It's nearly full on the Friday lunchtime of a bank holiday weekend. Indeed, no sooner have I been stationed at my table for one, and set up with a glass and the menus, than a party of half-a-dozen women get shoehorned in behind me. I'm just wondering how much bumping of chair-backs I can withstand when the waitress comes back over and offers to move me to a table by the counter. To guard against any impression of stand-offishness (sit-offishness?), I tell the party that I'm moving to give them more room, which earns me a round of sympathetic approval. So, we're all happy.
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Bread is extra, always a doom-laden proposition if on your own, less for the additional spend than for the fact that they will over-provide you in order to justify the cost. I only ever want one piece. Still, I'm regaled with four stonking great housebricks of focaccia, freshly baked in-house, sparsely dotted with rosemary. It has good woolly oily texture, but one was more than enough. There's a chafing-dish of mixed olive oil and balsamic, and a dish of whipped butter copiously sprinkled with big flakes of sea salt. As always, the butter is the winner, even if it isn't quite what focaccia wants.
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I'd rolled up the sweeping gravel drive in a cab and been disgorged at the entrance to be met by a floridly dithering character. The couple ahead of me said they were there for dinner and were invited to make their way to the Great Hall without further ado. 'I too am here for dinner,' I told him, whereupon he went into a blushing fluster. 'Oh, well, um... I -I... really?... Well, if you go along to the Great Hall, somebody there will probably ask you what you want, and erm...' This baffling response was hardly a dress issue, since it will turn out I'm the only gentleman in the entire dining-room wearing a suit and tie.
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I'm at one end, surveying the scene from my table next to the exit door to the pass. Waiters glide by, offering little twitching smiles of spine-tingling coldness. I begin to feel a little uneasy. The service is a peculiar mix of social types: one young man with the accents and overly jovial manner of a London market trader, a couple of very dignified, tall French lads, who have the forbearing look of professionals who had been led to believe this was somewhere classy, but in the event feel badly let down, and a couple of tiny wee girls who are desperately shy. Hard to know what tone to adopt oneself. I opt for chilly neutrality, which probably makes me look like a restaurant inspector.
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In a lidded cast-iron pan served on the side were the sweetbreads, three sticky nodules, on a deep bed of braised split peas. These were less than alluring, the peas (in a distant reference, I suppose, to pease pudding) having been cooked with some bacon or ham fat, so that they took on that glutinous – actually very gluey – texture that doesn't quite agree with me, Lancashire born and bred though I be. The sweetbreads too were a touch gluey, beautifully browned in the roasting and copiously basted, but their texture surrendering its optimal creaminess to a sort of salivary slime. Not keen. Just as I was about to begin, the waitress produced a little juglet of a thick, heavily reduced lamb jus, which she emptied tout entier over the main plate, pretty much dousing everything in sight, apart from the barley purée. Together with the creamy mash, and (if I remember correctly) a little light jus already on the plate to begin with, it turned everything into a kind of soup, with just the noisette and the leek standing proud of it.
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I paid the bill and called a cab and stood in the long corridor hallway near the entrance to await its arrival. As I did, two figures loomed out of the blackness of the inner courtyard. I opened it to admit them. It was none other than the couple from the next table. He said he was going to get something from the car and crunched out of the opposite door on to the gravel. I bade her a good night as she retreated along the hallway. A few paces off, she turned and said to me in a tone of command, 'Would you have an ice-bucket sent up to our room, please?' 'Certainly, madam,' I told her, 'right away.' They're probably still waiting for it now.
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An interestingly elderly demographic tonight, a birthday do, a pair of what might have been genteel lady novelists, a German family who reacted with mild surprise when Jason Derulo, riding solo on the muzak feed, confided that he now had his shit together.
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One charming local girl patrols the dining-room, intoning the menu spec as she sets down each dish. She's been drilled in the sentinel school of waiting, where they stand surveying the room fish-eyed when they have nothing to do, waiting to see whose water needs topping, helplessly inhibiting conversation. An uncomfortable practice.
