My last review visit to The Black Boy in Milton nearly five years ago clearly found me in a slightly irritable mood. Noting that the place prided itself on sensible prices, I asked how this could be said to apply to its small basket of bread for which the charge was £3.95. Well, I am tempted to think, after a recent return to this very appealing country pub, that my words might have hit home: the bread (and very good it is) now costs a pound less.

In other respects the observations made in my earlier review hold true. “Chef Kevin Hodgkiss produces dishes that are sure-handed, good looking and very tasty,” I wrote. That’s still the way they are. And Mancunian Kevin is still producing them. In a line of work not noted for employees’ longevity of tenure, here is a chef happy to remain in the same kitchen. Pub life in a small village suits him well, he told us when Rosemarie and I met him in the bar at the end of our fine dinner.

General manager Steve Irwin, by contrast is a newcomer to The Black Boy, though well-known to me. Previously he has worked in a number of Oxford establishments, including The Duke of Cambridge, Cafe Baba and Cafe Tarifa. Clearly happy in his new job, his enthusiasm was shared, I judged, by the three members of the waiting staff, Izzy, Charlie and Natasha, looking after us on our Friday night visit.

We were pleased to discover on arrival that we were to be seated in the bar. This large 17th-century Hornton stone building has an attractive restaurant at the rear, but greater conviviality was to be enjoyed within sight of the beer pumps. Though its food is well up to restaurant standard, The Black Boy — unlike other ‘pubs’ I can think of — remains a place that welcomes people who wish to drink rather than eat.

Robust flavours from well-sourced ingredients characterise Kevin’s cooking. His menu for the night included, for instance, a soup made with smoked mackerel, whiting, salmon and scallop roe (coral). Meat eaters were well-catered for with main courses of liver and bacon, venison sausages and a roast rib of beef (for two, at £39).

If I hadn’t planned to finish the meal with cheese, I would probably have begun with the salad of beetroot, mint and goat’s cheese. Instead I had slices of smoked chicken breast (and very smoky they were) with salad in a lemon dressing and mayonnaise with honey and mustard.

Rosemarie had the pan-seared scallops you can see pictured on the right. There were four of them, without coral (we know where that had gone!) on a bed of chopped smoked bacon, leeks and spinach with a fish sauce.

She continued with a delicious cutlet of Gloucestershire Old Spot pork from a pig reared (so Kevin told us later) in nearby Deddington. For anyone tired of the anodyne flavour or supermarket meat, this was a reminder of how pork ought to taste.

Though alive to the main risk in ordering plaice (the often minuscule size of the fish), I went ahead nevertheless and found that on this occasion the gamble had been worth it. Besides being of generous proportion, this fish was also beautifully fresh and cooked to perfection. It came with spinach, roasted tomatoes and a cake of herby crushed potatoes.

Pumpkin cheesecake with honeycomb ice cream, sticky toffee pudding, banana cake and vanilla bavarois were all there as temptation for the sweet-toothed. But Rosemarie chose to finish — as I knew she would — with the chocolate brownie.

This earned tremendous approval, as did my platter of cheese that you can see with it above. And, no, the camera does not lie: there really was as much Scrumpy Sussex, Coulommiers, Sainte-Maure and Stilton as the picture suggests. And all the biscuits, grapes, apple and chutney too. I (and my dietician) only wish there’d been another three people to help me eat it.