The nearest pub to my home is also the one closest to my office. Naturally I take a great interest in it. The place began life in 1871 as The Waterman but throughout most of its existence has been known as The Waterman’s Arms (“At the Command of our Superiors” was the nauseatingly forelock-tugging motto of the river folk that used to be displayed on the sign). A little over a month ago it was renamed The Punter.

While I can’t pretend I wouldn’t have preferred the name as it was, I find so much about the new place to compensate for this minor annoyance — not least its spruce new look and first-class food — that I really can’t work up any great head of steam about the change. A week or so ago, I found myself standing at the bar with one of the UK's best-known beer buffs, Tim Hampson. No less a traditionalist than I am, he joined me in laughing at others’ fake fury on the subject. So what if people don’t punt on this stretch of the Thames? Let them start.

The presence of one of our top beer writers for his and his wife’s second meal at the pub perhaps says all that is necessary about the quality of its ales. As for the food — well, as Tim and I chatted, Rosemarie and her mother were polishing off home-made Scotch eggs perfect in every detail, including the just-congealing yolks. Having excluded myself from their meal — work! work! — I remarked from the sidelines that an egg was almost the extent of food at the Waterman’s when I first knew it 35 years ago — a pickled one, popped into a bag of ready salted crisps.

Now there is a wonderfully wide range, including £5 lunch offers (cassoulet, hake with chorizo and vegetable tagine on the day I write), and extensive menus for lunch and dinner. Owner Tom Rainey and business partner/head chef Paul Fox do not baulk at the title ‘gastropub’ for The Punter, which builds on the success of their business of the same name established three years ago in Cambridge (and still going strong). They’d be daft if they did because it would be hard to find an establishment better answering the description.

And so to dinner . . . with Rosemarie and Olive on a busy Saturday night — nights tend to be busy here now. What to eat was someting of a poser given the availability of so many favourites — starters of squid, scallops, and grilled haloumi, for instance, and mains including lamb rump, roast squash risotto and skate wing with lentils. I have kept these descriptions brief, incidentally. Paul’s menu commendably gives the full works. An online review of the Cambridge Punter marvelled at a pudding of “orange, ricotta and almond crepe with fig, honey and blood orange sauce”. Phew!

I began with sardines, two real whoppers, their flesh moist and juicy, and tasting as if they had been hauled from the water a matter of hours before. With them came a salad of crunchy fennel, with dill, tomato and caper and Pernod butter (the last underlining the aniseed of the fennel). Paul evidently likes his capers for they came, along with pistachios, with Rosemarie’s pork rillettes which were, in their lovely fattiness, the perfect comfort food. For Olive there was slippery cannelloni containing a delicious blend of wild mushrooms and walnuts.

Rosemarie continued in comfort vein with a top-class burger, smothered with melted blue cheese. The golden brown chips were praised by her, as by her mum who had them with her big chunk of beer-battered cod and pea purée. I had partridge which while not high enough for my taste (is it ever these days?) was very well received since it arrived with most of the work done for me — the breast in chunks off the bone, the legs ready to be stripped of their meat. It came (a well-judged touch) with roasted bone marrow, plus dauphinoise potatoes, damson sauce and buttered cabbage (rather than the advertised sprouts, though I didn’t mind).

I finished with cheese (Timsboro goat’s from Bath, Oxford Blue and Oxford Isis, and Marksham Cheddar), while my companions disposed of a spendid chocolate brownie (“light, crisp, very chocolatey”) with ice cream and caramel sauce. A happy night!