The Dartmoor Inn
Moorside
Lydford
Okehampton
Devon
England
Tel: +44 (0)1822 820221
Serves lunch and dinner Tuesday to Sunday lunch; bookings advised; children welcome (although no under fives on fri and sat night); courtyard garden.
Karen and Philip Burgess are having a meeting in the cosy office above their pub. Karen, a small, energetic blonde, is sewing antique buttons onto felt Christmas trees. Philip, a big man with the kind of exhausted face only chefs and junior doctors have, is drinking copious amounts of espresso, batting around ideas for a ‘Flavours of Burgundy’ dinner and wondering aloud which single-variety apple juices to put behind the bar. The Burgesses don’t just run a pub; they manage a powerhouse of creativity.
When the Burgesses bought the Dartmoor Inn five years ago it had a juke box, four deep-fat fryers and eight microwaves. Karen, who had spent childhood holidays here, barely recognized the place. They set about transforming a run-down boozer into a country inn that would stop Martha Stewart in her tracks. It’s old England meets New England. A small bar, with a roaring fire, gleaming copper and a huge vase of flowers, is at the centre of a network of dining rooms furnished with colour-washed dressers, ladder-backed Goldilocks chairs and plants in aged terracotta pots. Karen, who has never quite decided whether she is really a chef or a painter (she has worked as both), has done everything herself, from the wood panelling to the hand-sewn quilts on the walls.
The food is a touch American too, though in style rather than flavour. The Burgess’s favourite restaurant is Chez Panisse in San Francisco, the birthplace of modern Californian cooking, and you can see its influence. Like Chez Panisse’s founding chef, Alice Waters, they’ve used French attitudes to food to invigorate the cooking of their own area. The ‘Flavours of Burgundy’ dinner could just as well be celebrating the produce of Devon and Cornwall, with dishes such as mussel and saffron tart and Devon beef cooked in Burgundy with baby onions.
Also like Waters, the Burgesses spend a lot of time sourcing ingredients and forging links with small-scale producers who can provide them with the quality they want. With their butcher, they decide which breed of cattle, South Devon or Ruby Red, has the best meat for a particular dish. Fish – John Dory, scallops, crab and Cornish sea-bass – comes daily from the market at Brixham or from fishermen Philip knows at Looe. Fruit and veg come from hand-picked local growers, and the cheeses are a changing selection of the West Country’s finest.
The Burgesses want to offer their food to the widest range of people and believe a pub is the best place to do that. They’re as happy to serve you fish and chips with half a pint of ale as they are to bring on a three-course dinner and a £40 bottle of wine. And they don’t just want to feed you; they want you to taste the countryside and to be surrounded by pictures and artefacts that will help you enjoy the food even more. It works: there are few places, anywhere, with as much heart and soul as the Dartmoor Inn.
