Given that we’re going to be leaving the Welsh Marches soon, it felt like time to return to that most historic and significant of pubs,
The Stagg at Titley. You’ll know it of course. You don’t? Call yourself a foodie? The Stagg is of course the very first pub in the entire world to have been awarded a Michelin star. In that sense, in this country at least, it stands as the first spot where the venerable Michelin guide stepped down from its pedestal of starched white linen, fifty page wine menus and waiters folding your napkin for you when you pop to the loo.
For my money, even twelve years later, the Stagg is still doing it right. The front room remains unashamedly a bar, where locals eye up arriving diners over the rim of their beer glasses. The two dining rooms at the back are handsomely decorated and furnished with no attempt to strew the place with rural knick-nacks or photos of pheasants and fox hounds. Yeah, this is where the local squire comes for dinner, no doubt.
Starters are very good. Pig’s head for sir and sweetbreads for milady. The pig’s head is breadcrumbed, and is a chewy, fibrous, porky delight. Served with a little pickled radish on top of a nice sauce gribiche. This comes in a tiny wee flowerpot with edible soil around the radish. Hey, we are deep in the provinces here, “on trend” is bound to be a year or two off the London pace. Maureen’s sweetbreads are excellent, quite rare in the middle, with a liver and walnut coating. It’s a gutsy mouthful, literally.
I can’t resist my first bit of grouse of the season. I get breast and leg, proper tasty, a good little bread sauce with bags of flavour, parsnips and a scrunchy game chip in “giant Hula Hoop” form. Autumn is here! Maureen’s fillet steak isn’t the most melting ever, though it’s nay bad. With a light shallot jus and some good chips on the side. The dish is saved by a smoked and roasted hunk of bone marrow, which does for the fillet steak what Johnny Depp did for Pirates of the Caribbean.
We finish with puddings. Yes indeedy, for all it has a star the Stagg is a pub and so you don’t have dessert, you most definitely have pudding. Maureen’s bread and butter pud is the proper job, with crunchy caramelised top and gooey beneath. My “Autumn Eton Mess” is a great concoction of plums and figs, hazelnuts, meringue and lots of fresh whipped cream. I’m sure the fruit has been introduced to some booze somewhere.
I grant you we picked the premium mains, but in essence it’s about £34 for three courses before drinks. That’s very high for a pub, but about fair for the quality. The wine list is utterly reasonable as you’d hope in a pub, plenty of bottles under £20 and some really good stuff. Boy, if The Stagg were fifteen minutes closer to Ludlow I’d eat here a lot!
