As soon as you’re through the door, it feels like the perfect country pub. Coats are hung on hooks in the hall and there are a couple of cosy antique-strewn lounges for pints of Black Sheep; cocktails made from foraged and fermented ingredients chalked up on a blackboard in the small bar are the first indication that this isn’t just a pretty village pub, even allowing for the fact the surrounding area is one of the smartest in North Yorkshire.
The flag-floored dining room lies beyond the bar, with polished tables gleaming in the light from the large skylight, and walls hung with arty photos of faming scenes. The one thing this country pub does not look like is a walkers’ pub (though dogs are allowed everywhere except in the three bedrooms). On a Sunday it is full of prosperous-looking Yorkshire folk, nothing flashy, lots of nice woollens. People have, if not dressed up to come here, then certainly put on their Sunday best.
The menu reads like classic pub. But what arrives on the plate is much more accomplished in terms of quality of ingredients and execution, while always remaining rooted in approachable enjoyment rather than award-chasing ambition. Chicken liver parfait to spread on toasted milk bread was exceptional in itself – smooth as silk and deeply flavoured – but the topping of a sweet-sour barberry cassis jelly elevated the flavour to another realm of flavour complexity entirely. It also looked almost too pretty to eat, as invitingly sticky-looking as treacle and garlanded with a scattering of petals. All of which made the £13.50 price tag easier to swallow.
There’s a choice of three roasts: salt-aged rump of beef with braised beef brisket toad in the hole and horseradish (£32); roast leg of Herdwick lamb with braised lamb shoulder toad in the hole, mint sauce (£28); rolled Berkshire pork belly, braised pig cheek toad in the hole, apple butter (£26). Again, not cheap, but with extras of seasonal veg, roast potatoes, gravy and, best of all, gooey cauliflower cheese included, it would take a very big appetite to need pudding in addition to a starter.
One is of course paying partly for Tommy Banks’ fame, but also for the quality of ingredients, much of it (beef, lamb, pork, fruit, veg) produced on the Banks’s 160-acre farm in Oldstead. And of course the skill with which the meat is cooked. The pork and beef are especially good: the pork sliced thinly but still frilled with an edge of crisp crackling, the beef cooked pink and cut thickly, the densely textured meat full of the hefty flavour of a life well lived.
Service from keen young locals is spot on – chatty and friendly but well-drilled on the menu. All of the 20-or-so-strong wine list is available by the glass; the best end to any meal here is a glass of one of the homemade liqueurs (rhubarb, sloe or damson).
There are already quite a few posh places to eat round here, most obviously the Black Swan, Tommy Banks’ original restaurant with rooms, but also the Star Inn at Harome. What I liked most about The Abbey was the Sunday roast felt like a posh special occasion, but also one with its feet grounded in the local Yorkshire soil. Like all the nutritionists and environmentalists say, we should eat less meat, but when we do, eat the best-quality meat that we can afford.
And I would unreservedly spend my own money here again. Sunday lunch is one of those supposedly quintessentially British dishes like fish and chips that so many places get wrong through indifferent ingredients and loveless preparation. I’m often not a fan of a Sunday roast in a pub because I feel a bit sick afterwards from having eaten too much stodgy, poor-quality food.
But when it’s done well like this you just think, there really is no way I could have made all that myself at home or accessed that quality of produce (it felt genuinely nutritious), nor served it in such appealingly convivial and civilised surrounds. I was sorry to leave The Abbey Inn, but I’d enjoyed myself so much I’d have been doubly sorry if I’d had to go to work the next day.
