The Duke of Richmond, 316 Queensbridge Road, London E8 3NH (020 7923 3990). Meal for two, including drinks and service £70-£110

You have to admire the luscious, greedy, thigh-rubbing instincts of a kitchen that puts a crab chip butty on the menu: a palm-sized, golden-glazed bun, filled with mayonnaise-bound white crabmeat, the crunch of lightly pickled samphire and, finally, a fistful of still hot, still crisp chips. The best food items are mindfulness incarnate. They stop you dwelling gloomily on what you haven’t done today or what you should be doing tomorrow or the size of your thighs or what you could do to Jeremy Hunt if only you had a box of wasps and a bucket of honey. They silence all those thoughts, even the interesting ones about Jeremy Hunt, and make you focus on the thing you’re eating. The crab chip butty at the Duke of Richmond pub is one of those items.

It also lays down a marker. The Duke of Richmond, in Hackney, east London, can be taken as simply a neighbourhood pub. And obviously it is. It’s a pub and it has a neighbourhood. You can get a pint at the bar and they’ll sell you a packet of Monster Munch, eagerly. Obviously, they’re pickled onion flavour because why would you bother with anything else? I know this because I had some with my glass of Provençal rosé. But they also want to be more than that. It is just a neighbourhood pub in the way Buckingham Palace is just a house and Piers Morgan is just a little bit irritating.

So elsewhere on that bar menu there’s Toulouse sausages with Parisienne lentils and green peppercorn mustard. They serve béarnaise with the chips and make their burgers out of the rib cap, regarded by many as one of the most flavourful cuts of beef.

Which is what happens when a chef like Tom Oldroyd takes over a pub. He made his name shaping the menu at the first outlets of Russell Norman’s Polpo group. If you want someone to blame for the whole small plates thing, you could have a go at Oldroyd, but he’s so polite and well-mannered you might find it tough to get into a real shouty argument with him. (And he’d probably point out that the Spanish have a lot to answer for in that department.) After Polpo, he set up the tiny Oldroyd in Islington and now, alongside that, he has this place.

It’s a single broad room decorated in shades of olive green and off-white, as if it’s one huge piece of Victorian creamware. The website describes a two-part business of bar and dining room. In reality, this is more than a little artificial. The dining room half of the space is separated from the rest by nothing more than a low dividing wall. On the bar side, the tables are laid only with napkin, knife and fork. On the dining room side, you get glasses on the tables and banquettes to sit on. The divide carries over into service. We ask to mix and match a little from the bar menu and the dining room menu; our waiter tells us that normally they don’t. But it’s a quiet evening because England are playing Colombia in some football tournament or other and the place is deserted so they’re happy to oblige. Yes, we can have that crab chip butty off the bar menu alongside our dining room starters. As it all comes out of the same kitchen and all ends up in the same space, it doesn’t make much sense.

Happily, the food really does. Aside from the crab chip butty – did I mention the crab chip butty? – we have a flaky vol-au-vent filled with meaty sautéed girolles, the freshest of English peas and grated summer truffle bound in a luscious jus. A bubbled and buckled tart fine is loaded with sweet sour confit tomatoes, a quenelle of black olive tapenade and another of herbed crème fraîche. The puff pastry – and the sourdough and butter – are all made on site. It’s both a small thing and a big one. They don’t need to do that. Many serious kitchens don’t bother to make their own puff. Here, they do.

There are thick slices of lamb from the Hebrides, unashamed of their well-earned ballast of fat, grilled over wood and served with dauphinoise potatoes, courgettes and enough light gravy to swim in. These are British ingredients cooked with an utterly convincing French country accent. There is nothing prissy or mannered here. It’s dinner, made by people who like to feed people who want to be fed.

It’s the same with a non-meat main of stuffed and baked yellow courgettes with braised borlotti beans enthusiastically lubricated with a shouty basil pistou. No one would call this an elegant plate of food. If you posted pictures of it online, people might be moved to call the emergency services rather than click “like”. Fair enough. But it is a seriously boisterous plateful. With this we have a salad of crunchy green beans under a dijon vinaigrette, and a side of Lover’s Mash because it sounds naughty. It’s not. It’s mash made from a particular variety of potato, which means nothing to me. It’s a good, solid mash.

Two thin-cut slices of watermelon served on crushed ice for £2.50 might get a few people a little cross. It is a shimmering bowl of huge profit margin. However, if you can avoid doing sums in your head, it’s a very lovely thing with which to finish on a hot summer’s evening. A summer berry mess is a plate of red fruit, broken meringue, a loose crème pâtissière and happiness. I end up scraping at the glaze. Prices are standard smart gastro pub: £6 to £8 a starter and low to mid-teens for mains. Amusingly, you can have all six of the starters for £39. There’s also a compact wine list with a fair choice below £30 a bottle.

Alongside Sunday lunch – name-checked breeds, extra Yorkshires at 50p a pop – they have a “feasting” menu, which is a silly word for some serious food. Get 10 friends together and they’ll roast you a whole suckling pig as the main of a £35-a-head menu.

Other main course options are available but I’m afraid I couldn’t get beyond the words “suckling” and “pig”. It is a mark of where restaurants have got to, that the solidly reliable food pub is no longer worth much comment. So note the 1,100 words I’ve dedicated to this one. The Duke of Richmond is an awful lot more than just reliable.

News bites

The Marksman pub, nearby in Hackney, is another ambitious foodie boozer. Start with one of their buns filled with curried lamb. Continue with the likes of pollock with pickled fennel or a chicken, leek and tarragon pie for two. If one of chef Tom Harris’s tarts are available for dessert – brown butter and honey, for example – make sure to order it (marksmanpublichouse.com).

Speaking at a recent conference, Simon Mitchell, MD of street-food operators Kerb, described the sector as now ‘sustainable in its own right.’ According to him there are street-food operators turning over more than £1m. In 2018, the entire sector will reportedly be worth £1.2bn.

The mildly controversial Cereal Killer Café in London’s Brick Lane and Camden is branching out from just bowls of cereal and milk to an all-day menu. Expect Cornflake Chicken, fried chicken in a ‘signature seasoned cornflake crust’ – and AranCheerio Balls, which are ‘garlic risotto balls in a Cheerio coating’. I am just the messenger (cerealkillercafe.co.uk).

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1