Review: The Horse Guards, Petworth

The perils of building a pub lunch into a proper walk in the country. By “proper” I mean a 16km hike, not a hour’s stroll. And the perils are clear: not eating enough beforehand (worried about not having an appetite) and so getting starving hungry on the walk, making the last hill before the pub into something of a terrible mountain. And then eating so much at the pub that the second half of the hike is a tightrope walk along the edge of indigestion! It’s all too easy to eat too much when the food is as good as The Horse Guards, though we were at least smart enough to stick with one glass of wine. Also a trial, though, as their wine and drinks list is deeply enticing for a simple country pub.

The Horse Guards is in Tillington, a pretty little village a short walk from Petworth. It hides itself fairly well, showing nothing much from the outside if you miss the sign up high, while inside it is small, friendly and cosily inviting. There’s local eggs and medlar jelly for sale on the bar. The menu is very seasonal and focused on properly local produce, but also nicely exploratory and inventive. For instance…

I started with chickpea panisse, wild garlic pesto and local feta. The panisse were pretty perfect, silky as set custard inside and properly crispy outside. Went down very well with the pungent wild garlic and the salty spikes of cheese. Maureen’s started was pork haslet with mustard, pickled mushrooms and veg. The haslet had a strong meaty, almost gamey, flavour and was a joy to munch on toast with pickles.

Maureen’s main was confit Jerusalem artichoke, sitting like glistening brown… erm… help, simile failure! Abort! Abort! Anyway, they were sitting very handsomely in a lake of Beauvale Blue cheese fondue, along with vivid green broccoli stems. Pumpkin seeds added crunch, wild garlic a lovely allium hum. The artichokes were full of nutty flavours and ate beautifully. My dish was a carpaccio of pink roast beef from Goodwood, with new potatoes glazed in miso and a generous wallop of bitter red roast raddichio. The sweet jus and herb oil cut the bitterness off the veg and amped up the flavourful beef. Loved every mouthful. An aside: we ordered a side of fries, having arrived starving, but they were totally unnecessary (and yet very good and very easy to eat!).

Had to try a pudding, even though it already felt like the rest of the hike might be a bit of a puff. This was a nice slice of rich St Emilion au Chocolat – a dense and fudgy chocolate tart – with a generous dollop of whipped and sweetened cream cheese on top, lots of luscious preserved cherries and a scatter of bright blue borage flowers. These gave an intriguingly oyster-y note (intentionally?) worked really well off the chocolate and cream.

The Horse Guards instantly becomes one of my favourite country pubs for dining, the menu much brighter and less predictable than a lot of the Cotswold gastropubs I’m very familiar with. You’d pay around £45 for three courses before drinks, which is fair for the sheer quality. I can’t wait to find an excuse to return, which is a very good sign.