Will be renting a cottage near Burford the second week of October and would like recommendations for dining. Have had lunch at Huffkins a number of times but not familiar with evening options. Have come across several possibilities including The Angel, Bay Tree Hotel, The Bull and The Lamb. While all of these look nice and any comments on them are welcomed, I am also looking for what I term real pub food i.e. a good curry, Shepard's Pie, Welsh Rarebit etc. Any suggestions ?


Thanks,
C.

I'm watching this one since in my stupid colonial money-isn't-worth-much world I would have sworn that the term "good pubfood" is an oxymoron so please educate me thoroughly.

If you don't know the website www.fancyapint.com it has reviews of pubs all over UK including as to drink, food, atmosphere.

Not necessarily. Pub food is not likely to get high regard among foodies, but I sometimes get put off by the constant clamor for good, so-called upscale cuisine. After dining several nights at such places offering two or three courses of "fine" food, I find that traditional (pub) food ( a "pie and pint") provides some relief from the often overambitious and ubiquitous menus many restaurants propose. Besides, if you haven't had a good curry, fish and chips or Shepard's Pie etc., you haven't really experienced British food.

Of course you can get good food in a pub, beyond the traditional starchy "pub food" dishes. Just not all pubs. The gastropub fad has faded somewhat but that doesn't mean the British chefs have stopped dragging stodgy pub dishes into the 21st Century. After all, Heston Blumenthal claims his Fat Duck outside London started in a pub and rose to the title of best restaurant in the world at least once.
It is a fact of financial life that pubs have a hard time getting by just on beverages these days. The food has to be worth buying too.
As an aside, you can find adventurous and far-from-cheap gastropubs away from the English hills and vales. The Queen and Beaver in downtown Toronto has an adventurous chef and his meals can easily cost over $50. The bangers and mash, because of the quality of ingredients and cooking, will never be mistaken for the fatty gruels of old.

Fancyapint.com is worse than useless for pubs in the Cotswolds: it doesn't even accept there's such a place as Gloucestershire and doesn't even review the beer in West Oxfordshire pubs that win CAMRA awards year after year.

CAMRA's Good Pub Guide 2014 is currently available only as a paper edition. Its 2013 edition is available on Kindle, and for what the poster is looking for is reliable (it's the gastropubbery the poster's trying to break away from that fluctuates so much from year to year), but still pretty patchy about describing the food on offer. But CAMRA is very aware that West Oxfordshire is close to being the real beer capital of Britain, and its pub reviews for the Wychwood area are well informed and lucid.

All of which said, I've never found Welsh Rarebit in any pub, for the past 15 yeas I've found shepherd's pie most often microwaved from some food service specialist's frozen, delivered instant bar food service and personally wouldn't expect to find what the poster is looking for in a Wychwood pub.

Offhand, I can only think of the bar snacks menu at the Royal Oak, Ramsden coming anywhere near the brief within a ten mile radius - and only the St Aldate's Tavern in Oxford within 20 miles.

Southam, sadly, is utterly wrong: the gastropub fad is showing absolutely no signs of fading in the Cotswolds and over the past five years practically every once scruffy pub, with curry nights twice a week and quiz evenings sustained by decent ham sandwiches, has either closed, succumbed to the Farrow & Ball paint and the identikit gastromenu menu copied by the charismatic wife of a Duke or Earl from a rival's a few miles away or decided to cling on to an unapologetic beer & crisps only offer.

But Flannerpooch 2.0 and I will discuss this on the footpaths and see if we can come up with something.

First, a correction to the last post.

CAMRA's highly reliable guide is, of course, the Good Beer Guide. Everything I said above about the Good Pub Guide would have been true if I'd got its name right.

It's not to be confused with the Good Pub Guide, which is available on the web, but whose criteria for selection strike me as decidedly iffy. EXCEPT its current nomination for Oxfordshire pub of the Year: the Trout at Tadpole Bridge (between Buckland and Bampton, so within 10 miles of Burford), which is determined not to call itself a gastropub and has menus that sometimes meet the OP's brief. It also has a weekly Sausage Club menu (on Tuesdays, I think), which probably meets the brief as well.

