The Painswick, Kemps Lane, Painswick, Gloucestershire GL6 6YB (01452 813 688). Meal for two, including drinks and service £100
One train is cancelled. Another sits outside Swindon for an hour, unwilling to enter, as if it’s been there before and is in no hurry to repeat the experience. A sizeable cab ride will be required to reach my destination. And I am hungry; properly hungry in a way I haven’t been since 1986 and that incident in Athens at the end of a back-packing trip when I ran out of money and considered eating pages of Let’s Go Europe for the sheer bulk. I am a control freak with absolutely no control of my situation.
None of this should matter. The effort it requires to reach a restaurant is not the restaurant’s fault. It was my own stupid idea to ignore the cruddy state of the railways and book a table. And yet I would be lying ferociously if I tried to pretend none of this impacted upon my mood, however much I tried to disperse the red mist. What’s more, where the Painswick is concerned, I was already battling my own prejudices. On the one hand, this boutique Cotswolds hotel boasts a chef, Jamie McCallum, who has worked with Gary Rhodes and once ran the kitchen at Anthony Demetre’s extremely pleasing and reliable restaurant Wild Honey in London. On the other, the website is home to some of the worst copywriting committed since Caxton first cracked open the ink. According to this website they “are all about breaking the rules, plating up a sort of ‘contemporary contradiction’ of fresh, punchy and accurate cooking, treated to a little bit of guilt free”. Somebody sat down, put fingers to keyboard, wrote that, punched the air and doubtless took the rest of the afternoon off.
What is contradictory about accurate cooking? And what is so very now about that contradiction? And how the hell do you treat ingredients to a little bit of “guilt free”? Do you murder kittens in front of the walk-in fridge and then laugh manically while shouting: “Don’t worry about it”? And while we’re at it, which rules are they breaking? The Geneva Convention? The one about no heavy petting at the local baths? The offside thing in football?
Apart from a brutal mangling of the English language, it’s also more bollocks than you’ll see on a prize ram at the Lambeth Country Show. McCallum’s cooking doesn’t contradict anything and it isn’t worryingly contemporary. It’s just really solid, extremely enjoyable stuff served in one of those honey-coloured sandstone hotels that make even the most hard-hearted of us dream of Bridget Jones mini-breaks. The dining room is designed by somebody with a serious line in muted tones, parquet flooring, dado rails and oatmeal-coloured banquettes. On a hot summer’s day after the journey from hell, it is exactly where you want to be, watching the butterflies fluttering by the open, mullioned windows and clutching a glass of Spanish rosé the colour of the latest Dita von Teese underwear collection.
To anybody who has ever eaten at the London restaurants run by McCallum’s former boss, Anthony Demetre – Arbutus, Les Deux Salons and now just Wild Honey – the cooking will be familiar. It’s confident bistro food aimed at a grown-up crowd. You admire the good taste and technique without being distracted by it.
Long-braised pork is finely shredded, spun through with fresh herbs, pressed, then seared in a hot pan until the surface is crisp. It’s served in an oblong so sharp you could use it as a ruler. There’s a dollop of a coarse salsa verde and one chargrilled spring onion. (A word on portion size: occasionally people study the pictures that accompany these reviews, and whine about the amount on the plate. Doubtless they’re looking at this starter right now and rolling their eyes. They can stop. Do I look like a man with a bird-like appetite? Do I look like someone who can be satisfied with a postage stamp of lunch delivered with a bow and a heel click? Of course I bloody don’t. If I don’t whinge about portion size, rest assured it was enough for me. Which means it’s enough for you. And if it isn’t, you are the one with the problem.)
That pork dish is built on the classic restaurant trick of getting all the hard work in early – the slow cooking, the shredding, the pressing – so you spin it quickly into something very pleasing on service. The same method is used in a main course of slow-cooked lamb, with the brisk summery delights of peas, broad beans and fronds of shimeji mushroom. The lamb has been rolled and bound, slow-cooked, chilled and sliced up before being seared. You could argue it’s exactly the same as the pork preparation and I would argue back that I really like it.
A thick fillet of sea bream comes with roasted Jersey Royals, roasted beetroots and a deep, thick, languid beetroot purée. Hiding underneath is a seared baby courgette. It’s a plate of care and attention, colour coordinated with the blue porcelain. We finish with a very dark chocolate delice with soused cherries and a sour cherry sorbet, and another dish of strawberries and meringue laid over an avocado purée. I’m probably meant to roll my eyes at the latter, in some desperate attempt to put a bit of space between me and soya-mocha-drinking hipsters, but it’s more than inoffensive. It’s creamy and a little grassy, as though it were an edible form of the lawn you might sit on for a bowl of those summer strawberries.
Not everything is perfect. A deep bowl of gazpacho, while refreshing on this hot day, is just a little underpowered. The good ones deliver a powerful whack. This one is just a little too polite. The bread we are served has seen better days, those days probably being the ones before we arrived. The main course pricing, mostly at north of £20 a dish, is enthusiastic. Then again, there is a good-value £25 set lunch menu, from which the gazpacho, bream and strawberries came. What matters most though – more than the terrible copywriting or quibbles over chilled Spanish soups – is the mood with which lunch at the Painswick leaves you. We slip out to the gardens where, in the mid-afternoon heat, the butterflies continue to flutter and England settles in its soporific haze. And we conclude that a day which started so very badly has, courtesy of the civilising powers of a good lunch, turned out all right in the end.
News bites
Nearby in Northleach is the Wheatsheaf, part of the Lucky Onion group. I spent most of my review raving about what was then called the Marathon pudding, but which now, presumably for legal reasons, they call a chocolate and peanut pudding. It’s basically a spoonable Snickers. The menu that proceeds it is classy bistro fair: oysters, asparagus with hollandaise, gin cured salmon, liver and bacon and so on. The perfect bolt-hole (theluckyonion.com).
Barbarians of the week award goes to the tawdry Italian café Granaio, which has popped up in the glorious Criterion space on Piccadilly Circus. The Criterion is famed for its golden mosaic ceiling. So what have they done? They’ve fitted a false ceiling and covered it with vines that don’t look like they’ll need watering any day soon.
Congratulations to Scottish-born chef Jock Zonfrillo who has won the 2018 Basque Culinary World Prize for his efforts to safeguard and promote Aboriginal culinary traditions in Australia where he has lived since 2000.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
