The Punch Bowl Inn
Crosthwaite
Cumbria
England
Tel: +44 (0)1539 568237
Web: www.punchbowl.fsnet.co.uk (www.the-punchbowl.co.uk/)
Serves lunch and dinner Tuesday to Sunday lunch; bookings advised; children welcome; garden.
The next time you crave comforting country cooking – rabbit in a piquant mustard sauce, succulent duck confit, melting shank of lamb with braised white beans – don’t assume that you need to book a flight to Lyons or Bordeaux; just get on a train to the Lake District. Here, on the edge of a quiet valley filled with damson trees, you’ll find an unassuming dining pub serving the kind of earthy, deeply flavoured dishes you dream of.
The Punch Bowl Inn looks pretty ordinary; it’s built of local slate, with modern timbered windows. But the framed menus on the walls give the game away. These pay homage to some of the greatest restaurant chefs in the world – Alain Chapel, Michel Bras, Paul Bocuse – as well as Le Gavroche, The Waterside Inn, and various outposts of the Roux brothers’ empire where The Punch Bowl’s Steven Doherty was a star chef for more than 13 years.
Steven soaked up the Roux brothers’ attitude to cooking, what he describes as their ‘attention to detail, utter respect for ingredients, ceaseless perfectionism’, and has applied it to rustic dishes. The result is superbly wrought bourgeois cooking that carefully mixes French and British traditions. There are pâtés and terrines with very British relishes such as quince chutney or tomato pickle, baked ham with mash, creamy cider sauce and black pudding, and a compote of sweet-tart damsons with cinnamon ice-cream and shortbread.
Doherty’s desire to apply a French finesse that takes dishes to a higher plane is a passion nurtured under Albert Roux, with whom he perfected the recipe for lemon tart and made it a classic. This quest makes him wrestle with the simplest of dishes. Shank of lamb with beans, for example, always bothered him. The shank was slow-cooked to mouth-watering tenderness, but the skin around it was always flabby. So he now double-cooks the lamb shanks, braising them until the meat is almost falling off the bone, then scattering them with parsley and garlic crumbs and grilling them to get a crispy finish. Every dish shows this desire to maximize flavour, to improve texture.
Doherty left London, and his stellar career, because he was sick of city life. He decided to cook in a pub, rather than a restaurant, because, as he puts it: ‘I wanted to cook in a place where the car park would have Nissans beside Mercedes, where people could afford to eat good food regularly.’ At the Punch Bowl, you can eat something as simple as a great ham sandwich at lunchtime, and saddle of rabbit with wild mushrooms in the evening. And it’ll cost you less than eating at many of the chain restaurants up and down the country.
Tell anyone in Cumbria that you’re interested in good places to eat and they’ll say, ‘Oh you’ll want Steven Doherty’s then – the Punch Bowl. Best place to eat in the Lakes.’ And they’re right: it’s the best place to eat in the Lakes, and way, way beyond.