aa gill recent review

[Ken Gargett]

[Ken Gargett]

no idea why nothing showing. will keep trying????

[Ken Gargett]

[Ken Gargett]

rob, i think your forum is broken.

[shrink]

[Ken Gargett]

give that man a cigar but that wasn't actually it.

[samb]

Informative piece, Ken

[El Presidente]

Some of your finest work..... made my day

[dicko]

Some of your finest work..... made my day

Hope Colt see's this!

[Colt45]

Hope Colt see's this!

Comedy this pure can't really be improved upon!

[reg]

Hope Colt see's this!

hope smithy DOESN'T see this! world war III

[Colt45]

hope smithy DOESN'T see this!

personally, I could have easily confused it with something Smithy would post.....

[android]

KG, this is why your Rx say's don't mix with ETOH!

[Warren]

Ken I've learned a lot today.

Priceless.

[LiLo]

I nominate this for post of the year.

[mkz]

This post should be moved to the classic section!

[Ken Gargett]

a great shame as it was a really wonderful piece by gill at his most acerbic.

but it will just not load. i think it just has too much dignity to allow itself on this forum.

[El Presidente]

a great shame as it was a really wonderful piece by gill at his most acerbic.

but it will just not load. i think it just has too much dignity to allow itself on this forum.

Shoot it to me.

[asmith]

There are some days that you just thank god for Ken.

Keep up the good work mate.

[Ken Gargett]

There are some days that you just thank god for Ken.

Keep up the good work mate.

given you are a 45 year old bloke of questionable practices who packs dead vegetation for a living, i would have thought you'd thank god for toast or anything else to help you get through the day.

[El Presidente]

Courtesy of Ken Gargett

AA Gill reviews The Kingham Plough Kingham, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire; 01608 658327. lunch, mon-sat noon-1.45pm, sun noon-2.30pm; dinner, mon-sat 7pm-8.45pm

Five stars Bronte country Four stars Queen & country Three stars country & western Two stars Black Country One star country pancake

Change happens very slowly in the country. Old habits don't just die hard, they stain. They're insanitary, and probably illegal. Country folk like things that are tried and tested. Tried in magistrates' courts and tested in the back of barns by five good sturdy lads with a bit of a drink on them. Coomb and vale appreciate ways and beliefs that have stood out in all weathers, been worn to a smooth practicality by the seasons. They prefer vendetta to Asbos, exorcism to antidepressants. Why splash out on a fancy bidet when you've got a perfectly good labrador? Why settle for five fingers, like city folk? Real peasants like to breed, to preserve and enhance family characteristics, keeping the gene pool small and repetitive.

One of the things that hedged communities continue to resist with all the black and stubby teeth in their carbuncled and wobbly jaws is good food. I'm speechless with admiration at the way the muddy and chemically enhanced bits of Britain still manage to consume pre-colour wind-up dinners in cafes that can compete with anything you'll find in Moldova. Here, they still make soup the traditional way, by pouring carefully boiled water over desiccated granules. The English food resurrection — it hasn't been a renaissance, more back from the dead than rebirth — is entirely urban, exactly the opposite of how food works everywhere else in Europe. There, good things to eat start in the kitchens of those who grow and husband good things to cook. The best restaurants in Italy, France and Spain look out over countryside. The march of gastronomy tramps from the field to the town.

In Britain, all the really innovative food is made in cities. Well, one city. London. And chefs have had to beg and bribe, plead and perform, to get the peasantry to produce raw ingredients that haven't had their beaks cut off or been chemically peeled. The evangelical conversion to modern British food has barely made it across the M25. It's like the spread of Methodism in Yemen. Where you do find local ingredients worth putting in your mouth, they're generally made by amateur, laid-off, born-again post-peasants who want to keep an allotment and a sow as part of some bigger, child-rearing, global, political, lifestyle movement thingy, or because it'll make a good television series. The bespoke-craftsman food business produces some of the most pathetically inept ingredients outside of an infants' school's nature table. Stroll round any farmers' market and wonder at the national shame and embarrassment of the bush-tucker challenge that is home-made Blighty grub: the vile jams, like boiled Fruit Pastilles; the artisanal bread, or organic doorstops; the remedial and inelegant nursing-home cakes; tiny pieces of hacked, underhung meat, with labels of adjectives and excuses as long as a Thomas Hardy sonnet. All sealed in industrial plastic. The vacuum-packing machine is the first bit of agricultural equipment new-age market gardeners buy, swiftly followed by the miniature smoker. There is no bit of desperate flesh, frond or fin that can't be embalmed with a tarry, slimy, overpoweringly carcinogenic added value. So we're offered mountains of disgusting, fire-damaged game, garlic and even salt that tastes like cancer-ward sputum swabs. The one exception is cheese. In the past 30 years, Britain has produced some spectacularly good cheeses. I suspect the reason is that while you can naively and amateurishly raise pork pies, to make a cheese, you've really got to know what you're doing, or learn before your bank manager finds out.

