By Gum, it’s quality stodge (but spare me the goat’s cheese!)
The Gumstool Inn
Calcot & Spa, Tetbury, Gloucs
The road wears the mist like a sodden blanket, the headlights barely breaking through the gloom. It’s cold now, country cold, first day of the New Year freezing. A first day coloured, entirely predictably, by the low grumble of a middling hangover. And I haven’t eaten since lunch. So the sign to Calcot Manor, carved into a lump of Cotswold stone, is both salve and salvation.
I’m with my father, who lives a few miles away from the rather smart Tetbury hotel, with its spas and treatments and Frangipani body polishes. It takes a lot to pry him from his own kitchen down here, especially on a night like this. But he’s been before, to The Conservatory, the grander of Calcot’s two restaurants. And says it’s pretty good. Nothing too fancy, and certainly none of those ‘endless 20-course eating menu things with their silly, tiny mouthfuls of mucked-about food, and those waiters who never stop talking’. Well quite.
The Gumstool Inn. Despite being a purpose-built hotel restaurant, the place has an easy, uncomplicated charm
The Conservatory, though, is fully booked. So The Gumstool Inn it is, a smart, modern pub with polished flagstone floors and winding bar, spilling its soft warm light into the evening’s gloom. Despite being a purpose-built hotel restaurant, the place has an easy, uncomplicated charm. A fire crackles merrily away, the wine arrives quickly, and service is smooth, sweet and unobtrusive. Exactly what’s needed for those with a somewhat tender constitution. This is not the time for disembarking upon the wilder shores of gastronomy.
There are fat chunks of charred chorizo, soft-textured but sharp-tasting balsamic onions, mild chillies stuffed with mild cheese and deep-fried whitebait. A starter of South-East Asian duck salad is inspired, simple, yet knowingly put together. Fistfuls of shredded quacker, all chew and crunch, mixed with cashews and slices of cool, crisp radish. There’s a gentle chilli heat and a dressing that’s sharp with lime. It reminds me of the crisp duck salad at Le Caprice, once one of London’s great dishes.
A technically perfect twice-baked cheese soufflé is less thrilling, needing extra oomph and depth. Expertly done, but crying out for more Montgomery’s or the kick of Keen’s. Salmon tartare is as clean as it is fresh, softened with soy and fiery with ginger. While a goat’s cheese parcel is… God only knows. Apparently lovely but I despise the stuff. Like licking a farmyard floor. I can devour raw tripe, and deep-fried bee pupae, wobbling cubes of set blood and the most lavatorial of stinky tofu. But faced with the cheese of a goat, I tremble like a just-set blancmange.
The Gumstool is a place with utter confidence in its cooking – good ingredients, treated with knowing respect
Anyway, mains are damned fine. Lackham Farm Chateau-briand (whose cows I can see from the upstairs windows of my mother’s house near Lacock), aged and properly butchered. It’s cooked the rarer side of pink and hewn into great bloody hunks, with a subtle bovine allure. It comes with a pile of silken mashed potato and a great bubbling iron dish of broccoli and cauliflower cheese. Stodge, of the very highest quality. Sometimes only good steak will do. My father’s liver comes pink, with capers and shards of crisp pancetta. ‘Any good?’ I ask. ‘Yup,’ comes the reply, with typical economy. I try a mouthful. And ‘yup’, it is.
So The Gumstool is exactly what’s needed on this misty January night. A place with utter confidence in its cooking – good ingredients, treated with knowing respect. Simplicity is more complicated than it seems. Even the espresso is excellent, with a marked acidic kick. ‘You know what,’ says my father as we leave, ‘maybe I should go out more often.’
He pauses, doing up his coat. ‘Well, as long as we can come back here.’
About £30 a head