502. Two Country Pubs - The Fuzzy Duck, Armscote And The Wildmoor Oak Inn, Bromsgrove.

    South of Stratford upon Avon, where Worcestershire red brick is starting to give way to Cotswold stone, there is the Michelin-recommended pub with rooms that goes by the name of The Fuzzy Duck. I have been hoping to get there for some time but bus services are difficult and it’s best to take a car and fortunately I had a friend who was pleased to drive me there and join me for lunch.

  The village in which the pub is located is Armscote in a quiet country lane off the main road between Ilmington, home to the Howard Arms, and Shipston on Stour, where one might dine at The Bower House, where Leo Kattou the former Head Chef at Simpsons and the recently closed Laghi’s, now rules the kitchen. The pub was opened in 2013, having been fully renovated and modernised, by siblings Tania and Adrian Slater and first featured in the Michelin Guide in its 2015 edition. The Guide’s description then stated, “Adrian and Tania … took this place from boarded up boozer to welcoming, fashionably attired dining pub. Seasonal British dishes use great quality local and sustainable ingredients…”.

  I had finally achieved my goal of dining at the Fuzzy Duck and first impressions were very positive. There was a pleasing welcome for myself, my guest and my young dog who behaved not far short of impeccably and we were delighted to find the dining room to be delightfully and relaxingly decorated, brightly lit by the natural light coming through the sizeable windows and spacious to ensure that one felt comfortable and able to talk without being overheard. 

 The table was nicely laid even though there was no table cloth and it was not long before I was embibing a Pink Duck cocktail from the drinks menu which featured at a cute fluffy ducking on its cover, made from Chase Rhubarb and apple gin, strawberry purée, lemon juice and lemonade. It was a pleasingly refreshing choice.

  Neither my companion nor myself were able to resist the lovely twice baked cheese soufflé with truffle sauce as our starter. It had a good punchy, cheesy flavour and was splendidly light and airy. We were already clearly in the rarefied atmosphere of fine and refined pub food and thoroughly enjoying ourselves.

  For my main, I felt the Quack and Chips demanded my attention and very good it was too. The fairly small but very well cooked honey and soy glazed duck leg was delicious, the meat moist and succulent, and the accompanying truffle and Parmesan chips were equally delightful both in their flavour and their texture - very fine chips indeed.mYes, this was an excellent dish and the salad of thin ribbons of carrot with an Asiatic sesame dressing added a soothing coolness to it all.

  I was very pleasingly satiated and could only manage an affogato served with a shot of amaretto as dessert but it was nicely served and proved to be a nice close to the meal.

  My dining companion (not Lucy The Labrador) gained as much pleasure from her opening cheese soufflé as I had myself and was immensely pleased with her dish of beautifully cooked sea bream and accompaniments along with her rather extravagant dessert of Eton Mess.

  We  departed content and very well fed and with the resolution that the Fuzzy Duck had not seen the last of us.

Rating:- 🌝+

30 July 2025

  The day previous, a dining companion and I revisited the Wildmoor Oak Inn at Wildmoor near Bromsgrove. I have written about this previously but enjoy lunching there so much that I find it hard to stay away for very long. The food served from the kitchen where Peter Jackson, Brad Carter’s brother-in-law, is Head Chef is excellent pub food, delicious and of that standard consistently. as well as being of very good value.

  We were not disappointed on our latest visit. We shared a plate of tasty hummus of good flavour, the amount of garlic in it nicely judged, served with thin slices of beetroot, sweet, softly textured confit garlic cloves and pea shoots, which for once served a real role in the dish rather than being a lazy man’s garnish for everything from breakfast scrambled egg to steak in the evening.

  My plate of haddock and chips was, as ever, excellent. The fish was beautifully cooked with delightful  crispy batter and the chips were about as perfect as chips can be. While I can live without the curry sauce, the mushy peas were delicious - sweet and minty - and the accompanying tartare sauce was a cut above most tartare sauces that one encounters. For dessert I chose the perfectly wobbly vanilla panna cotta which was lovely though the flavour of vanilla might have been stepped up another notch. The pleasingly wobbly panna cotta was accompanied by nicely macerated strawberries and an excellent sable biscuit.

