Review: The Olde Bell, Berkshire and The Crown, Buckinghamshire

It’s easy to forget how far from London it can seem when you’ve put 45 minutes between yourself and the Capital. Catch a crisp sunny day at the tail end of autumn and before you know it you’re walking across the chalk uplands of the Chilterns through amber beech woods, looking down towards villages that still retain a sense of compact, medieval remoteness – survivors from the days before the M40 carved the hill chain in two.

The group who transformed the Olde Bell in Hurley and the Crown at Amersham into “Luxury Coaching Inns” were aware of the value of the quick escape for catching your breath, regaining sanity. My partner Sebastian and I, in need of a little of both of the above, spent a night at each inn. The similarities in design and concept make a comparison between the two – sisters though they are – irresistible.

I think if you want a proper rest from bustle, you’ve got to plump for Hurley. A village that grew from a Benedictine Monastery, replete with characteristic brick-and-flint houses, it has two pubs, a little shop, and the river Thames winding round little islets at the foot of the village. If you’re feeling energetic you can walk the two hours to Henley-on-Thames (and treat yourself to a taxi back). Marlow is a little closer downriver and boasts a two-Michelin-starred gastropub with the best chips in the county. Or you can be lazy, take the car and explore the lovely Hambleden valley.

Old Amersham is also handsome – however, you do have more franchises of the Joules and Ask variety, which can have the effect of making you feel less “retreated”. Leave town though, and there are plenty of splendid walks – the South Buckinghamshire Way leads to pretty Little Missenden, though we missed the signpost and ended up looking confused and muddy under the threateningly fizzing wires of the region’s electricity substation. The big sell of the place is the ease of the commute. “It’s on the Tube!”, they say. But this is not quite true. There is a steep hill separating Amersham on the hill from ye olde part of town.

The Olde Bell first opened its doors in the twelfth century and is as delightfully wonky as its age suggests. Our suite, at the end of a narrow corridor, looks over walled kitchen gardens (which I gather provide a good portion of the herbs and vegetables to be found in the evening meal) and the wintery silhouettes of dead plants are reminders that in springtime the inn is backed by a wildflower meadow. The rooms were designed by interiors heavy hitter Ilse Crawford. They are classy and restrained, with reclaimed coffee tables alongside spanking new washrooms and red Roberts radios contrasting with Edwardian-style roll-top baths in the bedrooms. I know it’s necessary for star ratings, but old and new marry so well elsewhere that I wish there didn’t have to be an enormous flat screen television in both the bedroom and the sitting room: a 1950s edition of National Geographic would seem more suitable here.

The Elizabethan Crown is larger, more open, and very inviting. If the bar at the Olde Bell was the kind of cosy corner where you’d order bitter in a glass tankard and settle in with a crossword, the equivalent space here invites you to meet with groups of friends. Different though they are, the same Ilse Crawford touches – characterful old mixed with tasteful new – are in evidence everywhere.

There are some familiar touches in our suite too – the radio, the roll-top bath.  Again, it’s a good-looking, smart set of rooms. What is slightly odd is that nobody seems to have checked them before we arrived – two bulbs have gone in the old-style walled lamps that are supposed to light the lounge area, so we relax after our journey in rocking chairs, sheepskins over laps, in an unintentional but apt Elizabethan dimness. While there is a radiator at the bottom of the stairs up to this converted stable suite, it doesn’t seem to function. There are no radiators upstairs, and by way of replacement, there is a standard issue grey plastic air convection heater in the corner – I don’t imagine this item was a carefully sourced element of Ms Crawford’s original vision.

But while Hurley has the edge so far, location and heat-circulation-wise, there remains that vital part of each stay – how they feed you. Over to Sebastian…

– Rebecca Fortey

The dining room at The Olde Bell was originally three rooms, now knocked through into a single large, lovely space. The walls are lined with deep, high backed benches, covered with Welsh woollen blankets, belted somewhat curiously with leather straps: a quirky interiors touch, presumably intended as a nod to horse blankets, leathers and the traditional coaching inn.

You are, it must be said, forced into more intimacy than you might want with your nearest neighbours.  Sat at a table for two, the party with their back to the wall shares a bench with the equivalent party at the adjacent table, essentially creating a table for four but with a couple of strangers. This is less than cosy if your neighbours turn out to be a shrill woman, who believes no point is worth making unless it’s worth making five times, and her partner whose lengthy silences appear to be filled with dark thoughts of shutting her up, forever.

