Sitting in the kitchen
I know what kind of cuisine I like. I like powerful flavours. I like them sharp, sour, bitter, umami. Ferments and pickles. Charring and smoking. Herb and spice. I’m not so bothered by delicacy and cream, butter and elegant simplicity. I think this explains why sometimes my lukewarm reviews of places like Five Fields and Core – clearly superb examples of their type – don’t agree with what everyone else is writing about them.
Conversely, I will fall happily in love with places like Oxheart, a tiny place lurking in a rural Cotswold village cooking up the kind of place-based modern British food that I prefer. There are a couple of seats at the kitchen counter, which we were lucky enough to get, because then you can spend the whole meal watching Chef Mark Ramshaw cooking and chat with him when there’s time. And there are maybe 6 or 8 other covers, that’s it. The decor is dark and woodsy, the crockery nicely rustic local pottery.
Chalk stream trout
Lots to enjoy in the food. Very easy to scoff was a starter of sticky onions and ogleshield cheese grilled together and topped with a friendly abundance of truffle. Gimme a trug of this and a huge chunk of bread and I’d be in heaven. Oh yeah, and the bread course was special in itself: a beautiful sourdough with smoky butter, a little jar of excellent beer pickles and some slices of absolutely superb pork charcuterie.
Pork, peas and pickled strawberry was a good main course; meltingly good piece of slow-cooked meat with the strawberry making a great relish. Loads of flavour in the gravy to boot. Fish course was chalk-stream trout, cured rather than cooked but still served with a very tangy beurre blanc.
Pork
First dessert was a proper savoury: a chunk of bitter-caramel-y spiralised tarte tatin, alongside a chunk of beautifully kept local rind-washed cheese (I didn’t note the name, sorry!). Truly great pairing. The main dessert included the dramatic flair of a strawberry sorbet set to look exactly – I mean EXACTLY – like a frozen strawberry. It was spookily good and of course it tasted great. Every dish was consistently good, which with such determined local sourcing and invention, isn’t easy.
The tasting menu at Oxheart was £65 before drinks when we went. The wine list is small but interesting, we found some good stuff. If you like the same kind of food that I like, you’ll love Oxheart.
Not a strawberry
