Haughton, Cheshire (01829 260 265). Meal for two, including wine and service: £70

All restaurant meals come with a cost. At the Nag’s Head in Haughton, Cheshire, I fear that cost may weigh too heavily upon the staff. There are real health and safety issues, in this case surrounding the matter of plating. I have been served food on slates before – lovely black ones that would look brilliant, say, affixed to houses. I have been served food on wooden boards before – big thick ones that you might wish to use for cutting bread. But never have I been served food on a slate in turn laid upon a 3in-thick wooden board. It’s inappropriate plating squared.

I watch our waitress try to lift one of these off the table and fear for her wrists. I say: “Plates are a lovely thing for eating off, aren’t they?” She sighs loudly, like water pulling back out to sea over shingle. I swear I can hear the lactic acid building up in her biceps. “Yes,” she says. “They’ve worked brilliantly for centuries.” I suppose it comes with the territory, for everything at this newly refurbished pub, from the team behind Nigel Haworth’s Northcote Manor in Lancashire, has substance.

There are huge wooden beams in the conservatory. There are polished stone floors and wood panelling in delicate shades of Farrow & Ball, and even a shelf held up by the sort of shotguns a mad farmer might wave while shouting: “Get off my land!” Outside there is a place for you to tie up your horse, alongside the Mercs and Range Rovers, for we are nestled deep within Cheshire plush and all possibilities must be catered for, including those with four legs. Money has been spent.

Put aside any silliness in the crockery department and what’s left is the sort of country pub many of us would kill for. This is not an extension to the recently refurbished Northcote Manor, which has fashioned its experience after the great country-house hotels, where plumpness in the cushions and depth in the varnish have long been considered virtues. It’s a pub. For all the sometimes self-conscious refinement at Northcote, however, Haworth’s food has always been at its best when he is channelling the food traditions of his bit of England: the offals and pies, the roasts and brawns and pastries, all with the encouraging slick of animal fats which gladden the heart even as they drench it.

It’s a statement of the obvious that the pub environment suits that sort of thing very well. Until recently Northcote’s diffusion line of pubs serving food stayed close to the Ribble Valley from which the inn company takes its name. From time to time people would mutter about consistency, but the pubs were generally considered a good thing. This push south some distance into Cheshire suggests that with the outside investment that has enabled the mothership’s refurb has come an ambitious plan to build a much bigger pub group. Experience teaches me that it’s a tricky business to get right, good operations directors being hard to find.

Which makes this one all the more encouraging. While the menu flirts with a little global adventurism – chicken wings with chilli and seaweed, glazed pork and faggot skewers in a BBQ sauce – mostly it cleaves to the English traditions as refracted through a kitchen trained in French classicism. We nibble on hot crisp pig’s head croquettes, the voguish snack of the moment. They puff out gusts of unashamed porkiness as we bite in. An old stager like the prawn cocktail has been thought carefully about – not simply in the bite of the seafood, but with the addition of capers and the refreshing crunch of pickled cucumber.

For my starter I am diverted to the set menu at £15 for three courses, where lurk treacle-baked ribs with devilled black peas. It’s a thing of dark beauty, the long-braised then roasted ribs all but the colour of night, the meat waiting to be sucked clean from the bones. And then the dense, nutty black peas. On paper it has all the ingredients of an English site-specific dish; it eats like something from the American deep south. I feel my blood sugar levels rising. They charge me just £5.50 for it.

A braised blade of beef, falling apart with a fork’s nudge, comes with a pillow of mash spun through with smoked marrow. It takes an awful lot of effort to smoke marrow bone; I’m grateful they bothered. And then Nigel Haworth’s take on Lancashire hotpot. A declaration: Haworth once showed me how to make it, and it really is a noble dish. He told me that customers, having read the recipe in his books, would ask when they should add stock, but there is none. The slow cooking of the lamb and onions, beneath its roof of mandolined potato, the glazed and butter-burnished petals arranged just so, is self-lubricating. At Northcote it is served with prime lamb chops protruding from around the rim like an honour guard.

Here, very sensibly, they dispense with that expensive ingredient to give you the very thing at just £12.50. It is as good and as unimprovable a dish as when I ate it at Northcote. Of course there is an irony. Lancashire hotpot is part of that category of dishes which grew out of poverty and the imperative to use the cheapest cuts long cooked to make them edible, bolstered by as much even-cheaper potato as possible. And here we are eating it for north of a tenner in a glossy Cheshire pub where you can tie up your horse next to the Merc. All it proves is that the best flavours are not to be found in the luxurious.

Dessert, if anything, is a high point in an already good meal. A scoop of their own lemon-curd ice cream, enclosing a further dollop of lemon curd, comes under a cloud of flamed Italian meringue. It’s a burnt Alaska without the sponge. There’s also a pleasing kind of apple trifle – no trifle at all, for it is apple purée, cream, nuts and apple jelly – alongside still-warm sugar-crusted apple doughnuts back-filled with more purée.

We do not wish to drink much, which the list facilitates. It includes a few choices in 70ml “usually only ordered by the clergy and our more senior customers”. Bottles start in the teens, while much of the rest is below £30. We finish with a bill for £70 for two, with the knowledge that you could do well for very much less. Let’s just hope that nobody broke their wrists clearing our table.

Jay’s news bites

■ I can’t big up a Lancashire-born pub group without mentioning the glorious Parker’s Arms near Clitheroe. The menu doesn’t look like much: here a parfait, there a pie, over there a sausage roll. But all of it, from chef Stosie Madi, is as close to perfect as makes no difference. And then there are her tasting menus, where the fireworks explode. Look out for hogget with wild garlic, black peas and white-wine jelly, or homemade Eccles cake with custard (parkersarms.co.uk).

■ More proof of socioeconomic change in China. The Irish Dairy Board has managed to do a deal with the Chinese to sell them Kerrygold whole milk. The Chinese dairy market is now worth €18bn a year. Not bad for a country where, according to some studies, lactose malabsorption affects over 90% of the adult population.

■ Food business “incubator” Kitchenette has launched a permanent “pop-up”, enabling emerging restaurants to try themselves out for up to six weeks. First into the site in London’s Ladbroke Grove is Pao Wow, serving the food of Mumbai (wearekitchenette.com).

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1