Yahoo News The Pig On The Hill, Westward Ho! Devon, review: 'Many a mizzle makes a drizzle'
The Pig On The Hill, Westward Ho! Devon, EX39 5AH
Contact: 01237 459222; pigonthehillwestwardho.co.uk
The Pig on the Hill lies a mile or so inland from Westward Ho! in north Devon, apparently the UK’s only place name to be adorned with an exclamation mark – though there are quite a few that could do with a question mark if you ask me.
It has nothing to do with the Pig Hotels group, whose writ runs widely across the South and South West, and whose outposts are cliquey and boutiquey, an aristocratic fantasy of peasant life, a fête galante of foraged ingredients, artisanal tisanes and ensuite herb gardens, all washed down with lashings of Farrow & Ball.
The WH! one – the pig at hand, let’s say – is more authentically rural: in fact it was adapted from a cowshed, though it’s been spruced up in the adapting so the exterior effect is that of a retired gangster’s lair on the Costa Blanca. Still, a powerful rustic vibe persists. Agricultural implements – and several cute little images of pigs – line the walls. Geese sound a minatory honk when you arrive, as if leaping to the defence of the Roman Republic; the farm next door posts gruff messages forbidding a potential shortcut. There is mud.
We arrived a little footsore, having walked around the low headland that separates WH! from Bideford, in conditions that my West British travelling companion described as somewhere between a mizzle and a drizzle. We sat in the bar bit (where the stools are modelled on tractor seats) nursing a couple of beers before going through to the eating area, done out in a sort of diner style, to one side of the long, narrow space.
Previous experience had forewarned us against expecting much in the way of divergence from your classic, canonical Devonian pub menu. The Pig on the Hill seemed a bit different: hearty and meaty, to be sure; but with a few cheffy touches (Szechuan pepper! Apple jam! Cauliflower purée! Several dishes served with something other than chips! Something in a cup!) alongside “the classics”. This, plus all the usual guff about seasonality and provenance, made for a beguiling proposition.
I’d be lying if I said it was a complete success. It was our server’s first day, and several aspects of our order went awry. I’d hate any criticism to attach to the front-of-house team, though: they dealt capably and gracefully with our mitherings alongside the various demands of the bar and the dining room – not to mention a rowdy party in the skittle alley next door, to whom bowl after bowl of chips was ferried through with a ceremonial air, like offerings being brought to the Minotaur.
A decade of Come Dine With Me and Masterchef has turned us all into clipboard-wielding would-be Michelin inspectors
I’d also confidently speculate that if we had visited on a summer Sunday, with the barbecue fired up, kids joyfully chasing the geese and live music from Okehampton’s leading Bob Marley tribute band, rather than limping in on a wet night in the first falterings of spring, then the exuberance of the place would surely have taken our minds off the odd dropped catch.
Our problem was more conceptual, if that’s not a faintly pretentious word to use about dinner in a former cowshed. Too many of those cheffy touches were either misapplied or not followed through. The Szechuan pepper in our (fresh, crispy and of itself delicious) squid was anaemic and understated: our lips remained resolutely tingle-free. I enjoyed a flatiron steak, sliced as in an Italian tagliata, nicely aged, robustly seasoned, rare as I’d asked, served with triple-cooked chips (now the statutory minimum). But it came with a fussy little mini-shepherd’s pie made with slow-braised beef shin, succulent with bone marrow, topped with a creamy mushroom cloud of fondant potato and served in a tiny saucepan. Again, fine in itself – better than fine – but distractingly, weirdly dissonant with the steak.
Roast hake arrived in a bowl the rough size and shape of a Second World War US infantryman’s helmet. The “seafood sauce” turned out to be a sort of bisque; the “sea vegetables”, which had suggested the thrilling image of a pair of tattooed chefs foraging among the rock pools, baskets akimbo, turned out to be a scant handful of samphire which might as well have come from Tesco. As you worked your way down into the great concavity of the bowl, everything tended to gloopify.
Perhaps the most straightforwardly good thing we ate was a panna cotta made with buttermilk to lend a touch of acidity, of just the right consistency (it shivered when you spooned into it), with a perfectly balanced and entirely unstringy rhubarb and ginger compote. It proved what we already knew: these people can cook. So why didn’t our dinner quite hit the target?
Partly, it’s just the changing nature of the marketplace. A decade of Come Dine With Me and Masterchef has turned us all into clipboard-wielding would-be Michelin inspectors. We mistrust simplicity; we demand our sauce skidmarks, our charred cauliflower, our lamb three ways. This makes us a hard target for chefs. And while the food at the Pig on the Hill was definitely a cut above the sort of blameless stodge available elsewhere along the South West Coastal Path (at least until one reaches the Babylonian delights of Bude), it betrayed a strange, neurotic fear of simplicity, while also lacking the courage of its convictions.
Unlike its piggy namesakes – and unlike, say, the Carew Arms, the last West Country foody pub I reviewed here, six or so months ago, a fully realised essay in pastoral romanticism, the gastropub equivalent of a mid-Seventies Van Morrison LP – the more ambitious aspects of the Pig on the Hill’s menu seemed bolted on rather than built in.
