336. The Bower House, Shipston On Stour

 

  

  The bus journey from Stratford upon Avon to the charming Shipston on Stour where virtually everyone wears a green body warmer is not far in miles but these are country miles and so the trip seems longer than you might expect as it passes through the gorgeous Warwickshire countryside with hardly any human habitation in sight apart from the occasional hamlet or village, such as Ilmington where you can catch sight of the beautiful Michelin-listed Howard Arms as the number 51 heads towards Shipston. There are fields full of sheep and some fine cattle and gradually the buildings change from West Midlands red brick to buttery Cotswold stone.

  Shipston is not large and not of the 2020s. Many of the local shops look roughly like they may have looked in the post second world era but without Attlee’s rationing being evident. And there are two former Michelin dining establishments to spot in the town square - the White Bear (listed 1985 to 1990) and the George (listed 1980) (both decidedly Georgian in style) before you arrive at the Bower House comfortably spread over two shops and, on entering, looking spacious and bright with the main dining room at a corner of the building and light flooding in through the very large windows on two sides. The dining room is tastefully decorated in an attractive shade of red with blue and red, comfortable furnishings.

  Service is excellent - polite and friendly and on the ball. There’s an appealing menu - small plates or starters with mains in the form of fish or meat from the charcoal grill. The set menu  looks like exceptionally good value and includes dishes that one would be sorely tempted to order but I was lured by the à la carte and had no regrets. I began with a delicious Bower Sour and a delightful little brioche was served with salted butter and a tasty white miso butter. The starter was not far behind. 

  My choice was the very tasty rabbit and bacon terrine which was served with radish, black garlic aioli and playful crispy kale. A great start - the terrine was delicious and the accompaniments spot on though I think I should have preferred my bread not to have been toasted.

  The stone bass I chose for my main was also perfectly cooked and seasoned, the accuracy of the cooking contrasted with a sadly overcooked plaice I had had at a bistro in Stratford the previous evening. If you’re going to serve fish, cook it accurately, and if you want to know what that means go and see what the Bower House does with the fish it serves. The stone bass was served with a gorgeously creamy polenta, excellent pickled girolles, strips of spring onion which I did not like particularly and a fabulous, tasty chicken jus which brought everything together. A fine dish.

  

  Dessert was fairly simple - a generous slice of very fine Basque cheesecake with a beautifully sticky Pedro Ximénez syrup. I should have liked a little more of the syrup and could have done without the decorative microherbage but I appreciate that it is not easy to make a plate of Basque cheesecake look pretty so I see why the greenery had invaded the dessert.

  Three pleasing petit fours accompanied the coffee - a fudge, a truffle and a splendidly peppery tuile. 

  There was time to see the sights of Shipston which did not involve a lot of walking before reembarking the bus for Stratford and enjoying another land cruise through this beautiful and empty part of Warwickshire, replete and impressed by my lunch at the Bower House.

The White Bear, previously Michelin-listed

The George, previously Michelin-listed

An amble around Shipston -

Raring - 🌝

335. The Opposition, Stratford upon Avon.

 

  I was in Stratford to see what mischief the RSC had wrought on Shakespeare in its most recent production of Macbeth. Mischief had indeed been wrought. Best not to think about it.

  Dinner was needed the following evening and I chose The Opposition, three or four shops down from the Garrick Wing of the Shakespeare Hotel where Lucy The Labrador and I love to stay so by the time I arrived at the restaurant very little distance hade been travelled. The Opposition makes up a part of a row of bistros including the well thought of Lamb’s of Sheep Street and has an attractive frontage and an even more attractive interior - more spacious than you might think when you first arrive because there are four dining rooms that make up the ground floor dining area, atmospherically oak beamed with exposed stone walls.  Even though the pre-theatre dinner crowd had already moved on to see the rubbish the RSC was delivering at the theatre a stone’s throw away, the restaurant was still full of diners and for want of a better word, buzzing. And thereby might be the problem.