So it was with a leaden expectation and a puckering stomach that the Blonde and I loaded up the twins and hove up the M40, the road of tears, to the land that humility and the Luftwaffe forgot. The Cotswolds. Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire — honey-coloured hell on earth. Darfur with thatch. Stow-on-the-Wold is kitsch Mordor. But this isn't really the country, is it? It's a suburban adventure playground for media folk. A sort of chilly safari park, a 4WD turbo pedigree dogging lay-by. I must admit that on a cold and bright winter Sunday, when you could see as far as civilisation, it did have a sparkling varnish of Vaughan Williams lyrical prettiness. Just as long as you kept moving.

I expect the locals call Kingham a village. I expect they call it our village. It's not. It's a cul-de-sac in the suburban creep. It's twinned with Billamberg and Smythson-on-the-Mantel. The Plough is a local pub that's got a bit of a reputation. You may not have heard of it, but if you lived in Notting Hill, you would have. There's a big car park, with spaces wide enough for big rural-school-run cars. Inside, it has that traditional, higgledy-piggledy, knocked-about claustrophobia. We were sat in an inglenook, for God's sake. An inglenook, on one of those rural benches that the tenants were made to wait on, squeezing their caps while their daughters were swived.

We were meeting local Londoners Nick Love and his handmade fiancée, Alice BB. I grudgingly have to admit that the staff are charming and not remotely local. Well, they were local to Sandhurst and Andalusia. We started with home-made scotch eggs, one of those things that are infinitely better home-made than commercially bought, then home-corned beef with black potatoes and an egg. Each of these ingredients came with a provenance, a county name and a family tree, but I'm not encouraging that sort of thing. It was well made, though I thought it tasted slightly more of jack russell than cow. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Warm salad of goose neck was excellent, a rarely offered seasonal delicacy, and there was snails and mushrooms on toast, and, for Sunday lunch, beef, pork or lamb. All came with titles and addresses. Apparently, my lamb had gone to university, reading divinity, no doubt.

All of this was exactly what you'd want from a Sunday lunch in a pub: well made, generous, hot, hearty, tasty, thoughtful and, of course, measured against country wages, ruinously expensive. Main courses are £15 to £17, starters £8 or £9. But then, hey ho hey nonny no, this isn't the country, this is Oxfordshire, and everybody's nanny earns more than £50,000, so that's all right. This is the pub food you've always dreamt of. It's possibly the perfect Sabbath inn, as long as you don't look out of the windows. But it can only be sustained by London folk. Coming here a lot.

The kitchen is a serious restaurant workplace. The bar menu is as fine as I've ever seen. There is a profusion of local cheeses and ice creams in metropolitan flavours. It's all a lot of work, and it's well worth it, and anyone thinking of opening a local pub restaurant should come here and see the gold standard. And anyone who's about to write to me saying that their local hostelry does a damn good ploughman's without all that fancy wine-list nonsense should eat here before posting it. Mind you, you should see the locals. There were blokes here with hiking boots and gaiters, and three layers of Gore-Tex. You'd think it was Orkney. If you want mud round here, you have to order it from Daylesford.

When the kids go to skip in puddles in their Boden wellies, the au pairs offer still or sparkling. It's not real out here. It's not funny. But it probably is quite clever. And you can eat very well.

[Onsto]

A.A. Gill is a rampaging, self important dickhead with the palette of a fire eater. He should be chemically castrated before he breeds any further. Anyone who thinks this is harsh should read the above again.

Ken - shame on you for trying to broaden this asshats audience.

[DrunkenMonkey]

A.A. Gill is a rampaging, self important dickhead with the palette of a fire eater. He should be chemically castrated before he breeds any further. Anyone who thinks this is harsh should read the above again.

Ken - shame on you for trying to broaden this asshats audience.

I have to say I find him really amusing. Of course, I have to admit he doesn't have the wit to come up with insults like "dickhead". Well done.

[PADDYWHACK121272]

Ken - shame on you for trying to broaden this asshats audience.

Mmmm, could take a while for shame to kick in i'm thinking...keep 'em coming Ken...

[Onsto]

I have to say I find him really amusing. Of course, I have to admit he doesn't have the wit to come up with insults like "dickhead". Well done.

Referencing his lack of taste was the insult. Calling him a dickhead was a personal observation. I wasn't aiming for wit.

People like Gill are what's really wrong with the UK these days. Style over substance - it's a £40 pub lunch and he thinks that's ok while abusing all food outside of London? Snobbery, tastelessness and verbosity in place of thought and real commetary. It's not of enough importance to engage in an argument about - just didn't want to let it go by without at least pointing it out.