Otherwise:

- the OP's selection of dishes is a pretty good summary of what not to expect in a pub. Welsh rarebit is really only ever found in Huffkins-style places. The best Huffkins-style place in the area (possibly on the planet) is in Burford: branches in Witney and Stow on the Wold have slightly different menus. The best place for a good English curry is a good English Indian restaurant run by an Englishperson of Bengali parents (though see below), and Burford's Spice Lounge is a perfectly good sample of the genre. Shepherd's pie I'm convinced is now a lost cause outside private houses: it's either microwaved from frozen, bought-in, or poncified in central London gastropubs. Fish & chips is iffy in most pubs (though a reliable staple in Gastropubs Lite - again see below), but works in a few pubs doing fish & chips nights. Nearest: The Plough at Finstock on Tuesdays. The OP missed out Chinese: the Dragon Inn in Burford High St is just as authentic an English eatery (though a bit ancient by most Chinese standards) as any flock-wallpapered Indian place.

- There's an unEnglishly authentic Cantonese place at The Pearl (from the outside, just another Cotswold pub) in Leafield. There's also an unGastropub menu at the Fox down the road, which is a kind of canteen for the nearby Formula 1 car factory (there's a dozen or so around the area).

- There's a war going on between the Gastropub Lites: eating places in pubs that don't do much in creative cookery, but specialise in precise cooking of high-quality, fully traceable ingredients. The war is at its fiercest in Kingham, where Daylesford's new White Rabbit takes on the incumbent Plough Inn. The consensus for a while has been that the Five Alls at Filkins (UK restaurant of the year in 2010, according to the Good Food Guide, which has some prestige in Britain) is the local champion at this, though the nearby Swan at Southrop thinks it disputes that. In all cases, the bar menus might come closer to the brief than the restaurant ones, which are all the stuff the OP's trying to avoid.

- You have to visit the Daylesford mother ship in Daylesford. Though some of the retail prices in the shops are clearly aimed at the Russian kleptocrat market (not insignificant round here, though easily confused with the English investment banker market), the restaurant is close to reasonably priced.

- some other ideas at the local food blog (http://pawsunderthetable.blogspot.co.uk/)Barnaby is NOT Flannerpooch 2.0, BTW.
The author finds it hard to be critical of restaurateurs who share her concern for local, sustainable, blah blah... But her heart's in the right place and there are a few places I've tried as a result that have been OK

I can't possibly improve on flanner's posts. They pretty much cover the territory -- you will find MANY good places to eat in and w/i a few miles of Burford. But the sort of things you seek aren't ''real pub food"

here is the correct link flanner provided.

http://pawsunderthetable.blogspot.co.uk/

Thanks flanner for your informative post. Yes, I am looking for something between a gastropub and one that serves tinned soup and frozen pies. Although I have been coming to the UK for some 25 years now, I admit I have little experience with pub meals. Most have been light lunches. I'll certainly check out your suggestions. I lived in Oxford for a year but never ate at St. Aldate's Tavern. Usually spend a night or two in Oxford at the end of my trips so will put it on my list.

"but never ate at St. Aldate's Tavern."

Wise man. For decades, scotch eggs were the height of its sophistication, then it spent much of the past decade being passed from one private equity owner to another (at one point getting itself rebranded The Hobgoblin).

It started trying interesting food about 18 months ago. For all I know, it might remorph again in the next three weeks. The Kings Arms, BTW, I'd forgotten now does some proper English comfort food - like fish finger sandwiches - and pork pies with a taste

They're almost all repositioning themselves almost every year. Though we're supposed to believe pub food's got better, it's mostly just got pricier and polarised. 40 years ago, when I first got a proper job, I used to live on pub shepherd's or steak & mushroom pies. Now I can only find stuff of that standard if Mrs F or I make them ourselves.

But if you want burgers made from hand-nurtured Aberdeen Angus hung for 42 days...

A bit of a shame that in order to have a decent shepherd's or steak and mushroom pie (another favorite) that we have to bake it ourselves!

