Review: The Mash Inn, Radnage

I had no idea the Chilterns were such proper countryside; only a stone’s throw from London but with proper twisting lanes, bosky woods, hilltop views and bucolic villages. In one of them, Bennett End, is the old red brick Mash Inn, a restaurant with rooms.

We stayed overnight in a garden room with dinner and breakfast in the morning. For £300 the room was very small and even if the soft furnishings are posh I’m going to take exception to a room with no hooks/rails to hang a towel on and no full-length mirror. They also hadn’t turned the heating on before we arrived, so we spent the first hour in our coats while it warmed up.

Okay, okay, you’re much more interested in the food!

They put up a really jolly good tasting menu, and the pub itself is a beautifully cared for old low-beamed place with nooks and crannies and a roaring fire. The most inspired dish was the main course, which came as a sort of Asian-fusion duck feast. Very beautiful roast duck as the centrepiece, with crispy duck skin crackers, exceptionally good sticky rice, powerful zingy kimchi and good relishes.

The rest of the courses included a lot of interesting elements, though I’m not completely sold on all of them. Definitely a think-y kinda meal. Example: we had generous chunks of lobster fried in tempura batter with a soy sauce to dip in. So that’s definitely a bold thing, to use an ingredient like lobster but serve it as humbly as the mixed tempura in your local Japanese. And it worked. But I think it rather elevated tempura more than it elevated lobster. Example: dim sum dumplings filled with chocolate and a caramel dipping sauce. I’d certainly never had this combo before… but I’m still not certain that the chocolate and caramel really loved the glutinous flour dumpling. Tiny crab cornets were exceptionally good, with lots of brown meat filling the cone.

Overall I’d have to say I’ve had more consistently excellent tasting menus than this for £110, so I’m certainly not going to say the Mash Inn is good value (ref: paragraph 2 on the Garden Room!). But it was an enjoyable feast in very lovely surroundings – both the pub and the countryside – so if money isn’t something you watch too closely, then I can recommend it.