The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Table talk
Michael Deacon at The Purefoy Arms in Hampshire
I DON’T KNOW about you, but I find it really unnerving. The waiter coming over, asking what you’d like to eat – and then not writing it down. Not even getting out a notepad. Just nodding and smiling, and saying ‘Certainly, sir,’ and ‘Excellent, madam,’ as he works his way round the table. Then off he saunters, relying entirely on his memory.
I mean, it’s very impressive. But it makes me nervous. What if the waiter misremembers what we said? What if he gets my table’s orders muddled up with another table’s? If I’m brought the wrong dish, will I just shrug and eat it anyway, or will I reorder – and end up eating my main course half an hour after my friends have finished? What are we all going to say, if the waiter strolls up, arms laden with steaming plates, and says, ‘Here we are. One roast tortoise, one donkey à l’orange, two fried gym shoes and a side order of paper clips. Could I get you anything else?’
Lord knows where waiters find the confidence to do it. I know I couldn’t. My memory’s hopeless. It’s very good at remembering things that I will never have any conceivable use for, such as who scored a hat trick for QPR at Old Trafford on New Year’s Day 1992, and the name of Philip Larkin’s secretary at the University of Hull. But it’s no good at all at remembering things I actually need to know. However desperately I claw the air, useful information floats serenely and irretrievably from my grasp, like a balloon in a breeze. If I were a waiter, I wouldn’t just need to
write the order on a notepad. I’d need it tattooed in capitals on my forearm.
It happened at this week’s restaurant. The waitress shimmered across to our table and took our order, calm as you like, without a pencil in sight. Interested, I asked her whether she used any special memory techniques, crafty mnemonics involving rhymes or keywords or picture association. Not at all, she said. She was just used to it. Saved her having to carrying a notepad around. Nothing more to it than that.
Well, it may not have seemed like much to her, but to my sieve-like brain it sounded like a task of Herculean magnitude. She got the order completely right, though. OK, so there was one small thing: she didn’t bring the little dish of olives we’d asked for with our starters. Maybe she didn’t hear in the first place. Not sure. Either way, I felt weirdly shy about pointing it out, so instead I apologetically asked whether she could bring us a little dish of olives as well, as though the idea had only that moment occurred to me, and I was kicking myself for not having thought of it sooner. Of course, she said, and brought them straight away. All was well.
If anyone ever asks me to define Britishness, I will say: the desperate silent terror of having to tell a stranger to their face that they’ve made an extremely minor error.
The restaurant was The Purefoy Arms, which opened in June in the pretty Hampshire village of Preston Candover. It’s small and buffed to a shine, with a big beer garden out the back, and dog treats for sale at the bar – including, for £2.99, a serving of ‘doggy ice cream’. Honey and banana, apparently. I never realised dogs had such sophisticated palates. Did they like it? ‘Well,’ said the barmaid, ‘we haven’t had any complaints.’
The Purefoy is run by Gordon Stott, the winner of the UK Pub Chef of the Year Award 2017. Remarkable, isn’t it, the way pub food has changed. In recent years it’s become so much more ambitious and creative – and, let’s be frank, middle class. Even down to the bread, which at The Purefoy is sourdough, and served with beurre noisette, sun-blushed tomato and basil pesto. I started with the ‘kedgeree’, which was listed on the menu in quote marks, and with good reason, because it looked like a small bowl of custard with an egg yolk floating in it. It tasted great, though: tangy curried rice, slippery poached cod, mussels, and juicy capers. My wife had the mushroom and truffle soup, served in a bowl that looked like an upturned sun hat. She said it tasted very light, like drinking a cloud.
My main was the pork chop, served with sweet-and-sour peppers, fennel, and bubble and squeak, plus a side of wispy hispi cabbage. Perhaps not blowyour-socks-off spectacular, but good, well presented, and a cut above a conventional pub lunch.
We shared two puddings. First the Tia Maria-soaked sponge with coffee cream, meringue and chocolate: strong, punchy, super-boozy. Then the ‘chocolate bar’, which consisted of alternating bricks of chocolate ganache and white-chocolate fudge. Very soft and squishy, in particular the white chocolate: in texture it was almost closer to butter than fudge.
I liked The Purefoy. It’s a pub that takes food very seriously, while still managing to be unpretentious, relaxed and friendly. If you fancy pushing the boat out, there’s a sixcourse tasting menu: one for meat eaters and another for vegetarians.
Unfortunately I can’t comment on the doggy ice cream, as we don’t own dog. The couple two doors down have a pug. Next time we’ll bring him along, as a consultant.
The mushroom and truffle soup tasted very light, like drinking a cloud