I have nothing against the hand-nurtured Angus being hung for 42 days, but it does sound pricey.

outside of burford on the road towards stow there is a very nice pub on the left hand side of the road... it's a couple of miles from burford I think..

check out Maggie white sweaters on main st burford..

The reason that Shepherd's Pie is not really pub food is that traditionally it was made from left-over meat, usually lamb.

A weekend joint was bought and cooked to be served hot as Sunday lunch.

On Monday, it was served cold with fried left-over potato and other vegetables.

On Tuesday. the remains were made into Shepherd's Pie.

The distinctive taste of Shepherd's Pie is because the meat has been cooked before it is minced, and this results in a finer mince. Mince=ground for overseas posters.

Yes, but the reason shepherd's pie HAS been pub food is that it's jolly easy to get chunks of stewing lamb (usually cheaper per kg than leg meat if you buy them, or even less round here if you took an elderly ewe off a customer's hands), bake them, then mince them and make the pie as if the mince had come from a joint. And that's what pub landladies used to do during what's now looking like the golden age of pub food (late 60's to early 90s).

One problem is that you can't get free elderly ewes (or cows, or sows) any more (they've got to go to a far off abattoir, which costs more than they'll ever ever be worth). Another is that pub landladies don't cook in pub kitchens any more. All sorts of things - mostly to do with the food hygiene cult - have inflated the cost of running a real kitchen, so pubs either go upmarket (hence the £15.95 designer burgers) or pop junk into a microwave.

Either way, the landpartner's often doing an altogether different job anyway, so at least one of them can get a steady income. If the pressure of running a pub hasn't split them up or given one the heart attack.

Not one pub in my microtown has a full time landpartner. They're all dead or in London all week earning a proper wage.

Perhaps during the "golden age of pub food", landpartners would mince up the remaining meat from the Sunday roast lunches, which were a popular choice at the time. Maybe even mincing and reusing cooked meat is unacceptable now for health reasons, and might not appeal to more ambitious chefs.

Good point.

Recycled butternut squash risotto doesn't quite have the same appeal.

Thanks everyone for these informative (in so many more ways than one) replies.

A postscript on shepherd's pie, and the changeableness of Cotswold eating places.

Yesterday, the Flannerpooch 2.0 found a new playmate while on the footpaths, as happens every 10 minutes. Its owner was the chatelaine of one of our more remarkable stately homes, and while the two dogs exhausted each other, their Bosses fell to complaining about the sad state of local pubs, as is the custom of the country.

She waxed excited about new management of the Fox at Lower Oddington - whose menu does include cottage pie (the term now used for shepherd's pie made from meat other than lamb or mutton, though that's a recent pedantry). The Fox's is venison, from roe deer - meat that's constantly in glut round here, because there's a plague of deer and the cullers are in constant demand.

If you want to experiment (the chatelaine's restaurant descriptions implied a reasonably acute palate, though we've not visited) make sure to coincide the visit with likely opening hours of the not quite adjacent St Nicholas' church (there's a newer one in the centre of the village) and carry a torch.

The church does not have artificial lighting, but has a fine medieval Doom, which you almost always need a torch to see properly. So, still, do a few hundred other churches in England - but none, to my knowledge, have a painting to compare with its very late Magnificence (probably the last surviving piece of medieval painting to be put on a wall before the Great Vandalism Henry VIII released, in the most wanton destruction of art the world's ever known)

Personally, I find the most common explanation of the painting (that it's a satire on the Lord of the Manor, Thomas Wolsey) beggars belief: it's known to date from well before the Cardinal's downfall, and he certainly wasn't a man to encourage mockery. Its subject matter and treatment are unique in these islands and a history traveller might be intrigued by the mystery.

Thanks for the information. Always like to hear about a good pub but, IMO, there is nothing much better than a medieval wall painting and a satire at that! I am definitely intrigued.

flanneruk, It was very late when I read and responded to your post. I completely missed the point regarding your comment on a satirical nature being assigned to the painting. Indeed I can't imagine Wolsey adhering to any form of mockery. Unfortunately I'm no expert on medieval wall paintings, just an interested observer but, perhaps, a little research and a good look at the painting will help shape my own opinion.