Sunday 8 December 2013

a fine time at the Fox

We met friends who live in London for lunch today, splitting the difference travel-wise, and going to a pub in Finchingfield, which takes a shade over the hour for us when I'm driving, and an hour and a quarter for them.  It fell to me to choose the pub, so I was relieved that today's was a nice one, The Fox Inn, complete with beams, log burning stove and real ale, tucked on the edge of the green.

Our friends have lived in London for thirty years, while rarely venturing out of it, except to go abroad.  That may not be unusual for north London middle class professionals.  I always get the impression from Giles Coren's restaurant column that he regards anywhere beyond the M25 with a fair amount of suspicion.  West Sussex might prove bearable, or perhaps Dorset or Cornwall at a push, while one has small children, but essentially London is where it's at.  Our friends are not English, or not wholly English.  He is an American, and returns to Oregon regularly, but I'm not sure he has ever been to Birmingham, let alone Wolverhampton or Bridlington.  Her father is English, but she grew up in Germany.  They have visited her relatives on the Welsh borders, and the home counties houses of friends and colleagues, and she's made it as far as Devon a couple of times, but her natural instinct is not to head out into the countryside at weekends.

Apart from the fact that it cut down everyone's travel time, they liked the idea of an English country pub on a Sunday lunchtime.  Which is fair enough.  Country pubs are one of the glories of English culture, when you can find a good one.  It became my job to find one, because while we don't live at that end of the county, we have got enough local knowledge to at least be able to look at the map, and know which the honeypot villages are that are likely to have the right kind of pub.  In the absence of a local contact who can recommend somewhere, my usual method is to tap the names of the more prosperous and picturesque villages in the right general area into Google with the word pub, and see what comes up.  Then it's a matter of deciding whether you like the look of them from their website, and checking a few reviews.

Massively ambitious menus with prices to match are a No.  So is anywhere that promises there is guaranteed to be something on the menu to delight your palette, or advertising a Gourmet Kitchen. And while I'm sure that explicit mentions of tasty food and professional staff are meant to encourage me, I find they have slightly the opposite effect.  Nobody sets out to provide tasteless food served by shambling amateurs on purpose, after all.  And photos showing wine glasses so large I could put my whole head in one are a red flag.  I'm not too keen on purple cushions either.  In the end you have to guess the vibe of the place, and cross your fingers that the food is reasonably nice.

The Fox Inn did me proud.  The staff kept the service flowing at just the right pace, there were no mix-ups over what we'd ordered, and the beer was well kept (so the Systems Administrator informed me.  I was driving).   Picturesque local colour was provided by the white geese that stood about in the road outside, holding up the traffic, and the group of people laboriously erecting a Christmas tree in the middle of the village pond.  We debated why they didn't just put it on the green, but without reaching any firm conclusion.  The food was fine.  Three of us had fish and chips, and two opted for the full Sunday roast.  I never bother with roasts in pubs, since the SA does such good ones at home, but I don't attempt to fry fish in batter, so tend to go for it when eating out.  There was nothing remarkable about the fish and chips, but it was competently done, though our friends' teenage daughter spurned the mushy peas.

I was marginally relieved when we arrived at Finchingfield and it looked like the picture on the pub's website, and a little more relieved when our friends walked into the bar.  A tiny part of me was worried in case I had confused Finchingfield with Feeringbury, or even Felsted, after looking at lots of pubs on the internet, and directed one or other of us to the wrong place.  It is the same irrational part of my brain that is afraid that one day I'll go to Hadleigh when I'm meant to be going to Halstead, or Braintree instead of Brentwood.  

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