Review: The Bell Inn, Yarpole

This weekend was clearly doomed. Doooooomed!

Which is another way of saying that we were too late trying to book the restaurant(s) we wanted and so ended up eating somewhere dull on Saturday night. And then we didn’t even manage to rectify things with a good Sunday lunch, making for pretty much a culinary failure of a weekend.

Our friends Tim and Vanessa were visiting and we had wanted to try The Checkers in Montgomery, which scored a Michelin star this year… but was perhaps understandably booked up a couple of weeks in advance. So we thought we’d return to The Stagg at Titley, the granddaddy of Michelin-starred pubs, which we hadn’t been to for years. Fully booked. So we settled on The Bell at Yarpole, that I vaguely recalled had a Bib Gourmand and was run by Claude Bosi’s brother.

The Bell is actually under new ownership, has been for a year. Cedric Bosi has followed his brother up to London and can be found at a new gastropub in Wimbledon. The current chef at The Bell was apparently winner of Herefordshire’s New Chef of the Year, 2010. Their website is annoying, but I like that the address is “thebellyarpole.co.uk” which looks like it should read “the belly arpole”.

It’s still a lovely pub, and the chap behind the bar was friendly and helpful. Service was generally friendly too, though not terribly skilful. And so we come swiftly to the food. Four of us ate, and the bill came to £145 including a £30 bottle of wine. So, roughly appropriate gastropub prices for the Marches.

Starters included scallops on cauliflower purée, game terrine with spicy pear chutney, broccoli and Stilton soup. The scallops were fine, though for no good reason one of us had 2.5 scallops instead of 3 scallops. The terrine was good, very rustic with nice chutney. The soup was tasty enough but hardly elevated.

For the mains two of us had a trio of lamb (cutlet, breast, shepherd’s pie) and two had the trio of pork (belly, faggot and black pudding). The shepherd’s pie was okay but huge, the cutlet pretty good and the breast okay, the parmentier potatoes with it were squodgy and tired, and the gratin of beetroot and celeriac just didn’t work; the cream was very apparent and seemed split. I don’t think beetroot was made to gratin in this way. As for the piggy dish, the black pudding was tasty and probably home made while the faggot had a good strong herbal punk but needed gravy to prevent it desiccating your mouth. And was huge. The pork belly was fairly well cooked, but could have been a lot more unctuous and – criminally – the crackling was a waste of inedible chewiness. The mustard mash was fine, but there was lots of it. Especially with the side dish of (over) boiled veggies.

We finished with a massive lump of sticky toffee pudding in a lake of caramel sauce untempered by any bitter notes at all.

For the price, this wasn’t a terrible meal. But it wasn’t much good either. There were some basic mistakes in the cooking, and you can’t rectify that by giving us enough food to feed ourselves and the family of trolls we keep locked in the boot of the car. Only the smaller of the two dining rooms at The Bell was open this Saturday evening, which is perhaps telling.

I won’t trouble you with our failed attempts to recoup the weekend with a quality Sunday lunch. It didn’t work, we shouldn’t have tried for anything more ambitious than a pub roast without forethought and planning. In fact, Tim pronounced accurately that the best thing we ate all weekend was the homemade marshmallows that came with our (really good) hot chocolate at The Green Cafe, where we stopped after a leaf-kicking morning stroll along the Whitcliffe. Honestly, who makes homemade marshmallows just to offer them with a cup of hot chocolate? Our favourite cafe.

And needless to say, the weekend wasn’t really doomed. We always enjoy seeing our friends for a weekend even when the gourmandising doesn’t quite work out.