You won’t miss sea view when fish is this good in the country

THEY may offer aged ruby red beef steaks cooked over charcoal and calf ’s liver with bacon, greens and mash. They may also serve up a mean Cotswold game pie and a rump steak burger, but despite its carnivorous name, The Old Butchers is arguably Britain’s best fish restaurant without the luxury of a sea view.

The ancient Cotswold wool town of Stow-on-the-Wold is as landlocked as can be and although it might be better known for quaint if overpriced tea rooms and ‘olde world’ coaching inns, The Old Butchers stands out like a shining beacon of gastronomy and warm hospitality.

Peter and Louise Robinson took over the former butchers’ shop on Park Street in 2005, having previously run The Kings Arms around the corner on the market square.

Prior to that, Peter was head chef at London’s hugely influential Terence Conran-owned Bibendum restaurant and at Olga Polizzi’s luxurious Hotel Tresanton in St Mawes, Cornwall.

It must have been the latter that instilled a love of fish cookery in this Macclesfield-born chef and Cornish seafood dominates the menu at The Old Butchers, whether it’s the Porthilly rock oysters, the wild sea bass or the mussels in the marinière.

The restaurant has a bistro feel thanks to the sumptuous leather armchairs and shelves lined with wine bottles. An unpretentious music policy on the lunchtime I visited rarely strayed from 1980s pop – Madonna’s Material Girl segued into Duran Duran’s Hungry Like The Wolf, followed by Bananarama’s Venus.

It all makes for an informal and relaxed place. It’s precisely what a neighbourhood restaurant should be, although still upmarket and appealing enough to reel in the Cotswold tourists.

Lengthy menus are often a turnoff – in lesser places, they often mean the food is cooked from frozen – but that’s certainly not the case here, where everything is cooked from fresh to order. The Robinsons are simply generous feeders who like to give people plenty of choice.

There really wasn’t a single dish on the menu that I didn’t want to sample, from the Cornish scallops and nduja butter or steak tartare and chips to the half grilled Cornish lobster, Ricard butter, chips and green salad or escargots à la Bourguignonne (snails in garlic herb butter). They certainly don’t make it easy for greedy solo diners.

I kicked off with a couple of Scottish langoustines (£3.75 each) – each the size of a small lobster, with a surprising amount of meat in the claws – served with a thick and glossy homemade mayonnaise.

Next, crispy pig’s trotter with smoked eel (£9.75) was faultless. The greaseless, breadcrumbed croquettes were packed with juicy shredded trotter meat flanked by a neat row of thinly sliced eel with a delicate smokiness, a swirl of fruity damson ketchup and a tangle of crunchy, mustardy celeriac remou- lade. It was precisely the sort of dish that makes this job worth doing.

It was followed by a bowl piled high with meaty scallops, plump mussels and perfectly cooked Cornish gurnard (£21) in a rich, rust-coloured ‘bouillabaisse’ sauce with plenty of heft and depth of flavour. It was the taste of Cornwall transported to the heart of the Cotswolds.

The desserts at The Old Butchers are comfortingly old school, including treacle tart and clotted cream, profiteroles and chocolate sauce, and tiramisu with espresso ice cream.

My creme brûlée (£7.50) passed the ‘spoon test’ – the glass-like sugar lid cracked as soon as I tapped it – and the set custard was perfectly silky. OK, the accompanying prunes might have lacked the promised Armagnac flavour – it was there but perhaps not as boozy as expected – but the warm, buttery Madeleine more than made up for that.

With Peter in the kitchen, Louise running the restaurant and daughter Millie working front-of-house, The Old Butchers is the epitome of the well-run family-run business.

Open seven days a week for lunch and dinner, it’s the sort of place everybody dreams of having on their doorstep. In short, it’s the perfect neighbourhood restaurant and as good as Cotswold dining out gets.

RATING

5/5

A bowl piled high with meaty scallops, plump mussels and perfectly cooked Cornish gurnard