  My lunch companion chose one of the ‘specials of the day’ as her main course - gammon, which though it looked rather overcooked, was judged to be delicious and succulent. This was accompanied by a pot of the much loved chips, peas and a remarkably attractive-looking fried egg. Her dessert was very grand - a magnificent confection made up of a perfectly sweet mango sorbet sitting on a mango and passion fruit pavlova.  No complaints about it were heard.

  The Wildmoor Oak Inn continues to be a very great pleasure to dine at and represents very good value in these times of continually rising ingredients prices.

Rating:- 🌞

29 July 2025.

  Now, a quick mention that I very much enjoyed my pretheatre dinner at Stratford’ s Hotel du Vin where I chose to eat a splendidly sweet and filling bowl of French onion covered by a thick, vigorously tasty cheesy crouton and then, for the second time in two days, a very well cooked, moist and flavourful confit duck, more generously sized than that served at the Fuzzy Duck, and in a rich and highly toothsome sauce. This was excellent and perhaps only held back by being served with a generous helping of sauté potatoes when I rather would have preferred fewer potatoes and some other vegetable to give more contrast to the dish. Nevertheless it was very good. The Stratford Bistro du Vin serves some very good dishes and I especially enjoy the robust, rustic and filling Gallic-style dishes it has on its menu.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛🌛.

31 July 2025.

  The HdV dinner preceded a trip covering the short distance to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre where a fabulous production of one of the three plays I have never before seen, The Winters Tale, certainly did not give me any indigestion though, the production being so powerful and at times very dark, a stiff post-theatre drink seemed a necessity.

  Finally, during a long walk around Stratford town and along the river bank I spotted two interesting sights relevant to Stratford’s dining out history. Firstly, I espied the ‘floating restaurant’ The Countess which chugs up and down the Avon serving lunch, afternoon tea and dinner. While this is not particularly notable it’s worth noting that in 1978 and 1979 another Stratford floating restaurant, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was included in the Michelin Guide. 

  Further along the river, by the bridge near the theatre, can be found the site of the former Boathouse restaurant and this too was once included in the Michelin Guide in the 1998 to 2000 editions.

  There was also a sad sign of the times - a notice in the window of the Stratford upon Avon branch of Pizza Express announcing that the dining establishment is to close on 2 August. There are now many empty shops in the town and many of them former restaurants and cafes. There are directly caused by the Labour government’s raised taxes for businesses and aggressive raising of the minimum wage which are wreaking havoc with the hospitality industry which continues to also be hit ever rising food prices. Stratford is now a shadow of its former self and Starmer’s crass Labour government and the actions it is taking are playing a huge role in destroying the town and the industry. So Stratford says Ciao to another popular dining establishment. No doubt, it is not the last. 

115. Digital Michelin Guide For 2021.

  Michelin will hold its Guide reveal event on 25 January 2021 at The Dorchester Hotel in London. The Guide is usually revealed in October but the delay will allow for a “full and comprehensive” edition to be published. Naturally the ‘reveal’ ceremony will be held in a London location and not anywhere else in the country where a worthwhile restaurant may be found occasionally.

  And this will be an entirely digital edition which makes it rather historic given that for the first time I shall have no new book to place on my bookshelf since 1974. In decades to come, foodies interested in the history of dining out will ask “What happened in 2021? Why was no Guide issued? Why’s there a gap in your collection?”. And I shall sigh and think of missed lunches, a birthday dinner that never took place and the constant sloshing of alcohol not down my throat but over my hands. We won’t forget the run-up to Michelin 2021.

  Chain restaurants have gone to the wall even the venerable Pizza Express (see Blog 49 is closing a large number of branches in the West Midlands which in Birmingham are in Corporation Street and The Mailbox as well as Bromsgrove, Dudley Merry Hill, Hereford, Ludlow, Moseley, Shirley, Stourbridge and Walsall.

