A star is born, and not a single bum note
TABLE FOR TWO This Essex fine-dining pub serves food that is ambitious but grounded, says Keith Miller
The Dunmow Flitch Trials are a coy folk ritual of some antiquity, whereby couples try to convince a jury of “six maidens and six bachelors” that they’ve spent the first year and a day of wedlock in a condition of sustained happiness. If they do so, the eponymous flitch – half a salted pig’s worth – will be theirs.
A cynic might point out that the custom is more about rewarding a love of bacon than it is about promoting the institution of marriage. But I suppose most relationships are transactional at some level if you drill down far enough.
When Daniel Clifford, of Midsummer House fame, took over the Flitch a few years back, he didn’t serve bacon on the menu, an oversight that wasn’t lost on reviewers. He has since handed the reins to a Midsummer House colleague, Tim Allen, who’s also cooked at the Wild Rabbit in the Cotswolds, and whose name is now emblazoned all over the joint, engraved in the doorstep and etched on the frosted glass partitions that give the front-facing half of this converted pub the faint appearance of a rustic dental practice.
Allen has reinstated, or I guess “instated”, the titular dish in the form of an excellent starter: a Jenga brick of bacon, maple-cured and slowcooked, dark and sticky on the outside, paired with a crisp-edged, tender-hearted scallop and served with some cauliflower, a few squeezelets of gooseberry, a little cylinder of charred cabbage wrapped in superthin prosciutto crudo and several cigarette papers of blade-sharp apple.
It’s all arranged across the plate in a straight line, a style I noted was still being observed at the Wild Rabbit when I ate there last year, some months after Allen’s departure.
We’d gone for one lunch menu, at a cheeky £25 for three courses, and one à la carte costing nearly twice that. There was no appreciable differ- ence in quality or complexity – we pretty much loved everything. It’s an expertly balanced menu, cheffy and Michelin-chasing (they’ve just – stop press – been awarded a star in the 2019 guide), but tangibly grounded in hearty cuts of meat and fish, and arranged artfully but, once you’ve got used to the idea of all those straight lines and squeezelets, by no means fussily.
Veal rump came with more cauliflower – the occasional overlap of ingredients between dishes didn’t seem lazy, but rather gave a nice sense of structure – and a few bonbon-like agnolotti full of a creamy truffle liquid which could be slurped directly from one nibbled end of the pasta pouch for an undiluted hit, or allowed to mingle with the meat reduction already on the plate. Monkfish appeared on the lunch menu, done as halibut usually is, with a zeppelin of rich mash, a small thicket of brown shrimps and a salty-smoky caper sauce.
We paused, swirled our glasses of Encantador Monastrell Yecla (“Vino fantastico!” it says on top of the label, pleasingly) round like the walking bon-vivant clichés we are and looked about us.
The dining area is longish and narrowish, retaining the low ceilings of the building’s ancient pub incarnation, but purged of any historical features to yield a neutral, contemporary and comfortable, if – I’m bound to say – not wildly stylish effect.
You can sit at the pass in a sort of breakfast bar arrangement, but we couldn’t see much of the open kitchen as we were too far back.
Through the French windows to one side we had a view of a stark beer garden, the only testament to the Flitch’s foodie credentials an elaborate brick oven/ barbecue set-up, with not one but two en suite Big Green Eggs.
A couple appeared with some sort of wolfhound in tow, for whom they poured some water from a standpipe into a bowl.
We returned to the fray. On the lunch menu were two puddings, one of which was a cheesecake, which my partner hates for reasons I’ve never quite got to the bottom of, partly because whenever I ask I get the feeling that I’ve disappointed her in some way: that if I cared at all about her I’d just know. So we ordered the other one – more zeppelins (I suppose the correct word is quenelles) of rhubarb and ginger, sourdough and orange ice cream.
From the carte I summoned some cheese: another highlight; any three from eight possibilities, the superstar of an impressive line-up being fourme au maury, an Auvergnat blue cheese washed in red wine.
I’m not sure I can go the whole (ahem) hog and award the Flitch 10 out of 10 – I didn’t like the room much, for one thing, though our fellow diners didn’t seem bothered. But I’m tempted.
It’s hard to remember anything beyond the real highs and lows of food you’ve eaten in the past, but lunch at the Flitch did take me back to the Wild Rabbit, where dishes that I guess had been devised by Allen were being cooked after his departure ( and the subsequent loss of the WR’S Michelin star) by competent but maybe not stellar chefs.
And while I enjoyed eating there, and said as much on this page, it now seems to me in hindsight that there were a few small glitches, the kind of thing it might have seemed churlish to make much of at the time – sauces reduced a degree too far, textures that “wished themselves unmarried”, as they say at the Dunmow Flitch Trials.
Here and now, under the purr of the Stansted flight path, I don’t think either of us experienced a single bum note.
TIM ALLEN’S FLITCH OF BACON
ESSEX
LUNCH FOR TWO
£ 120 9/ 10 The Street, Little Dunmow, Essex CM6 3HT 01371 821660; flitchofbacon.co.uk