The Coach & Horses
Telephone: 020-7278 8990
Address: 26-28 Ray Street, London EC1
Rating: 15/20
The Falcon Inn
Telephone: 01285 850844
Address: London Road, Poulton, Glos
Rating: 14.5/20
What chance has the unreconstructed boozer these days? There is hardly a corner of the country where the simple beer drinker can find somewhere that caters for their purer pleasures. It wasn't long ago you could pop into the Coach & Horses at the back of the Guardian and vanish in a fug of cigarette smoke and conversation. The beer was good. There were crisps, too, and it was rumoured that you could have sandwiches, if you asked nicely.
Not any more. The Coach & Horses has cleaned up, put in more tables and chairs, and stuck up a menu. Choose from chicken and cep velouté; salad of roasted pumpkin, goat's cheese, pecan nuts and sage; warm salad of ham hock, egg, Puy lentils and mustard vinaigrette; roast skate wing and couscous; mirin-glazed cod with miso broth, vegetables and udon noodles; hot chocolate wontons with blood orange.
Actually, the food was rather good. Not those dishes listed, but smoked herring with bread and butter, pickles and parsley, followed by lambs' kidneys with purple sprouting broccoli and gratin dauphinois. They were hearty affairs, with plenty of oomph and flavour. I'm not sure why the herring was hot, but the parsley salad was tiptop, a mound of rustling greenery with slivers of sweet pickles and chunks of lightly smoked herring tucked away in its folds. The kidneys were overcooked for a purist such as myself, but I could not complain about their number, the richness of the sauce, the massive block of gratin, or the brilliant green of the health-giving broccoli. Just to make sure of a productive afternoon, I finished with vanilla ice cream with butterscotch schnapps, as sickly and devastating a combination as it has been my pleasure to finish off in some time.
It was curious, and not a little sad, given the overall standard of the food and the excellence of the Timothy Taylor's Landlord bitter, that there weren't more people there. The jeans, button-down collars and sagging jackets of Guardian stalwarts have gone, and in their place were a few groups of dark suits and ties talking earnestly about spreadsheets, production quotas and marketing strategy. It was a bit like lunching in a school canteen after everyone else had left. Shorn of the grungy life my Guardian colleagues gave it, the Coach & Horses seemed wan and characterless.
Compare and contrast this, as the exam papers of my youth used to say, with the Falcon Inn in the cutie-pie village of Poulton, Gloucestershire. It had character to spare, what with honey-and-cream stone, black beams, stone-flagged flooring and an open fire. It had all the trappings of ye olde village pub, but with none of that restricted sense of purpose.
However, one of the more notable differences between rural gastropubs and their urban equivalents is the greater formality of the former. Most of them veer towards the gastro rather than the pub element. That is not to say that the food is superior; rather that it reflects the different aspirations of their customers. For eager eaters in the country, the gastropub is often the nearest thing they're going to get to a proper restaurant. There are still vast swathes of Britain where there is little or nothing between the nearest Little Chef and a hotel with more pretensions than Hyacinth Bucket and less class than Footballers' Wives. Watching my fellow diners at the Falcon, there was more of the special-occasion ritual than the everyday habit about them. None that I could see was drinking beer with dinner, even though both Hook Norton and Donnington's were on offer and in fighting trim.
There was less difference in the style of the food. The menu at the Falcon was more French and less consciously cosmopolitan than that at the Coach, but the cooking had the same generosity and heartiness. There was, among other dishes, fish soup with rouille; smoked haddock, cheese and leek tart; ballottine of chicken stuffed with basil and pinenuts; confit duck leg with butter beans; roast fillet of cod with Vichy carrots and crisp bacon. I had the haddock tart and a carbonnade of venison with mashed winter vegetables, both of which were cheerily uncomplicated, full-flavoured and well-made. The pastry for the tart and the mashed veg in particular stood out. It may seem odd to single out bit-part players over the leads, but they are a measure of the care taken with each part of each dish.
The final point of comparison is price, and here the Falcon leaps away from the Coach. First courses at the latter start at £3.50 and run to £7.25, with main courses between £9.75 and £12.50. Over at the Falcon, first courses start at £5.50 and go to £6.50, while main courses go from £8.95-£15.95, with most being between £12.95 and £13.95. There was little between the two bills - £23.55 at the Coach & Horses; £24.05 at the Falcon. But I had had one more course at the Coach & Horses. On the other hand, the beer was 40p-60p a pint cheaper at the Falcon.
The point is that both offer decent, well-considered, well-cooked food at, by the general standards of the UK, un-gross-out prices. Now, a pint of your finest, landlord, and a packet of pork scratchings, if you'd be so kind.
· The Coach & Horses: Open for lunch, Mon-Fri & Sun, 12 noon-3pm; dinner, Mon 7-10pm, Tues-Sat, 6-10pm.
The Falcon Inn: Open for lunch, Tues-Sun 12 noon - 2.30pm; dinner, Tues-Sat, 7-9pm