  Of course the greatest loss of this year has been the Ludlow Food Festival - the world’s original food festival - and it did not seem right to not be in Ludlow last weekend when it should have taken place. So the dog and I went any way and walked around the town, she swam in the river, and in the absence of the famed Sausage Trail she had her very own excellent sausage sandwich from the marvellous Vaughan’s sandwich shop in King Street. This little shop is a gem, wholly unpretentious but keeping up the tradition of the great English sandwich for an excellent price.

  As usual we stayed at the dog-friendly Fishmore Hall where I indulged for the first time in its take on afternoon tea. This is the first time I’ve had tea which starts with an amuse bouche, a delightful piece of chorizo sausage roll with a pickled tomato jam. More sausage, and this time served on a slate! And then the savouries - 4 variants on a traditional sandwich theme - a tuna and Red Leicester melt which was very tasty and looked nice with its zigzag streaks of balsamic decorating it, a smoked Cheddar and spring onion wrap which was actually my favourite though I’d normally choose a straightforward white bread English sandwich over a piece of flatbread any day, a pleasing coronation chicken finger sandwich with extra texture and, saved till last because of its promise, but the least enjoyable, a brioche of tasty ham hock not benefitting at all from the accompanying mustard and honey.

  There was a fine collection of attractive cakes and when it arrived on my table the sight of the funky looking Battenburg squeezed a “Wow!” out of me. The fruit and non-fruit scones with clotted cream and raspberry jam were very edible but I thought the outer surfaces might have been a little too crispy. The petite chocolate espresso cup with a lovely smooth chocolate mousse and white chocolate was a happy indulgence as was the lovely violet and blueberry macaron and the gold and red coloured  lemon and raspberry Battenburg which had elicited the Wow! on first sight lived up to expectations.

  An unusual and enjoyable twist on a traditional English tea while sitting in a sunlit conservatory with a view of Clee Hill in the distance dominating the scenery - what could be finer?

  But afternoon tea is not all that’s on offer at Fishmore. Apart from the fine dining restaurant, Forelles, another part of the Hall, a splendid Georgian sitting room, is used to serve bistro food. Much of it is very good and a very pleasing sirloin steak, which I choose to eat only rarely, eaten in the ‘bistro’ made me extremely happy on my first evening at the hotel. Cooked exactly as I wanted, tender as butter and the flavour enhanced by perfect seasoning. No sauce was ordered and none was needed. A dreamily delicious portobello mushroom luxuriously cooked in butter with very fine chips and a spanking tomato accompanied the steak. There was also a bunch of leaves rich with rocket, which is one of my arch enemies, but the ferric bite from it went well with the meal though the challenge of eating all of the rocket was a challenge too great for my frail taste buds.

  One of the nicest things about Fishmore is that the hotel is very dog friendly and when eating in the bistro diners can be accompanied by their dogs. It’s just the right sort of room to have a black Labrador stretched out on the floor paying close attention to the precise direction the forkfulls of sirloin are travelling in and willing that direction to be the one which leads to her mouth.

  And there was Sunday lunch. Here fine dining with its neat little islands of food turns into a trencherman’s holiday. Well, perhaps that’s not true of the starter. I had a creamy cauliflower soup with curry oil and a crouton in the form of an onion bhaji which seemed like a very clever idea except that my bhaji was a little burnt and and the resulting bitterness spoiled the overall dish. 

  But back to trenchermen. A vastly generously sized roast pork traditional Sunday lunch was served up according to my choice. The meat was enjoyable, not completely delicious - perhaps it needed a little more seasoning - but the accompanying garden full of vegetables ensured there were several things on the plate to please. The pork’s crackling was stupendously perfect, crispy but not tooth-shatteringly crunchy,  the duck fat roast potatoes were more leathery on the outside than crispy - I picked at one of them and left the other two; getting roast potatoes to the point of perfection really is an art known to just a few, and there was also spot-on red cabbage, some rather indifferent broccoli, good old swede purée, crushed carrot, pleasing cauliflower, green beans which gave little pleasure and the very necessary apple sauce and red wine gravy. I was full long before I could I had eaten everything (well the beans and roast potatoes were never going to get eaten no much how much was on the plate) and no-one should be able to claim they still felt hungry after all that.

