A pub-restaurant-hotel which I understand to be something of a cooperative venture between the brewers Hall & Woodhouse and the heir to the throne, presumably the owner of the freehold. Handsomely got up with a very handsome first floor dining room, previously illustrated. A big place which would have seemed rather cold if it had been empty, but it was not. The downstairs bar was busy and the upstairs restaurant was busy enough for comfort.
I took a rillette, in this case a fancy word for a piece of cold meat loaf, the sort of thing they sometimes call pâté in the rest of Europe. Good, only marred by a dollop of yellow goo, fortunately removeable. Excellent Caesar salad. Brown goo in a glass for pudding, probably rather more sophisticated than the Instant Whip of childhood that it reminded me of, in any event better suited to BH’s palette than mine. A decent Chablis. Bread oddly bad. I had thought that the heir, said to be keen on both food and on tradition, would have insisted on decent bread, but he clearly had not on this occasion. The service included the only foreign waitress of the week, just one foreign among the various English. See reference 8 for the full story.
All in all, a good meal.
Ley Arms, Kenn
Fish and chips. Not up to the usual pub standard at all – fish and chips being something that a lot of pubs do quite well these days. And the crushed minted peas were not to my taste at all. But there were attractive and attentive barmaids.
We reminisced about the times we had visited the pub, more than forty years ago, when pub food had barely been invented and the pub scene was rather different. See reference 7 for today’s story.
National Marine Aquarium, Plymouth
Pie and chips. Entirely suitable for the occasion.
An aquarium which had something for everybody, including two large tanks with large fish and middle sized sharks. Lots of nicely presented, smaller oddities: starfish, jellyfish, anemones, cuttlefish and octopuses. All the more interesting for my recent reading of reference 5, noticed at reference 6.
Buckfast Abbey
Mid morning tea with Scottish pie, instead of the more usual tea with cake. A small pie, entirely suitable for a mid-morning snack. Pastry quite chewy, reminding me of the casings of the pies you used to get from pie and mash shops. The ones which came with a smear of something dry and brown on the bottom, air gap above. While the contents of this pie were entirely satisfactory.
Builders in at the abbey itself. Including a squad of organ builders from Italy, I think they said Pisa. Perhaps the French monks who restarted the place a bit more than a hundred years ago had a tradition of buying their organs from Italy. Or perhaps English organs smell too much of Protestants and worse. Tainted, so as to speak.
We were amused to find a holy water dispenser next to the font (elaborate, with its elaborate cover suspended from the vault above) which looked very like a small tea urn, a bit like the sort of thing that is trotted out for events in village halls. Often made by Burco.
Paignton Zoo
Beef mince stew with chips. Again, entirely suitable for the occasion. Restaurant area looked and felt like a slightly tired version of what you get at a motorway service station.
A zoo which worked hard on its ecological credentials but was not helped by the rain. Nor, to my mind, by all the small loudspeakers scattered through the grounds providing jungle noises. But we did learn from a bored keeper, an exile from up north, all about Burnley football club.
Forest Inn, Hexworthy
A large pub with restaurant, accommodation for both people and horses, in the middle of nowhere, recently reopened. Presumably a place with thrived when Dartmoor thrived, thrived with thousands of people walking, riding and fishing, people who now go on packaged holidays in warmer climes. The pub had at least five people to feed, but seemed to be doing well enough on the week day lunch time that we visited. Maybe they will thrive; in any event we will be back. The bar itself was a bit of an oddity, not country pub at all: pale polished hard wood and red plush, maybe 1950’s. Very Young’s, lately of Wandsworth.
I took lasagne and garlic bread, clearly microwaved from frozen. Not bad, but I have had better. Wine OK. Beer looked good.
Albatross Fish and Chips, Totnes
Haddock and chips. Good – much better than we expected given the location in town and lack of custom, at least when we arrived. Illustrated by google streetview above.
But chosen in preference to the more Totnes, more spinach and bean flavoured fare to be found elsewhere in town. A place which lived up to its notices with lots of strange people wandering about, working hard on their retired biker/hairy/druggie images. We were amused to think that all these people who had gone to Totnes to escape the awful life of suburbia, now made their living out of visiting retirees from said suburbia, people just like ourselves. Perhaps they saw it as getting their own back.
Holiday cottage (a converted cow shed)
Gammon and boiled vegetables, twice. A little salty; must remember to soak for a bit longer next time.
Lentil soup, twice. Once with left over celery and gammon, once without. No carrots on either occasion. Onions fried in butter separately and added at the end.
A holiday cottage with a decent set of saucepans – like kitchen knives, not something that one can rely on in such places. And our first experience of cooking with bottled gas since we lived in the back of Bury Lodge at Hambledon, more than forty years ago. Which, according to google, was 'built on a site of Roman and Celtic historic interest, the parkland was designed simply using existing field patterns. Unusual, rather austere house built 1806 by Sir Thomas Butler in Strawberry Hill Gothic style'.
Shops
Ben’s of Totnes. White bread satisfactory, vacuum packed ham very salty, apples adequate. Apples which were well out of season and had clearly been in store somewhere, a reminder that farm shops sell plenty of stuff that was not grown on their own premises. A stretching of the truth, rather as is often the case with the phrases ‘home made’ or ‘home cooking’. An operation spun off from the Riverford Foods noticed last year at reference 3. Perhaps two brothers who decided to part company.
Country Cheeses of Ticklemore Street, Totnes. Poacher present, and first tasting, yesterday, entirely satisfactory, good even. A shop which was rather keen on sour dough bread, but we agreed it was something of a fashion just presently – a fashion which I, for one, do not much care for. The shop girl who dealt with us had excellent shop girl manners, with cheerful and smiling agreement being the response to whatever the customer might come up with. Not clear about the relationship between country cheese (reference 1) and ticklemore cheese (reference 2), named for the street of the shop. Perhaps the latter had abandoned retail to the former in order to concentrate on manufacture.
References
Reference 1: http://www.ticklemorecheese.co.uk/Ticklemore_Cheese/Home.html.
Reference 2: http://www.countrycheeses.co.uk/.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/orgo.html.
Reference 4: http://bensfarmshop.co.uk/shops/.
Reference 5: Reference 2: Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life - Godfrey-Smith, Peter – 2017.
Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/coding-for-red-and-other-stuff.html.
Reference 7: http://www.theleyarmskenn.co.uk/.
Reference 8: http://duchessofcornwall.co.uk/.
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