With chef Mark Lloyd out of the picture, KATHERINE MACALISTER regrets missing the boat at the Appleford Kitchen

What do you mean he’s gone? He only just got there. In fact Mark Lloyd had asked me not to review the Appleford Kitchen and Bar until he’d finetuned it a bit and everything was up and running. And now look what’s happened? The horse has bolted from the stable before I’d even got out of the car. And he didn’t even tell me...

Still, I’m a professional and worse things happen at sea. But dammit, I was really looking forward to going to the Appleford where Mark had just taken over as head chef straight from the River Cottage. There Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s home-grown cooking flowed furiously through his blood.

Renowned for his enthusiasm for wild food and foraging, think floral salads, sea fennel, nasturtium and other little-known edibles cooked in an imitable, innovative, classic and contemporary style.

So I thought it safe to take my vegetarian friend along last week, even though Mark was long gone, to see what had become of it.

What became increasingly apparent from the moment we arrived, was that Mark took every last culinary molecule of imagination and flair with him, leaving us with an eating experience which defied belief.

And as Appleford is in the middle of nowhere, it needs to be a destination pub to survive. Get to Abingdon and keep going, past Sutton Courtenay and beyond. We arrived with the best intentions but the quiet dining room and the few tables of customers eating food which smelt like school dinners said it all and our hearts sank. We’d missed the boat.

And the menu was worse than expected. There was nothing on it that we fancied. Something fresh and seasonal would have been good, and even the most meatarian restaurants serve soup and a ploughman’s, but not here. No soup, no ploughman’s and from the range of sandwiches, a huge lack of vegetarian options. In desperation we looked at the salad menu, but it featured two different kinds of chicken salad and a black pudding offering!

We studied the menu over and over again trying to find something that whetted the appetite and when the waitress approached for the fourth time, ordered the nasty sounding stuffed aubergine dish and asked them to make me a salad to see what they could come up with.

Not much actually. It emerged at least half an hour later, with some lettuce, freezing cold roast pepper and courgette (presumably pre-baked for the aubergine dish and brought straight out of the fridge) and some insipid oily dressing, (£6.25) and that was it. I kid you not.

My long-suffering friend pushed the aubergine (£7.25) around her plate for a bit. It came stuffed with goats cheese and roast veg, but it needed to be slow-roasted and oozing, rather than hard and dry. “I don’t cook and I could do better than that,” she sighed.

We turned down pudding, and left as soon as possible, with me apologising all the way. And after I’d dropped her off I went home and made myself a sandwich. I was starving.

Come back Mark all is forgiven.

  • The Appleford Kitchen & Bar, Main Road, Appleford-on-Thames, near Abingdon, OX14 4PD
     
  • Call 01235 848074
     
  • theappleford.co.uk