They are roasting a hog at the Clanfield Tavern tomorrow and inviting villagers to mark the first anniversary of last year's shocking floods. Water engulfed the West Oxfordshire village (see below) during the afternoon of Saturday, July 21. Some customers eating lunch at the pub were stranded for up to three nights, dossing down in the bar. Among them was singer Ruby Turner, whose sparkling enthusiasm kept everyone smiling in adversity.

While this cataclysm might seem a curious event to commemorate, the pub's boss Tom Gee explains that it's the community spirit they engendered, rather than the floods themselves, that will be celebrated. For Tom and his colleagues in the Real Food Pub Company the good neighbourliness has been of crucial importance in building the business. They had moved into the pub - the company's first and thus far only operation - just three weeks earlier. A memorable beginning, you might say . . .

Having forged excellent links in the neighbourhood, the team's operation - with its emphasis on locally sourced and, in some cases, home-grown food - has gone on to attract patrons from the surrounding towns and villages. With their new venture in the Wiltshire town of Cricklade due to open in a few weeks time, the Real Food Pub Company is striding confidently into the future. This will be a source of some pride, perhaps, to staff at Oxford Brookes University, where Tom gained his degree in hotel and restaurant management, and to mentors of the new executive head chef Ben Bulger, among them Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons.

Rosemarie and I chose last Saturday night for our first taste of what's on offer at the Clanfield Tavern. We enjoyed a pleasant drive there through evening sunshine, only to encounter a mild annoyance near journey's end. The one road to the village from Faringdon was blocked off in the centre of the town to accommodate some rustic celebration, and we had to retrace our steps to the Bampton turn off the A420.

Fortunately, we were no more than ten minutes late. Having been shown to our table in the handsome candlelit conservatory, we were soon sipping glasses of unoaked French chardonnay and making choices from the short, but interestingly varied menu. This needed to be read, by those with an interest in where their food comes from, in conjunction with a blackboard on which was listed the sources of all the ingredients bought in by Ben and his team.

Those for my starter, in fact, had not in the main been bought in at all. Besides lardons of crispy smoked bacon, from pigs raised at Foxbury Farm, Brize Norton, my prettily presented salad included baby beets, red and yellow, and broad beans, carefully separated from their skins, all of which had been grown in the kitchen garden established earlier this year. (There is to be another, devoted to potatoes, coming soon.) Among other starters were devilled whitebait and saffron mayonnaise; smoked haddock fishcake with peas, curried mayonnaise and a soft egg; and buffalo mozzarella and vine tomato salad.

Rosemarie chose the robustly flavoured sausage, tomato and white bean soup. It featured chunks of thin pork chipolatas and slices of a spicy salami-style sausage, in a power-packed liquid with celery, onion and green beans.

More of these green beans, again from the garden, featured along with spring onions radish slices, cucumber and baby leaves in the Tavern salad, which accompanied my main course of roast Cornish brill, with new potatoes and caper and herb (chiefly mint) butter. More out of curiosity than need, I also tried the Tavern greens - sugarsnap peas, and chard, both a little undercooked for most tastes.

The brill portion was cut from the tail of the fish and therefore rather bony, like a small skate wing, rather than the chunky pieces of pure white fish I saw on the way to other tables. Its flavour was excellent, however. Rosemarie, too, had a cod portion rather smaller than others we saw, but again it was beautifully fresh and perfectly cooked in crisp batter to an opalescent white. The hand-cut chips were first-class. The mushy peas were heavily flavoured with mint, which Rosemarie does not much like. They appeared, to my taste, to have been made with tinned marrowfat peas, rather than the usual dried peas, steeped and boiled. I still liked them though.

Gloucester old spot sausages with mash and onion gravy; crispy and roast Bibury lamb (the meat broken up and encased, as I could see, in a rectangular 'box' of pastry or breadcrumbs); and char-grilled rib eye steak were among the other main courses. There was also a chicken pie not mentioned on the menu whose existence, once she discovered it, was a source of irritation to my companion since she would definitely have fancied it.

Fortunately, her mood was lightened by pudding, a perfectly constructed treacle tart (its base crisp, the topping sticky and soft) with super (home-made?) vanilla ice cream. Not for the first time when observing such a dish, I wondered why it is called treacle tart when it is always made with golden syrup. Can one of my clever readers explain?