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The Bell Inn, Aston Clinton
I AM always suspicious of country house restaurants. You know the sorts of places: dining rooms filled with dried flower arrangements and hunting prints, with large dossiers of a menu, floridly inscribed and brimming with adjectives. The Bell might just have turned out to be such a place. It looked like it was going to be such a place, and indeed once it was. But three years ago Kevin Cape, late of the Con- naught, went to run the kitchen and turned this pleasant little country hotel off the A41 into a serious restaurant.
It is still a family-run hotel, full of coaching-inn charm: wood-panelled bar agleam with copper; thick carpeted bed- rooms and Crabtree and Evelyn bath- rooms. The fire rustles in the smoking room, and an amateurish oil of the found- ing father looks down at you in the lounge. It is part, too, of the Relais network — one of their châteaux hotels — and twee cosiness is staved off by a certain brisk elegance.
There are a number of menus in opera- tion in their mural-decked, leather-padded dining room — a set lunch for £15.50, set dinner for a pound more and special Sunday lunch for £19.50, though it is hard not to be lured by the a la carte. But be patient with the florid script and prose- poem descriptions, for the food they de- scribe is, for once, the right real thing.
Admittedly, they seem to be pushing it a bit with their Salade Aphrodite sur son ocean de perles noires a la vile de Reims which sounds like something Norman Douglas might have restrained himself from including in his Venus in the Kitchen — but since, by casual observation alone, it would seem that a number of their dinner guests are illicit weekenders in need of some entertainment before bedtime, breathily proposing a plateful of oysters and other such love-bites (£22.50 for two including a glass of champagne each) is obviously a sharp move.
For other voluptuaries there are the pleasures of ravioli stuffed with mussels in a saffron sauce, polenta with wild mushrooms, snails with potatoes puréed and 'perfumed with garlic'. It's a hard menu to choose from. After pleasurable deliberation, we went for the assiette bouchere des gastronomes which was de- scribed modestly as a selection of pâtés and turned out to be a leaf-festooned plate of chicken and pork terrine, a glorious creamy slabful, stuffed quail and scotch eggs made from quails eggs circled with a mushroom and foie gras forcemeat, warm and bosky and a real innovation, and a vegetable consommé, steamy with tarra- gon and filled with oblique slashes of baby corn, celery and beans, barely cooked and resoundingly crunchy, and topped with a herb-flecked quenelle.
The soup was a wise move, for if the preparation here owes something to nouvelle cuisine, the portions certainly don't and it's better to start with something light if you don't want to be exhausted before the main course.
Here I did something I never normally do. I don't stop whoever I'm eating with from ordering foie gras, but I make it a rule for myself never to. But there I was, ordering the langoustine and foie gras risotto almost before I knew it. I should regret it but I can't. The rice was fat and sticky, the sauce grainy and pungent and the rich flesh of the seafood and liver meltingly compelling.
Again, pay no attention to the explica- tion de texte, which informs you that the ribambelle d'agneau is 'a refreshing colla- tion of lamb, redcurrants, galette of potato and braised root vegetables'. Cape's lamb is soft and sweet, the cutlet en crane, the liver, barely turned in the heat and piled in viscid pink slices at the edge of the plate, the sauce sharpened by berries, infusing the little zeppelins of root vegetables and dyeing them an earthy terracotta.
Puddings are good but not exceptional, or maybe it's just that too much has gone before. But the wine list is a delight. There are always a couple of 'wines of the week' on offer, good and affordable (this week a St Veran '88 for £11 and an '89 Beaujolais villages for £9.75) but I wallowed extrava- gantly in the satiny fruitiness of a 1982 Hermitage la chappelle for £24. So I expected a stiff bill. And I got one, though at £96 for two it was less than I dreaded. A double room with bath costs £90, but the hot water is endless and fast-flowing and the bed the most comfortable in any hotel I've ever stayed in. The perfect extrava- gant night out.
The Bell Inn, Aston Clinton, Bucks; tel 0296 630252
Nigella Lawson
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