  The specials, written on a blackboard but also featured on the crowded paper menu, looked too tempting to resist. I had the starter of Cornish crab and avocado salad. It looked as though it might have benefitted from me arriving an hour earlier - the avocado was browning and the peashoots in the salad looked exhausted and were not a pleasure to eat (and I did not). The crab was nice enough but this starter did not rise above the middling

  The main was Fillet of plaice with samphire, caper butter and seasonal vegetables. This was a nice piece of plaice but the cooking was tragically inaccurate with the fish, though not inedible by any means, being well over which seems to me to be a great waste and misfortune. The way food was flying out of the very busy kitchen seemed the likely cause - it was clearly too difficult to apply the necessary attention which a fine piece of pricey fish deserves compared with a dish of lasagne or a plate of tortellini. The vegetables were mainly cooked satisfactorily, it was pleasing to have plain buttered new potatoes than being served with some cheffy twist applied to them.

  For dessert I had a depressingly inelegantly presented ‘fresh vanilla rice pudding with plum compote’. Again this was too tempting to resist and the rice pudding was very reasonable and nicely bucked up by the plum compote but I couldn’t help feeling that more could have been made of this dish.

  The service was excellent. I sat next to a charming couple who said they had visited The Opposition four or five times and “had never had a bad meal”. From my experience I doubt that the restaurant does serve any ‘bad meals’ but my meal was full of faults which I do not like to see when I am paying well over £60 for a three course meal plus drinks. It’s sad because it’s a lovely place with plenty of atmosphere and fine service.

Rating:- 🌛.

334. The Mayan.

 

  My knowledge of Mexican food is very limited to say the least. I couldn’t tell you what is authentic Mexican cuisine and what isn’t. Of course the English food snob is obsessed with ‘authenticity’ and will not put up with Anglo- variants of a dish, though the changes in them are made to make them palatable to English tastes. I see little point in suffering in the cause of authenticity and so I am quite happy to eat foreign food even if it has the spirit of a foreign dish rather than the complete substance of it. So I had no hesitation in reserving a table at the New Mexican-style restaurant, Mayan, in Gas Street Basin.

  In the past I have been to Mexico City for a few days and eaten genuine Mexican food in good quality restaurants but that was forty years ago and my recall of the dishes is now rather limited though I do remember an excellent dish which included a heavy use of chocolate (a savoury, not a sweet). Unfortunately it all ended in tears as Monteczuma took his violent revenge out on me which resulted in me loosing acutely about 9lbs in weight and for some reason or the other, to develop a dislike of the smell of coffee for some weeks following. It also cut short my ability to eat any food during my remaining days in the Mexican capital. 

  Well that was then and this is now. And the Mayan looked very exciting with what was clearly a large amount of money having been spent on it to give it a glitzy Mexican look with gold, though more probably gold plate, everywhere. The Mayan does for Mexican food what Qavali does for Persian and what Lulu Wild does for Chinese. Excellent, if perhaps somewhat overbearing, decor. Sadly I was the only diner that lunchtime, there to enjoy it.

  I started with a ‘signature cocktail’ - a combination of tequila and mezcal and other ingredients called God of the Sun. It looked pretty but lacked punch and was disappointing at a cost of £14. 

  To begin I had guacamole with tasty, crunchy totopos. Avocado is not the tastiest ingredient available to a chef and this needed more salt at the very least to take away some of the blandness of the dish. But it was perfectly edible.

  I had a starter of tortilla soup which proved to be a bowl of the tasty, hot and spicy soup with thin strips of tortilla and a very generous amount of tasty shredded spicy chicken and to balance the heat, cooling avocado and sour cream. This was very good but enough to make a meal in itself.

  The main course was made up of three very well cooked pieces of sea bass with nice crispy skins and a single prawn with chick peas and a coconut, mango and tamarind sauce. While the sea bass itself suggested that the chef who had prepared it really knew how to deliver a perfect piece of fish, I’m afraid that the sauce did not really do the fish justice - where I wanted citrus the sauce was sweet and failed to complement it.

 This had been a very filling meal and there was nothing on the very short dessert list to make me feel I wanted to add to sense of total repletion. I did however have a very spicy chocolate drink epwhich certainly gave my taste buds something to think about.

  The front of house staff were very nice but for the price bracket this restaurant locates itself in, they need to be doing more things - filling my glass with water rather than leaving me to do it myself, paying attention to my napkin when I leave the table, offering to take my coat when I arrive and opening the door for me when I depart. Early days yet but all this was possible on my visit as I was the only diners in the restaurant that lunchtime.

  This is a spectacularly decorated restaurant, probably quite thrilling when there are more diners there, but it is expensive, so the diner’s expectations must be high even at this stage so early in the restaurant’s life.

Rating:- 🌛🌛