The Pig, Brockenhurst
Zoe Williams is pleased to find The Pig in Brockenhurst – quite a few people seem to be going here recently – ‘full on a Monday lunchtime’. She enjoyed ‘the freshest crab I’ve tasted this year’ and some ‘giant and gutsy’ scallops with crosnes, whatever they are. The restaurant’s ‘reputation’ is ‘deserved’.
‘An offal lot of offal’: Amol Rajan coins a new phrase during a visit to Hereford Road. Calf’s liver with mash, sage and onion ‘has no surprises and is competently done’ – it was also on the menu when I last visited HR, almost three years ago. Desserts ‘complete an overall sense of comfort’.
Christopher Hirst visits The Pipe & Glass Inn in South Dalton, East Yorkshire. The ‘inventive’ chef may have ‘ambition’, but cauliflower soup was ‘distinctly underpowered’ and beef fillet ‘somewhat bland’. Still, ‘he deserves commendation for a tempting vegetarian menu’.
She might ‘goggle at the luxury’, but Marina O’Loughlin finds herself seated in a ‘leper colony’ at The Delauanay. (Not literally.) ‘Nothing – apart from the cakes and pastries – is particularly elaborate but it’s done well.’ Mussels are ‘plump and sweet’ and beef stroganoff ‘tender and rich’ but she’s made to feel ‘like a second-class citizen’ by Corbin and King. (This has not been my experience at all. When I went, I got a crap table but they moved us quite happily when we asked. And when I went to the half-full Wolseley with a very famous person, they sat us at the worst table in the room.)
‘Create is a good place to eat,’ says Jay Rayner: all the better because it’s a ‘social enterprise venture’ in Leeds that helps to get the long-term unemployed back into work. £14 was an ‘ungrasping’ price for partridge breast with confit leg, chestnuts, sprouts and sautéed girolles (yum), and ‘by the end of lunch even this cynical old dog was ready to clamber on to his hind legs and applaud.’