Beaminster, Dorset (01308 538 100). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £60 to £90
For seven years from 1970 my family went on holiday to a hotel overlooking Studland Bay in Dorset. As a result I’ve never quite managed to believe that the county actually exists, in the way Leicester or Bromsgrove plainly do. My memories, being those of a blissfully happy child, are presented in the excitable colours of postwar colour photography, drenched for good measure in honeyed sunshine. Given that we were there for the summers of both 1975 and 76, the latter is probably not overly imagined. Certainly it is impossible for that Dorset to coexist with the realities of me fighting my way on to the tube at Brixton.
The Knoll House Hotel of the 1970s was a curious place, run by a colonel and his wife and frequented by the fading gentry, who would cart down their speedboats and anchor them in the bay. The same families went for the same two weeks every year, some of them for decades. God knows what a bunch of north London Jews were doing there. I assume my parents liked the fact that it was full of other kids and that therefore they would not need to entertain us for two weeks.
It also had a certain louche appeal. On the early evening of the middle Friday two scions of one family, strapping lads with hair the colour of straw, would waterski across the bay in tailcoats, and we would gather on the veranda of the hotel to watch through binoculars – the same veranda from which Churchill had reviewed the fleet during the war, as the colonel never tired of telling us.
Part of the appeal for that particular clientele, I imagine, was that the place smelled right, which is to say like a minor public school run by a bursar with his hand in the till. The honk of old boiled vegetables hung heavy in the reception areas, while the swirling pattern on the carpets covered a multitude of sins. It was the first place I came across terms such as “table d’hôte” and “hors d’oeuvres”. I imagine it was a brilliant way to use up the leftovers from the day before. On Friday nights there would be a buffet, the centrepiece of which was a whole mayonnaise-dressed salmon, decorated with bits of lobster shell, which we children looked at but never ate. At the end there was a sweet trolley, with trifle and crème caramel, chocolate cake and pies and fruit salad. My father, asked what he would like, would always say: “Yes” and the poor waitress would have to fit a bit of everything into one small bowl.
That is my Dorset. It is not the sort of place I would expect to find Cass Titcombe, a huge stubbled chap who has about him the air of one of the friendly, reliable characters from a Dickens novel. He’d make a very good butcher. The last time I ate his food, he was the executive chef at the small Canteen chain, for which job he seemed perfectly suited, for its food also had something of Dickens about it. The menu was (and remains) very much modern British renaissance, refracted through the kind of cosmopolitan good taste needed to make these dishes edible: it’s pork crackling or scotch eggs with piccalilli; it does hefty pies, and inner organs, devilled; there are sausages with mash and onion gravy and sticky toffee pudding. It is food for days of drizzle and chill winds.
He left Canteen behind a while ago, and flirted with a street-food operation before concluding it was a mug’s game. A little unexpectedly his new venture, on the square in Beaminster in Dorset, is full of sunshine and light – literally so on account of the bay windows flooding the space of banquettes, polished flagstones and floorboards. It feels like Titcombe on holiday, or perhaps on mine. Brassica, until not long ago the restaurant of MasterChef winner Matt Follas, is extremely agreeable. It’s the sort of place where you put the world to rights over food that makes its point without being overly insistent. In the evening, starters are around £7, with mains in the mid-teens. Lunch is an exceptionally good-value three courses for £16.50.
We order one of their sharing plates to pick at and it’s full of sweet and pickled vegetables – here a little cauliflower with the yellow glow of turmeric, there some long-cooked tomatoes quickly yielding up their sugars like they desperately want to be reassessed. There is a tangle of slightly warm shredded ham hock, with more pickles and cooled soft-boiled eggs, alongside a couple of leaves of endive with a dribble of vinaigrette.
A salad of smoked mackerel comes with nibs of roasted beetroot that have a dark toffee-like consistency, as though they were experimenting with being another vegetable entirely. The fish flakes away into the leaves, its essence amplified by the smoking rather than being turned into something brutish which will repeat on us for the rest of the afternoon.
A stew of braised hogget – lamb allowed an adolescence – is raised beyond being solely an ingredient for winter days by its base of spiced lentils spun through with preserved lemon. Better still is a perfectly cooked fillet of hake on top of crushed potatoes in turn layered with an aioli boosted by the harbour kick of brown crabmeat. A glance at the evening menu reveals more of the same: pasta dishes with ox cheeks braised in red wine, or with seafood; crab and celeriac salad with dollops of that brown crab aioli or grilled skate with capers. No borders are being tested, no culinary traditions challenged. It is simple, deft cooking, with attention to detail. Later, Titcombe tells me he buys in the hoggets whole and breaks them down himself, which is one way to keep the prices low. So it seems he really could be a butcher; it’s our gain.
We finish with a pleasingly made pear and frangipane tart, built into a slashed and crisped oblong of buttery puff pastry, and a rhubarb and gingerbread trifle which is a reminder of the dessert trolley at Knoll House. We do not drink, but there’s ample choice below £30, and more than anything else a sense of a place at ease with itself.
Titcombe has done a runner from the clatter and noise of the city and landed amid the light and breath of Dorset. In doing so he has furnished me with a sweet modern memory of the county; one that sits very nicely alongside all my old ones.
Jay’s news bites
■ For more small-town pleasures, visit Maison Bleue in Bury St Edmunds. It describes itself as an ‘unconventional’ fish restaurant, though on my visit it seemed to do things exactly as you might wish, with the minimum of faff, in a relaxed dining room of a sort where ladies in hats can take lunch together. Go for fish soup, various kinds of tartare, seared scallops, and sea bass in a pumpkin velouté (maisonbleue.co.uk)
■ Figures indicate that Manchester has had the greatest growth in urban UK restaurant businesses over the past decade, up 57%, with Leeds at 55% and London at 32%. Two points: this is a percentage rise, which suggests that Manchester and Leeds started from a low base. And the increase was across the sector, which includes chains, pubs and bars, not just independents.
■ Clumsy cashing-in operation of the week: Ballygally Castle Hotel in Northern Ireland is launching a Game of Thrones afternoon tea that includes ‘Lannister Egg Rolls, Baratheon Bread… and Dothraki Trifle’. Presumably you feed them to your enemies and watch them choke.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter@jayrayner1
