within an inch of its life. It is the forest floor and the deep, damp earth, and a bonfire curling to a heavy clouded sky.
In the evenings and at weekends there's a list of specials. Stosi Madi, who cooks here – and it feels very much like a one-woman operation – clearly can't cope with us missing out on some of them and suddenly starts sending out extras (which we pay for). There are gutsy Lebanese sausages of beef and lamb, the meat spiced and mixed here before being sent to the local butcher to be cased, and sent back again to be steeped in red wine for two days. They taste gloriously of hot lamb fat and cumin and booziness. We scoop them through a bowl of their own peppery hummus. Earthier still are slices of pink smoked ox heart with dots of a pungent wild garlic purée that makes it feel as if iron is coursing through my veins.
There is a similar feeling from a fiercely peppered slab of aged skirt (which they say they will cook only to medium rare at most; good on 'em). It's proof again that the best flavour is in food's underbelly. There are onion rings that are properly crisp and triple-cooked chips and a zippily dressed watercress salad full of the crunch of raw radish. Another main seems equally as blunt: a hand-raised venison and ground pork pie with a hot-water pastry shell. It is a true thing of beauty, gamey and meaty and solid. Look at this list of dishes: a sausage roll, a mushroom pâté, steak and chips, a pie. It's nothing and yet it's everything. Each element is precisely as you would wish it to be and how it so often isn't.
For dessert there's a slice of Wet Nellie, a Lancashire classic originally designed to use up leftover bread and cake, but here tasting of candied peel and spice and Christmas, all of it lubricated with a duck-egg custard. The only down note is Stosi's take on a Portuguese custard tart, freely available in my corner of London on account of the large Portuguese population. Here, the set custard is over sweetened. But it's the tiny flaw that puts the joyousness of this place in relief. The Parkers Arms is almost at the end of the road. It's on the way to nowhere. They do only what they do. And they do it bloody well. Though to find that out you do have to go there.
Jay's news bites
■ For more unfancy pub action head to the Magdalen Arms in Oxford. A collaboration between alumni of the gutsy Anchor and Hope in London's Waterloo, it's the sort of place that serves long braises of beef beneath bronzed suet-crust pastries that crack under your spoon. It's the place for earthy dishes which don't sound like much but deliver everything you might want. Irritatingly, the website does not include the daily changing menu; you'll just have to take your chances (magdalenarms.com)
■ Wing Yip, the UK's leading supplier of Chinese foods – a significant proportion of dim sum served in Britain's Chinese restaurants is theirs – has launched a cheaper form of mail order. Goods are delivered to one of 2,000 locations around the country from where they can then be collected. Delivery costs £4.99 for orders up to 20kg in weight and under £250 in value (wingyip.com)
■ Allegra McEvedy's pork-based restaurant Blackfoot in London's Exmouth Market has introduced a Piggy in the Middle feasting menu for parties of six or more. Choose between smoked belly, whole porchetta and honey glazed ham, with starters and desserts, all for £35 a head (blackfootrestaurant.co.uk)
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1
