The Stagg Inn
The Stagg Inn
Titley, nr. Kington
Herefordshire
England
Tel +44 (0)1544 230221
Web: www.thestagg.co.uk (www.thestagg.co.uk/)
Serves lunch and dinner Tuesday to Sunday lunch; bookings advised; children welcome; garden.
Trelough duck with elderflower; lamb with fennel and garlic purée; roasted pineapple with vanilla ice-cream: it’s difficult to believe, as you read chef Steve Reynolds’ menu, that he used to be ‘a doner kebab and six pints of lager man’; that, apart from a short stint at the Roux brothers’ Le Gavroche restaurant, he is entirely self-taught; and that he’s never been to France. Difficult because his pub, the Stagg Inn (the first pub in Britain to get a Michelin star) is the kind of unpretentious country eatery you find in provincial France: it serves delicious but restrained cooking, it’s doggedly regional and it’s full of locals.
Steve was an architectural photographer when he got fed up with London and moved back to his native Herefordshire. He started to cook in a pub owned by friends and his style developed as he cooked and read Raymond Blanc and Prue Leith. Perhaps it’s because he hasn’t experienced sustained exposure to restaurants that his cooking is so unshowy. He admits to cooking in ‘a kind of bubble’. He never knows what is fashionable; he just sources top-quality produce and doesn’t do anything too complicated with it.
Nearly all the food he serves is right on his doorstep, not because he has a romantic notion about ‘localness’, but because the produce here is very good, and because he and his partner Nicola want to support and feed the community. In this, as in so much else, the Stagg Inn is a beacon.
