There’s no denying the enterprise and imagination of the Peach Pub Company. Not content with running a cool dozen of middle England’s best gastropubs — plus a lucky 13th, the James Figg in Thame, that styles itself more pubby than gastro — its bosses have now expanded into publishing.

The fact that the bosses (wine and design) include Deddington-based writer Jo Eames helps explain this unusual development. Her first novel The Faithless Wife — a love story set on Menorca — having received what she amusingly describes as a series of “glowing rejections” from mainstream publishers, she and Peach colleagues Hamish Stoddart and Lee Cash decided to produce it in-house.

Hamish’s co-operation is the more readily understood when one knows that he is Jo’s husband, though one cannot but wonder at his initial reaction to the title. His fears were eliminated, he told me, when “Jo stressed that it was the faithless — not the unfaithful — wife, which is something very different”.

We were talking amid the cheery hubbub last Thursday at The Fishes, in North Hinksey — one of Peach’s Oxfordshire establishments — where the launch party for the book was held and where, in common with the company’s other houses, copies are now being sold. The price is £9.99, with £1 going to Cancer Research UK. Since the Fishes is one of my favourite places to eat, this seemed a good opportunity to combine business with pleasure (or should that be the other way round?). With Rosemarie clutching a copy of The Faithless Wife (which she has been reading with great enjoyment) we made our way into the pub’s dining area and began a study of the menu.

At its head is spelt out something of the Peach philosophy: “We only ever serve you food we’d be happy to be served ourselves.” (The mission statement makes sense, of course, only if you know The Fishes to be run by people of good taste — which it is.) This food, it goes on to say, includes free-range chicken, eggs, ice cream and pork, dry-aged Aberdeenshire beef, British grown vegetables, and cheeses from artisan producers.

An original, much-imitated, approach to pub dining includes the so-called ‘deli boards’ — selections of cheese, cold meats, fish and antipasti, which can be enjoyed either as starters, nibbles or sharing plates.

There are also starters proper (chicken and summer vegetable terrine, for instance, or Cornish crab cocktail); ‘either/or’ dishes — priced according to size — like courgette and sun-dried tomato risotto, summer ratatouille pancakes with goat’s cheese sauce, and moules marinière; and no fewer than 11 mains, including sausages and mash, pork T-bone with pickled aubergine and polenta, roast romano pepper and tomato quiche and a number of steaks, including a 24oz T-bone at £40 — don’t worry, that whopper’s for two.

You expect specials, too? They’ve got ’em. Tonight it’s mains of honey and cardamom glazed duck breast and pan-seared scallops with capers and raisins, a starter of slow-cooked salmon, and summer fruit gateau and poached rhubarb for pudding.

I started with the slow-cooked salmon, smoky melt-in-the-mouth fish whose preparation involved something to do with Earl Grey tea. The waiter patiently told me twice what had been done in the kitchen, but like some of us — many of us, surveys say — who bizarrely blank out the radio weather forecasts, I ‘switched off’ to this.

Anyway, it tasted wonderful, with the accompanying pickled cucumber and beetroot — a perfect run-in to my whole lemon sole with salsa verde that followed. The moist chunky fish was offered with new potatoes, but I had a fancy for chips, in which I was duly obliged. I also enjoyed al dente green beans and buttered spinach.

Rosemarie began with two tasty deli board selections — prawns with Marie Rose sauce and marinated anchovies — and continued with fishcakes — fishcake, singular, actually — which was packed with fish, salmon mainly, and came with a miserly portion of spinach and lemon butter sauce. Both our dishes teamed well with the Picpoul de Pinet, a fashionable lemony white wine from the Languedoc which has rightly been called a more muscular version of Muscadet.

Rosemarie ended this enjoyable dinner with scrummy chocolate cake, while I broached, but far from finished, a generous plate of well-kept cheeses, which included mature Double Worcester, creamy Taleggio, Brie, Quenby Hall Stilton (the Supreme Champion at the British Cheese Awards last year) and mildly goaty Golden Cross.

Then it was home to our books — Rosemarie’s The Faithless Wife, mine Philip Ziegler’s new biography of Edward Heath. This reveals The Grocer to have been fond of pubbing — he’d get his chauffeur to drive him to hostelries near Salisbury where he would sit by himself nursing a whisky. The book also shows him to have been inordinately greedy.

I think he would have liked The Fishes.