300 Wheatley Lane Road, Fence, Lancashire (01282 611 773). Meal for two, with wine and service: £75

Forgive me if, for the next few sentences, I sound like a man tiptoeing through a field of uncracked raw eggs. I don’t want to offend. Or to be precise, I’m very happy to offend but only with good reason. Right now I don’t have one. So when I say Fence in Lancashire is not the kind of place where I’d expect to find food of the quality currently being served at the White Swan pub, that’s all I mean.

Fence is a working village, the sort where people have to wash their hands at the end of an industrious day. It laughs in the face of the manicured and picturesque; if you want that, it’s back over the hill in the very lovely Ribble Valley, where it’s rumoured nobody has ever farted. Fence is a place of solid-built houses with, at one end, a solid-built, four-square pub. Just looking at it, you know that darts have been thrown in there, and bad football results mourned with too many pints of sticky bitter.

Try as I might I can’t be polite about the pub car park next to it, which is all curved and buckled Tarmac. It looks like the kind of place where a bloke would park up in his Ford Capri so he could chuck his girlfriend, while chain-smoking Embassies. I’m a nostalgic, me. Still, it functions as a car park, one that deserves to be full.

Inside the pub, work has clearly been done since it was taken over by the owners of Turners, a wine shop-cum-deli and café in nearby Barrowford. The tellies have gone, the carpets stripped out, and the maple-coloured wood bar has been given a good polish. There are some fearsome animal heads on the wall and standing by the optics are huge jars, incubating gins flavoured with sloes, damsons and blood oranges. What matters most, though, is the presence in the kitchen of a young chef named Tom Parker. Right now he’s giving a masterclass in how to craft tight, compact menus to a budget – just three choices at each course – without sacrificing flavour, inventiveness or wit. Some of what he’s serving here is a minor bloody miracle.

It all begins to make a bit of sense when you learn that prior to coming here Parker was part of the brigade at nearby Northcote. Nigel Haworth’s venerable country-house hotel is not just rolling out its own pubs, but producing a diaspora of young cooks who are choosing to stay close by.

As with Haworth, there may be lots of modern French technique in Parker’s cooking, but there’s also a place for the great local delicacies: his daily changing menus, at £20 for two courses and £25 for three, feature feverish outbreaks of tripe and ham hock, bone marrow and cheese curds, damsons and Yorkshire rhubarb from just over the way. It doesn’t feel ideological. Parker is not trying to make a point. He’s just cooking with the good stuff, and being thrifty. So among the bar snacks are crisped potato skins because he scoops out the insides for his outrageous mash. A little more evolved, but only just, is a dish of tiny plum tomatoes, skinned and bobbing about in a warm sweet-sour broth, heavy with cracked black pepper. Like all the best ideas it’s eminently stealable.

I begin with what is described as a cottage pie of oxtail. It’s the humble brag of the food world. This isn’t a cottage pie like your mum used to make. The oxtail has been braised until it hasn’t so much fallen off the bone as surrendered. The braising liquor has then been cooked down to a sticky jus with just the lightest smack of red wine. Right at the end, this tangle of meaty bits is spun through with a fresh chiffonade of parsley. All that is at the bottom of the pot. To reach it you first have to go through a layer of shamelessly rich mash made with smoked potatoes. And because that isn’t quite enough to make the point, the mash is dimpled with pearly lumps of bone marrow.

After lunch I talked to Parker and he described what he does as just “simple cooking”. I laughed at him. Sure, it makes sense, but getting all those things right is not simple. Any right-thinking person would want to eat this. A soft, deep carrot soup can look like a way to get the books to balance, but there are touches that lift it: not merely its depth of flavour but the crisp croquettes of ham hock, providing gusts of piggyness, and more especially the fronds of celery leaf which give a crack of anise.

Gloucester Old Spot comes two ways, as blocks of belly that have been confited until almost all the fat has dissolved away, allowing the skin to crisp, alongside a big piece of loin. There are roasted carrots and a jus punched up with the light tongue-numbing touch of liquorice that makes me want to lick the plate. Two pieces of seared plaice lie on ribbons of homemade hand-cut pasta in a cream sauce heavy with aged parmesan. I know it’s aged because it says so on the menu, but for once I can taste it. There is a cheese in this sauce that’s had so much experience it could write its memoirs.

Desserts are basic things executed with smarts. Pearl barley is substituted for rice in a classic creamy pudding, and laid with pieces of rhubarb the colour of children’s sweets. A fine vanilla panna cotta with blood oranges and torn leaves of basil comes sealed within a Kilner jar. The moment you open it, the whole thing whiffs like an Italian garden in high summer.

I have looked at other days’ menus, and all of them have something that thrills. I adore the sound of ham hock broth with tripe and butter pie, or hare with homemade black pudding and preserved damsons. And naturally, being run by the owners of a wine shop, the list is full of loveliness at reasonable prices. Mostly I’m struck by the sense of commitment, the willingness to do this and do it so well. I cannot lie. I did hesitate on the threshold. Could this place really be worth my time? How much more intense would that feeling have been if you were thinking not simply of getting lunch, but of taking it over and cooking there? All I can say is I’m glad they did.

Jay’s news bites

■ On the other side of the Pennines is Whitelock’s, a Leeds pub you might not find unless you knew where to look. Its alleyway may not be enticing but this grand old Victorian boozer is. The current menu includes pease pudding and ham, smoked bacon and black pudding Scotch eggs, and selections of both Yorkshire cheeses and British charcuterie (whitelocks leeds.com).

■ The notion of bringing your own wine is familiar. But why not go the whole (hand-reared) hog and bring your own ingredients? London’s Café Royal is inviting guests to bring up to four of their own – meat, fish and vegetables – to be turned into a bespoke menu. Cost: £70 a head. But you’ve already paid for the food. Sounds like a great deal, though not perhaps for the diner (hotelcafe royal.com).

■ Ever wanted to throw paint at your friends, as they do during the Indian Holi festival of colour? Now’s your chance. Vivek Singh’s Cinnamon Kitchen is charging £8 a head to spend half an hour on their London terrace doing so, from 5-14 March (cinnamon-kitchen.com).

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

Follow the Observer Magazine on Twitter @ObsMagazine