True story: walking over Magdalen Bridge the other day, I get a call from a girl at a London PR agency. Do I want to go and eat at a restaurant she represents? It’s in a village in Oxfordshire and it’s just won back its Michelin Star. Well, I tell her, it’s miles outside Oxford and horrifically expensive and therefore totally irrelevant to the vast mass of Cherwell readers, but it’s a free meal, so of course I’d be delighted. I email Marta, Cherwell editor, and offer to take her, hoping that if I ply her with plenty of expensive food and wine she might not sack me next time I’m three days late with my copy. I settle back to anticipate a happy evening of gluttony. The next day, I get an e-mail from her boss: the restaurant is ‘reviewing their PR opportunities’ and so they don’t actually want any critics to come after all. Sorry, do keep in touch, and all that. I’m devastated, but much, much worse, I now have the unhappy chance of telling my editor that the posh dinner she was looking forward to is now off; demotion to deputy assistant recipe writer surely beckons.
Marta took pity, but I was still puzzled. Surely no PR agency can be so stunningly incompetent as to offer a critic a meal and then withdraw it the next day (particularly a critic as powerful and internationally-renowned as the principal restaurant writer of Cherwell). Now I know why they got so nervy; ‘Michelin-starred chef quits restaurant in row over “poncey food”‘ reported The Times yesterday. The owner, it reported, didn’t like the Michelin-starred food the chef was cooking, because he though it was too ‘sophisticated’ and expensive for the local residents (of the famously impoverished county of Oxfordshire). He wants to serve burgers and chips instead; the chef, the hugely-talented Ryan Simpson, understandably thought this was a little below his dignity, and walked out, taking all the kitchen staff with him. Good for Ryan.
The Ashmolean Dining Room has been reviewed by just about every national paper going since it opened last term, but I only got there on Tuesday. It is, as the name suggests, a pleasant room on top of the newly-refurbished Ashmolean museum (what do you mean you haven’t gone yet?) where you can get a bite to eat after admiring the Greek pottery, or, if you’re a philistine like me, you can go in the evening after the Museum’s closed to enjoy the view of Oxford college rooftops (this was, in reality, rather disappointing; the only college you can see by night is St John’s, and who wants to spend an evening staring at them?). Despite the unfortunate aspect, the food is actually pretty good.
Pot roasted partridge with cotechino sausage and the distinctly unappetising-sounding ‘wet polenta’ was a fat, well-cooked bird tasting suitably gamey, with some really good sausage on the side. The ‘wet polenta’ was more damp than wet, but was pretty good nevertheless. Ben never gets to eat interesting food because he’s a vegetarian, but his pumpkin and chickpea tagine was as good as anything without dead flesh can be. My baked egg custard tart was superb, sweet and eggy and full of punchy cinnamon. It’s not cheap – most of the mains are £17.50 and for three courses and some decent wine you’d be lucky to get out for less than £60 a head – but there aren’t any other central Oxford restaurants of the same quality that are cheaper. In fact, I might go so far as to say that there aren’t any other central Oxford restaurants of the same quality at all, and certainly none with as nice a room. There’s even an outdoor terrace for summer. It’s almost enough to make trooping past the vases downstairs seem worthwhile.
Rating: 4/5
In short: Makes museums fun
