It happens occasionally that I arrive at a restaurant or pub where I have made a telephone booking to find that the table I have been allocated is the very one I would have picked had I been given the run of the whole place to choose from. It happened on our Saturday night visit to the Red Lion, in Chalgrove.

A minute or two behind my companions owing to car-parking duties, I stepped into the bar just as landlady Suzanne was settling Rosemarie and Olive at a table beside the inglenook fireplace and its (happily unlit) stove. Perfection, I thought, taking in its near-baronial dimensions, its proximity to the buzz at the bar and its exposure (visual at least) to the flickering flames from the log fire at the other end of the room.

Was that not a portrait of Leicestershire’s celebrated 18th-century fatty Daniel Lambert gazing down at us from a wall? I think it was — and this added to the feelgood atmosphere. He reached 52 stone without, he claimed, eating very much or drinking alcohol. Surely we could stay thin by doing the opposite. We planned to try!

‘Feelgood’ applies as much to the food as to the ambiance here. Raymond Sexton, the landlord for two years, was previously head chef for a decade at the Cricketers, in Clavering. That’s the busy Essex pub run since the mid-1970s by Trevor and Sally Oliver; their son, the now legendary Jamie, cut his culinary teeth there, learning lessons about well-sourced, well-prepared food that helped make him a national institution.

Much of the meaty, gamey delight of the Cricketers’ menu can be seen, too, at the Red Lion. Lamb cutlets, lamb stew, calf’s liver, sirloin and rib-eye steaks — all were present and correct (if not always thought politically so). There’d been a venison special mentioned on the phone: sold out, alas, but there were still pigeon breasts and stuffed breast of pheasant, the second of which settled my main course choice. While I was picturing the pleasure to come, Olive bagged what we were told was the sole remaining portion of steak and ale pie. Rosemarie, I guessed, would go for the Arnold Bennett omelette — right in one.

But let’s deal with the starters first. Mine was conchigliette (tiny conch-shaped pasta) with pieces of beautifully tender smoked chicken and refreshingly tangy sun-dried tomatoes in a creamy sage-flavoured sauce. Rosemarie had four big shell-on prawns — in fact three; she generously gave me one — in garlic and chilli oil with lots of bread to dip into it. Her mother had a smooth home-made duck liver paté with Cumberland sauce and toast. All excellent.

I greatly enjoyed my pheasant, too, though its flavour suggested (as with almost all restaurant game these days) that it hadn’t been hung. No matter: there was plenty of additional flavour supplied by the streaky bacon wrapping, the red wine gravy and the stuffing of minced leg meat, chestnuts, sage and an unadvertised citrussy ingredient — orange zest, perhaps. Olive’s pie was sensationally good, with first-class puff pastry, a rich gravy and the sort of tender stickiness to the meat that you get with top-class stewing beef cooked for a long time. She and I shared a dish of broccoli, cauliflower cheese and carrots.

Rosemarie was equally delighted with her omelette, named for Arnold Bennett by the Savoy and featuring his favourite undyed smoked haddock, double cream and cheddar. It came with an interesting salad which included red, green and yellow peppers.

After all that richness, she passed on pudding. Olive did her bit, though, with a warm cranberry and apple Bakewell tart in which the taste of almonds was well to the fore. I had a super fruit salad which featured mango, melon, grapes, kiwi fruit, strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, apple and oranges.

This was a memorable meal at a special pub which, I forgot to mention, is owned by the local church. I was at its reopening party in the early 1990s after a two-year closure, when the first pint was pulled by the Bishop of Dorchester. Worshippers, I think, should say a special prayer of thanks for its continuing existence.