Fortunately they were a good course ahead of us, so as they tucked into their mains, we silently willed them to skip dessert while doing our best to focus on our menus as if wearing blinkers. It would, in such circumstances, be unfair to criticise the menu itself of just not being absorbing enough. It’s perfectly fine – an impeccably on-trend pen portrait of what the well-dressed gastropub is wearing in winter 2013. But you’re unlikely to lose yourself in it.

The food, when it came, made good on the promises of the menu: good ingredients, well sourced; nicely judged dishes, well executed. My starter of wild mushrooms on toast was exactly that, although with a few suspiciously domesticated looking chestnut mushrooms in the mix too. Rebecca’s “farmhouse” terrine was nice and porky, but perhaps a little underseasoned, serving more as a vehicle for the tangy homemade damson chutney that accompanied it, rather than as a main feature on the plate. Her roast pork belly was meltingly tender and its crackling crackled brightly – it had us reminiscing about the miraculous suckling pig at Bocca di Lupo. My halibut was a delicious and perfectly cooked piece of fish. It suffered, however, with another unfair comparison: its accompanying brown shrimps and fennel took me back to a dish of octopus, brown shrimp and fennel that I’d had at Lardo in Hackney a couple of weeks earlier that had verged on the sublime. Desserts – a plum jelly for Rebecca, a rhubarb crumble for me – were very nice indeed.

Nothing that came to our table matched the bitter domestic tragedy of our neighbours for drama. Which is no bad thing. But at the same time, nothing was as delightfully surprising as the couple deciding not only to skip dessert, but to take their coffee in the bar. The best of the meal reminded each of us of truly outstanding dishes we’d had before, somewhere else. And there’s the rub, for the kitchen, if not for us. It was a perfectly fine dinner, but not outstanding. I just can’t imagine any future dinner reminding us of anything we had at the Olde Bell.

Dinner at the Crown the following night was altogether more memorable, without Pinteresque vignettes played out at adjacent tables.

The restaurant staff at the Crown had been advised of Rebecca’s rather complex set of allergies. It would count as special service if the chef had taken the time and care to mark up a copy of the menu, maybe offer a couple of substitutions. The Crown’s David Hawkins came up with a whole different nut, seed, dairy and egg free menu, which included a chocolate panna cotta on the dessert list, which counts as above and beyond above and beyond. For a poly-allergic like Rebecca, this was the restaurant equivalent of “having me at hello”.

Not only that, the special menu, while clearly closely related to the regular version, was no bastardised offspring of it. It was a legitimate, fully acknowledged close cousin, just a couple of items per course shorter. What’s more, both menus – while as comforting and gastropub familiar as that at the Olde Bell – had enough surprises on them to suggest a more adventurous hand at the kitchen’s helm. We would have happily ordered any item, from either menu.

I narrowed it down to wood pigeon, apple remoulade and hazelnut jus to start, then a 28 day dry aged feather blade which came with something described as “chop house garnish”. Rebecca ordered cured Loch Duart salmon with cauliflower and jasmine raisins – which, for reasons it felt churlish to question, came without the curry spices or roe advertised on the regular menu – followed by corn fed chicken with bacon, which traded generic mushrooms up to specific girolles and gained garden chard over the standard offering.

In each case the execution matched the promise of the menu, but the outstanding items were Rebecca’s salmon and my feather blade steak, or more precisely their supporting acts. The mild cure of the fish – and perhaps even the absence of the curry spicing – highlighted the subtle earthiness of the cauliflower, raising it to a level of delicacy (in both senses of the word) that I don’t think I’ve ever encountered. It was an eye-opening dish.

My “chop house garnish” turned out to be a carrot. Just a single carrot, but also, perhaps, the best carrot I’ve ever had. Rich and sweet, tender without being remotely mushy, it had been slow roasted, maybe even confited.

Rebecca finished with the dairy free chocolate panna cotta with boozy cherries, and I went for the dairy full yoghurt panna cotta from the main menu. Not just for the sake of comparison, but because I couldn’t resist the accompanying black fig. The black fig didn’t disappoint, and the dairy free panna cotta (don’t ask me how, but the chef did offer to e-mail us the recipe, an offer I must get round to taking him up on) stood up to the comparison.

They had us at hello, and they didn’t let us go – or down.

– Sebastian Roach

 

The Crown, 16 High Street, Old Amersham, Buckinghamshire HP7 0DH
01494 721541; thecrownamersham.com

The Olde Bell, High Street, Hurley, Berkshire SL6 5LX
01628 825881; theoldebell.co.uk