Main Street, Westow, York, North Yorkshire (01653 618 365)
Meal for two, including wine and service, £65
If you are a person of appropriate appetite to be reading this column - which is to say of stout heart, hardened arteries and, most likely, the slightest touch of gout - just a description of my starter should tell you all you need to know: a small heap of parsley mash, surrounded by sauteed wild mushrooms, crisp lardons and baby onions in an arse-kicking meaty sauce (the business end of any bourguignon dish), and crowning this, a piece of black pudding shot through with sweetbreads. Yours for £5.50.
That dish was enough to convince me that the Blacksmith's Inn was a banker, though to be honest they had me with the rugged wooden bowl of their home-made crisps at the bar. I won't deny it was a relief, because one of the co-owners of this restaurant-pub hybrid, Gary Marshall, is not unknown to me. He and I spend more time than is strictly necessary on various food internet forums and, as a result, I have eaten with him twice over the years. He knows his food and likes his wine, much as priests like praying. He has a day job as a stockbroker in Leeds, and whenever he opens a wine list to make a choice, the winemakers of Burgundy start planning expensive foreign holidays on the proceeds.
But it's a bloody long way from sitting on your bottom eating dinner too often - or what my kids refer to without a hint of irony as 'daddy's job' - to running a restaurant. When I heard that he and his partner Sarah had decided to take over a pub and start feeding people, I waited for the inevitable car crash. This is because I am a miserable, cynical bastard. Fourteen months on and they are still there. They have a listing in the Michelin Eating Out in Pubs Guide, and were named the Good Pub Guide Yorkshire Dining Pub for 2006.
So I booked in, took a table by the open fire, admired the wine-themed prints on the walls and the menus from Michelin three-star restaurants across Europe, and waited to have my cover blown. As it was, that didn't happen until I had finished my starter, but I'm not sure it could have made much difference to this sort of food, which is built on sturdy principles: buy good stuff, preferably locally (that black pudding is prepared to their own recipe), cook it well, serve it up nice. Take my main course: two thick slices of dry-cured gammon from a pig of saintly quality, seared to a crispness with a free-range fried egg and some of Heston Blumenthal's triple-cooked chips (his one great contribution to British gastronomy so far). In short: bacon, egg and chips, albeit seriously high-quality bacon, egg and chips. Which is exactly what you want in a pub. On the side was a small Kilner jar of peppered pineapple relish, for anybody who thinks the gammon-pineapple thing is worth celebrating, which, as it happens, I don't.
There are weaknesses at the savoury end of the menu, mostly an over-reliance on mash, which turned up on all that evening's special main courses, as well as my starter. Sure, it had different flavourings - marjoram for the venison, chives for the seared salmon, and as colcannon for the pigeon sausages - but it was still all mash. And like so many restaurants outside London, their tables are blighted by unnecessary side dishes of vegetables (which, they say, the customers demand).
But there is nothing to whine about with desserts. Their baked egg custard tart was extraordinarily light, its richness offset by a zippy orange sherbet, and the kitchen knows what makes for a proper sticky toffee pudding. Eating one should make you feel like a Catholic who has built up a 10-year backlog of sins at the confessional, and this one does.
There are other attractions, not least the wine list, which is a personal affair, but Marshall certainly can't be accused of profiteering: 60 per cent of it is under £20 and it does make you wonder why so many places overcharge. The scope is wide, with a tendency towards Burgundy, and as an encouragement to experimentation many of the bottles are sitting on the bar, so you can have a butcher's at the label. Don't worry about the drink-driving thing: they have six nicely appointed bedrooms out the back, and Sarah is on hand to knock up a cooked breakfast. I can seriously recommend the bacon sandwiches.