  I didn’t attend the virtual Ludlow Festival as it was broadcast - I was busy having an enjoyable weekend in reality in Ludlow itself, happily eating real food and doing my best to meet Lucy The Labrador’s sausage craving. I hope to watch some of the videos now we’re back home and plan to be in Ludlow for the next Festival among the happy, vaccinated, COVID-19 free crowds in September 2021.

 

49. Pizza In Stratford.

  I had a sudden thought this morning, where has foam gone? Not all that long ago you couldn't have a meal in a smart place without drowning in foam. And now, I can't think of a meal I have eaten recently which has had little bubbly splashes of liquid on it. The cycle of fashion, what goes around comes around and, conversely, what goes around goes away again and, I assume, what goes around will eventually come around again, has turned and foam has passed away - the bubble has burst you might say. Au revoir, or is it Adieu, Foam. Perhaps now we can also say goodbye to unfoamy smears of sauce on plates, often so small that a single taste of them is just about all there is to have any idea of what ingredient they derive from.

  Perhaps we can return to a nice, generous amount of sauce which can still be made to look pretty but isn't so tiny in volume that it's identity remains a mystery. A sauce, a gravy, something to add the final sparkle to fine meat or fish and the other hangers on lurking on the plate or piece of slate or whatever on which the  dish has been served.

  I was interested to read in The Sunday Telegraph this weekend that the founder of the Pizza Express chain of restaurants, Pierre Boizot, had died just before last Christmas, on 5 December 2018. A review of the restaurants described how Boizot had taken on the lease of a 'struggling Soho joint called PizzaExpress' in 1965 and how he had been a 'true pathfinder, realising how this humble Neapolitan foodstuff could be made the basis of a contemporary, cosmopolitan and even a mildly swinging experience, a groovy cavalcade of primary colours, Paolozzi murals and ... live jazz'. 

  Coincidently, a dining companion and I, having limited time to fill up before setting off to see the brilliant production of A Christmas Carol at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon that evening, decided to go along to sample the delights of the Stratford branch of Pizza Express in Ely Street just 2 days after Boizot had died. Our dining place opportunities were limited as my fellow theatregoer has long convinced himself that anywhere that serves spicy food is intolerable to him and that being a well-established penny pincher - physically and psychologically well suited to have offered himself to play Scrooge that night had Aden Gilliat been taken ill and unable to play the leading roll on stage - Pizza Express offered a good opportunity for a relatively inexpensive but filling meal.

  It was ofcourse a Friday evening just before Christmas and the place was pretty full of middle class parents with their noisy offspring waiting to be fed like young gannets lined up on a cliff-face. It won't be the first time that I have stated my lack of love for Italian food in general and my specific disregard for pizzas but here I was hoping to oblige my Dickensian friend. Of course, my friend wanted to save money by sharing a pizza and, having not eaten since breakfast, I thought it would be a good idea to have something extra to ensure that I would feel comfortably replete. I ordered some cheesy garlic bread at a surprisingly high price and was served, almost in a blink, some not very enjoyable bread in a smaller sized helping than I might otherwise expected given the price paid.

  We ordered our pizza, naturally at about the lowest price that was available on the menu, and devoid of any ingredient that would have rendered it even vaguely spicy to fit in with my friend's tastes, and tucked into our demi-pizzas. We chose a 'La Reine' which is described thus:- 'prosciutto cotto, black olives, closed-cup mushrooms, mozzarella and tomato on a Romana base'. It was admirably dull but edible. It was delivered to the table super quickly, showing that the restaurant was capable of living up to the name of Pizza Express. The meal passed quickly and uninterestingly but given our intention to eat reasonably cheaply and without any ingredient which might have any degree of flavour - well I suppose the 3 half-olives were mildly tasty - the restaurant can hardly be blamed for that.

  I was left feeling that, 2 days after its founder's death, Pizza Express hadn't really left me with an overwhelming urge to return for a second visit but the crowds of families with their well-scrubbed offspring seemed to be quite happy there so I am happy to leave the place to that particular clientele.

  The Telegraph article gave Pizza Express a generous 7 out of 10. There's no accounting for taste.