Baslow, Derbyshire (01246 583 259). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £120
How long does it take for the dated to become a much-loved classic? In the 90s we looked back on the fancy French Robin’s Nest food of the 70s – snails in their shells with garlic butter, duck à l’orange, profiteroles – and sniggered quietly to ourselves. How old hat. How terribly, terribly unadventurous. How unstylish and, well, unsophisticated. Now a place that does those dishes is held up as a bastion of quiet good taste. And it’s not just the ones like Otto’s on London’s Gray’s Inn Road, which bring a modern flourish to the making of steak tartare tableside. A restaurant like Oslo Court in London’s St John’s Wood where there’s Melba toast on the table, grilled grapefruit for starters, a sweet trolley and it’s always 1975, is swooned over.
And so to Fischer’s at Baslow Hall, a venerable country house hotel in Derbyshire, where the outbreaks of floral and chintz made me mutter about being buried alive in Laura Ashley’s coffin. In here there is no design issue that cannot be solved by the liberal application of pelmets. At Fischer’s it feels like it is forever 1987. Small girls wear their best dresses to have Sunday lunch with their grandparents in one corner; older unencumbered couples enjoy the lack of distraction in the other. It’s not quite the deathly scrape of cutlery on porcelain, but there is a certain hush and mutter. This is a place for posh, grown-up Sunday lunch with added Alice bands.
A few years ago I had a conversation with someone in the hospitality business who described the 1980s country house hotel as an “interesting product” as if it was a washing machine with an extra spin cycle, or an especially efficient brand of haemorrhoid cream. Quietly I rolled my eyes. But brought face to face with that very thing I can see it was, and remains, a product. While it might not be the one I would choose, and carries with it the box-shouldered, big-haired thumb prints of the uneasy decade which spawned it, I can see it has virtues.
I can, however, take issue with a waiter who can be heard saying: “And I’ll take the lady’s order first, of course.” I don’t want to start culture wars, but oh boy! You can always take the order of whosoever I’m with first, but not because they happen to have ovaries. Good manners are great. Greasy fat dollops of patronising language are not. And then it occurs to me: this is probably just my problem. Right here, right now, in this room with its floral prints and pelmets and Alice bands, this is what the punters want. It’s not my culture.
In the end all of this would just be something to point and laugh at, if the food did not suggest they give a damn, but it does. With drinks there is a bowl of crunchy radishes from the small kitchen garden outside and a bowl of gussied-up crème fraîche to plunge them into. There is soft treacly bread, served warm, and a thimble of a gazpacho which, while overshadowed by the glorious example at Bonhams a couple of weeks back, is bright enough to wake you up.
The short weekend lunch menu is a bunch of simple ideas with the culinary equivalent of fairy lights strung across them. Accurately seared fillets of sea bream come with battered rings of squid – the menu calls them tempura; I lean towards calamari, Athens being rather closer than Tokyo – with a brighter edge leant by ribbons of confited fennel and a light-touch lemon dressing. Spears of asparagus come with a dippy egg. Apparently it’s a “hen’s” egg; as against what, exactly? A cockerel’s egg would be worth shouting about. A little salty Parma ham lifts it out of the nursery.
A main course of roast beef is notable less for the meat, which is fine, in a slightly prim, fat-trimmed, tutu-pink sort of way, but the attention to detail of very good horseradish sauce and a master-class in béarnaise. It’s all softness and acidity and the anise punch of tarragon. Smith & Wollensky take note. More intriguing is a thick slab of heavily rendered pork belly which has been smoked and served under a sticky glaze with a roasted onion crust and the crunch of toasted hazelnuts, alongside roasted salsify. It’s a big meaty plateful, with the kind of intense flavours you find when you run your fingers around the roasting tin at home when you’re sure nobody is looking. It’s a very fine dish indeed.
Dessert stumbles. It’s as if the setting makes the offering of a crumble or something dense and steamed – the sort of dessert you want with Sunday lunch – simply unconscionable. Instead we have a dainty apricot and hazelnut tart, which merely proves that classic almond-based frangipane really is the thing. At least the pastry base is cooked which, in a lemon meringue pie, it is not. The wodge of lemony filling is correct as are the soft burnished peaks of Italian meringue. But the pastry base is mostly raw. It is, to be fair, the one solid technical misstep across the entire meal. There is good strong coffee at the end and a chocolate cup filled with liquid salted caramel which brings us bang up to date.
The price for all this is £32 for two courses, which means you might as well have the three for £38, and that is a fair slab of anybody’s money. Oh, and they’ll insist upon a credit card number when they take the booking, which may well define the phrase “the hospitality business”. The wine list has a fair choice below £30 and lots of big noisy bottles for people celebrating 40th wedding anniversaries, which I suspect happens quite a lot here.
Recently a reader wrote to say they’d analysed my reviews and found that my negative ones were generally in London. This clearly meant everywhere outside the capital was terrific and I was ignoring lots of brilliant places. Er no, it doesn’t. It means I put more effort in trying to find good places outside London because what’s the point of a crap review of somewhere in, say, Derbyshire? But at the risk of wounding non-Metropolitan pride it really is still tough. I search high and low. And sometimes even when you do find solid cooking, it comes with a side order of floral print and a drizzle of orders taken from people first because they’re lady chaps. That might be your sort of thing. It happens not to be mine.
Jay’s news bites
■ Any review of Sunday lunch demands another shout out for the Lamplighter Dining rooms in Windermere. You order in advance for the whole table from a menu which lists the likes of whole roast chicken for £18.95, through to roast rib of beef for £25.95. The price includes starter, dessert and almost more trimmings than you can fit on the table. A true joy (lamplighterdiningrooms.com).
■ Research by booking website Bookatable has found 78% of parents believe children’s menus to be overly stuffed with unhealthy eating options; 69% felt the focus was on the adult offering. Here’s a suggestion: why don’t 100% of parents take responsibility for teaching their little darlings about food and raising them not to be picky eaters, so we get rid of god awful children’s menus once and for all?
■ Yet another reason for the middle classes to coo over Lidl. The discounter is to stock a range of 40 premium wines at knockdown prices, including the likes of Château Grand Abord and Château de la Dauphine which have never before been available in the UK (lidl.co.uk)
