Drewsteignton, Devon (01647 281276). Meal for two, including wine and service, £110
Normally I would regard the moment when the restaurant's cat deposited a live baby rabbit proudly on to the dining room floor as a gift from the god of restaurant reviewers. Hurrah! Something to write about. And I did enjoy the way the front-of-house lady, having removed the wildlife, stood nonchalantly in the doorway and wondered whether any of us might like a little bunny for dinner, because she was sure chef Duncan Walker could knock something up.
Ah, but writing about the Old Inn at Drewsteignton need not call upon such gimmicks, just as the restaurant avoids them. I was told that some locals had questioned the need for a "fancy" restaurant. I would ask why anyone might not want a restaurant like this nearby. Devon needs visitors, and this will bring them the right kind. Yes, the evening menu costs £39.50, but you will get some of the most pitch-perfect food I have eaten in a long time, and in a relaxed, elbows-on-the-table style. It's not over-elaborated, it's just smart, technically brilliant cookery, exercised in the interests of lovely ingredients.
Duncan Walker is a Geordie who cooked for years with Shaun Hill at the Michelin two-star Gidleigh Park Hotel at Chagford, then set up on his own before going travelling. A few months back he and his partner returned to this old stone restaurant with three rooms and just 17 covers. They are open for dinner from Wednesday to Saturday, but will take bookings at other times for tables of six or more.
It begins with a single seared scallop with a smear of sweet-potato purée and a bright lemongrass velouté. Three flavours, none of them fighting each other. The two starters displayed an immense suppleness. One brought a seared fillet of red mullet on consommé flavoured with coriander and pickled ginger. It was gentle, the flavours all but will-o'-the-wisp. It takes a very confident cook to know not to over-punch when the ingredients are this delicate. And then on the other plate, the exact opposite: a lasagne of fresh white crab, made with tissue paper-thin leaves of pasta and dressed with a seafood reduction that was so powerful and rich and decadent I didn't know whether to eat it or dab it behind my ears.
Both main courses had the virtue of under-advertising themselves. So with the rack of Dartmoor lamb also came an unmentioned slice of lamb belly, breaded and fried in the style described by Elizabeth David as Ste Menehould – a classy name for a dirty bit of cookery. Another plate of guinea-fowl breast also brought the thigh, stuffed. In an age when chefs seem determined to list everything that goes into each dish, including which direction the wind was blowing when the chief ingredient was slaughtered and the age of the commis chef's comely sister, this is deeply refreshing.
And then dessert. Walker can do soufflés. Walker can do soufflés like Silvio Berlusconi does denials: regularly and with enthusiasm. A blackcurrant soufflé was a huge volcanic thing, as tumescent as that Italian premier after he'd been at a bargain bucketful of Viagra. The top was slit for us and a cassis sauce poured inside, making the whole thing rumble tectonically. It was one of the grandest soufflés it has ever been my good fortune to swallow whole in 93 seconds. A dessert listed as "a plate of raspberry" produced a second smaller soufflé, a teardrop-shaped raspberry parfait coated in a dark-chocolate shell, a splodge of crème brûlée hiding a single raspberry and wearing a round pane of burnt-sugar glass like a jauntily angled hat, and a sorbet that was the very essence of raspberry. In a meal that did all the right things at all the right times, dessert was a very special kind of right, an effortless display of skill and bloody good taste. The menu changes regularly and will probably soon offer rabbit. Very, very young rabbit.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit
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