Some might accuse me of being a food snob. In my defense, I’m just being practical when it comes to restaurant selection.
We like to cook. We cook from scratch most nights. Even if I wanted convenience food, my husband’s unusual tomato allergy takes the vast majority of prepared foods off limits. It can also make chain restaurants, or those who get packaged ingredients from an industrial source, a gamble. We love great ingredients and are lucky to live in a county blessed with excellent fruit, vegetables, meat (farmed and wild), trout streams and a coastline offering a wealth of seafood. Winchester’s twice monthly farmers’ market is as good as any you’ll find in France or Italy.
Quite simply: unless we are dropping from exhaustion or away from the house doing other things, we don’t see the point of going out unless it’s better than we can make at home. And that attitude takes all of the pubs in our immediate neighbourhood, and most of the restaurants in Basingstoke, out of consideration.
At last, however, I’ve found an exception. A 25-minute meander down lovely country lanes puts The Purefoy Arms on the edge of what we can properly call local, but it’s worth the drive, and what’s coming out of the kitchen is far beyond my abilities. We’ve tested the place twice in a week; once by chance for a Sunday lunch, again as a planned dinner for visiting friends from France. Aside for some slightly dry burgers on the first visit, it was a triumph.
The menu is upscale British classics, locally sourced, with a fairly limited but interesting selection. The expansive garden could double potential covers, as it did on our Sunday visit, but on a Thursday night with steady rain booking was essential and the cozy dining room was limited to eight tables. It’s an intimate place and feels very local, given that it’s on a country road that neither outsiders nor tourists have any reason to traverse. I suspect the residents of Preston Candover, a picture-postcard village with plenty of thatch and substantial homes that turn up in the advertising pages of Country Life, like it that way.
Their local, named after a local nobleman and not the famous actor, occupies a sober yet elegant Georgian brick building that would be at home in any Jane Austen adaptation. (Little wonder, given we’re in her home county and the pub is just 10 miles from the house where she did her best work.) The bar at The Purefoy spans the dining room on the left and the pub on the right; and though occupants of one can get a peak at the other, they have separate doors from the entry porch.
My meal on the Sunday was so exceptional I had to order it again: the ox cheek donut followed by pork belly. The donut was more accurately (though less poetically) a dome-shaped pudding, with an outer crust that was both sweet and savoury, and more the consistency of cornbread than wheat pastry. (Though wheat it was.) Crispy on the outside, fluffy beneath, giving way to a filling of shredded ox cheek stewed down in a rich, tomato-based sauce. As if that weren’t special enough, it was crowned with a smooth onion jamb and a sprinkle of herb crumb. I nearly wept that my husband’s allergies kept him from trying this wonder.
The pork belly that followed was probably the best I’ve ever had. Every distinguishable bit of fat had been rendered into the flavoursome meat, which didn’t even need a knife to cut. It had been both smoked and cured, and after its long and slow (one assumes) cook augmented with a rich, sticky sauce and an orange and almond granola. There was also a bit of pickled fennel. None of this shouted out on its own, but rather made every bite of the pork an explosion of flavour. The additional element on the plate that did stand out was “crispy bubble and squeak”; essentially a sphere of that butter-laden, tasty side dish breaded and then deep fried. This is comfort food elevated to a higher plane.
I wasn’t the only one indulging in culinary reveries. My godson, a slight 12-year-old who isn’t normally a big eater, demolished an entire side of ribs that looked and smelled worthy of a Midwestern BBQ master’s grill. The peppered fillet stake won raves for its spectacular combination of accompaniments. Celeriac remoulade, mushroom and spinach tartlet, truffle and creamed potato combined for that perfect “Masterchef bite”. But the real accolades were saved for one particular starter.
It was not the pan fried scallops, beetroot, apple foam, peanut, chilli and ginger, even though that tasted delicate enough and looked pretty enough to grace any Michelin-starred table. But rather the more prosaic-sounding caramelised onion quiche with onion ice cream, pickled onion and fennel. Who raves about a quiche? And there was so much that could go wrong in this trio of rather odd treatments of a vegetable usually in a supporting role. Instead, this was an exercise in delicacy. The quiche was more of a delicate flan, each onion element subtle but full of flavour, the fennel barely there but adding a little hint of spice. The sample bites my husband shared out were so beguiling we immediately ordered another for the table to share.
Unsurprisingly, the desserts we sampled were also excellent. A plate of English cheeses did their patriotic duty and conquered the taste buds of our French guests. A rum baba managed to be both beautiful, delicate and boozy enough to make me slightly worried about my designated driver status. A white chocolate mousse was an Instagrammable thing of beauty.
The only failure here was my godson’s white hot chocolate. Without the redeeming bitterness of cacao it drifted into mouth-numbing sweetness I’ve only tasted twice in my life: the truly vile butterbeer at the Harry Potter studio tour and the St. Louis Ritz Carlton’s attempt to turn that city’s classic gooey butter cake into a martini. As with the other two, one taste of this concoction was exquisite, the second a bit much and the third overwhelming. Served in a shot glass, it might have been perfect.
A bit of research into the man at the helm indicates that such excellence in this quiet country pub should not come as a surprise. Having cut his teeth at The Vineyard near Newbury (my review here), Gordon Stott moved to The Sun in Dummer (just down the road from Preston Candover and an equally affluent area) where he became head chef at just 20 and went on to win a host of accolades, including gastropub of the year. In 2018 he moved to become owner and head chef at the Purefoy, where he’s earned a “plate” mention in the Michelin guide and where I suspect he’s on track for a star. He is, after all, barely 30. We’ll be keeping our eyes on him, and the pub’s phone number on hand for those nights when we want someone better than us … much, much better … to cook.
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