Review: The Vine Tree, Crickhowell

Actually The Vine Tree is across the river in the village of Llangattock, but I’m guessing more people will at least have heard of Crickhowell. The lovely little town in the Usk Valley, upriver from Abergavenny and beneath the Brecon Beacons? No? It’s a lovely area, you should take a break there.

The Vine Tree got a new head chef in Matthew Sampson about three months before our visit, along with a new tasting menu format. We were there on a Thursday night and the ambience was a little quirky. The dining room has a small bar, with mainstream beer taps, and the decor seems to still be waiting for a refresh to be in keeping with their destination tasting menu ambitions (Crickhowell is small, there are not enough locals here for an £85 tasting menu). The wooden chairs are a bit unforgiving. On a Thursday night there were only two other tables occupied, in a place with surely forty covers, and just one front-of-house and two in the kitchen. Service was good and friendly, though.

We went with the shorter £60 menu. Snack of a cheesy biscuit topped with Welsh cheddar and black garlic ketchup was tasty enough, the biscuit a chewy texture when I was expecting crunch. First little starter was a bijou piece of sea bream topped with slivers of jalapeno and served in a clear tomato broth with jalapeno oil. This ate very nicely, with a salt tang from the salmon roe on top. Second starter was a little dish of hen-of-the-woods mushroom in a deeply umami broth of mushroom and onion. Absolutely top-notch flavour bomb.

I went for the beef main, a thumb-sized piece of slow-cooked beef finished to a magnificent char on the barbecue, topped with a cherry ketchup and then cabbage and nasturtium leaves. Really ravishing bit of meat paired with the clean, sharp fruity flavour of the cherry. Maureen’s cod was perfectly cooked and served in a warming cider veloute with a good dollop of bright yellow pike roe on top. Pudding was a spooful of beautiful chocolate mousse scattered with crunchy puffed spelt grains and a bright tang of orange and olive oil; very luscious but over too quickly.

I should mention the nice little Parker House roll for bread course, and the dish of luscious little lemon and burnt butter madeleines they served with coffee, because these did much to make the meal feel sufficient. Sadly that’s my main takeaway from our dinner: how small every course was, even by tasting menu standards, how we scoffed every morsel of bread when we’d normally be saying “mustn’t eat too much of the bread, it’ll spoil our appetite…” It’s a shame because I thought the cooking was really excellent, I enjoyed the flavours in every dish, and it would be a good find in the middle of the Brecon Beacons if the portions were only just a little more… generous. Which is the right word. It’s not about whether a fine dining meal has filled you up, it’s about whether it feels generous.