THE GRANARY, Hay-on-Wye

A quarter of a century ago, when Mr Pernickety was more lissom and  less pernickety, and en route on foot from Chepstow to Montgomery, he stopped to eat in the Granary and was struck, even then, by its cosily retro, alternative air.     Reviewing it 25 years on, Mr P felt it had changed very little. There lingers an expectation of interesting ways of cooking lentils, and staff wearing Indian bedspread dresses, imbued with the aroma of patchouli oil and home-grown ganja. They don’t of course – not any more – but it’s still a popular, unsophisticated eating house whose ambience and furnishings – junk shop chairs, recycled pews, coton plastifié tablecloths, art nouveau stained glass – match the quiet murmur of earnest conversations about literature, yoga and sore feet, along with the comforting aroma of herby lasagne.

Mr P, having  joined a meandering queue and ordered food for himself, his lovely companion  and her young son, settled on a pew in a state of contented nostalgia.  When the food arrived, however, it demonstrated to him that over the passage of time either his own gastronomic standards had risen, or the quality of the Granary’s cuisine had fallen.  His Chicken Pie (£9.95) had been flumped onto the plate with a small tump of desiccated carrots, all swimming in a Doldrums sea of mushroom gravy, which only added to the sogginess of the pastry and stirred unsought memories of school luncheons. The LC found her Bangers & Mash disappointing. In these days of the Championship sausage, she thought, thosed offered by the Granary were very pedestrian, easily overwhelmed by the mash and gravy. Our young consultant (who is 6 and honest) said his Spaghetti Bolognaise was good – as good as his mother’s (but not, he added, as good as Mr P’s.) His drink, apple juice by PJs, he judged “quite nice” – inadequate praise in the view of Mr P, who drinks apple juice by the gallon in periods of abstention and is now a connoisseur.

Puddings, which Mr P has sampled in the past and not found wanting, include apple tart, carrot cake, coffee cake, big fat scones stuffed with cream, and an extravagant meringue pudding that looks like a matrimonial gown in a Big, Fat Gypsy Wedding – one for a future visit. For, despite its shortcomings, the Granary’s unchanged, traditional persona will always flavour its menu with a strong dash of nostalgia sauce… which Mr P cannot resist.

The Granary, Broad Street, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5DB

Tel: 01497 820790 Opens 9.00-5.00; holiday times: 9.00 – 9.00

Mister Pernickety usually writes about restaurants and other nose-bag providers, but from time to time he feels an overwhelming urge to share his views on non-food culture – Food for the Soul you might say (though not to be confused with Soul Food which is made of such things as black-eye beans, chillies and chitlins, and can present a serious gastric challenge.)

The production of Billy Bard’s Twelfth Night at Ludlow Castle this season is something not to be missed for it’s the most exciting and witty Shakespeare Show Mr P has ever had the good fortune to see. This could well be the directorial debut of a great new talent. Although Charlie Walker-Wise left RADA only six years ago, his impressively confident production is sophisticated, quick and fresh, and squeezes every drop of wit from the script.

Setting the play in Mallorca at the time of the Spanish Civil War somehow makes its rather dodgy plot less implausible to a 21^st Century audience than if it were in Tudor costume, and points up the consistency of man’s weaknesses.

Mr W-W’s casting has been inspired. Mr P and his companion could spot no weak link, no bad apple, no surreptitious under-achiever amongst the company. As in many of Will’s comedies, there is a gender bender agenda (which must have been especially confusing in the Globe of the old days when young chaps yet without Adam’s Apple played the female roles.) In this case, cross-dressing confusion is provided by Viola, out to seek acquaintance with the Duke Orsino (Mr P won’t try to explain the whole convoluted plot; it might bring on a mal-de-tete among his less cerebral readers), who spends 95% of the action as a young man servant to the Duke, oozing confidence and smart-arsery, called Cesario. She/he has some of the finest poetry in the play and it is delivered with thrilling clarity by Catherine Bailey (a former child actor who appeared with the RSC at the age of 15, and has done her time in East Enders and Holby City.)

Another inspired decision of Mr W-W’s has been to turn the rich, drunken twit Sir Andrew Aguecheek into a P G Wodehouse silly ass, in whose mouth Shakespeare’s wit is surprisingly apropos. He is played with butter-coloured hair and dazzling comedic skill by Paul Trussell, paired with a faultless Sir Toby Belch (Patrick Brennan).

Kirsty Besterman’s deeply mourning and finicky Countess Olivia combines well her haughtiness and vulnerability, while her servant, Maria (Lucia McAnespie) has a lovely Irish wildness to her.

As always in this play, the casting of Malvolio is key, and John Challis (AKA Boycie) is a great coup. Malvolio, Olivia’s steward is pompous, hubristic and ultimately ridiculous when the victim of a cruel trick. Challis is an old hand, with the experience of a former RSC and National Theatre player and the natural perfect timing to deliver some of the funniest scenes Shakespeare wrote.

Mister P cannot urge you strongly enough to see this ephemeral production, even if it means a long journey. And he would recommend a good light dinner beforehand at the Green Cafe by Dinham Bridge.

Twelfth Night at the Ludlow Festival runs until Saturday July 9^th.

Mr Simon King has overcome the legal requirement to pay £500 p.a. Performing Rights fees for playing recorded music in the French Pantry in Ludlow’s Tower Street. All the music you’ll hear [and it is very much to Mr P's fastidious taste  in these things] has been  recorded by him, his wife Gemma (who has a beautiful voice) and a handful of musical cronies. Fortunately, as well as being le patron of the newly moved bistro, Mr King is a superb jazz guitarist. The coffee’s good too, and Mr P will shortly review the menu.

It’s a great honour for a little town like Ludlow to boast two eating establishments deemed by the Sunday Times to be among the best two dozen in the nation, La Becasse at 19th and Mr Underhill’s at 24th (though Mr Pernickety would be inclined to reverse those placings.)  However, it is something of a waste that this distinction at the top is not followed up in the middle ground. There is now only one enjoyable, quality restaurant that doesn’t charge uber-prices, the Green Cafe, and that’s  only open for lunch.

The Dinham Hall Hotel ought to be able to compete but somehow the deadness of the place, the ambience and layout seem to mitigate against it, but Mr P hasn’t reviewed it recently so will  hold back for the time being.

When Mr P is asked, he recommends the Unicorn, or, for those of a parsimonious dispostion, the Queen’s. It is sad, though that there is no good Italian restaurant in the town, no engaging French brasserie. Instead, in Castle Square the public are offered the George – a tawdry wreck of a once fine hostelry, now a lager and footer pit, and the Castle Lodge Buttery – a shameful stodge-and-fat-based face-stuffery aimed at innocent tourists.

The Town Council (is there another collective term for a gathering of clowns?) are inviting ideas on how to spend money to improve Ludlow. Mr Pernickety strongly urges the establishment of a nice, robust boozer or two in the Sandpits area of town, so that those who want lager and footer don’t have to clog up some of the handsomest buildings in the town; and a campaign against the greedy louts that run the despicable PubCos that have such a stranglehold on the town’s hostelries, thereby damaging its reputation as a civlised desitnation. And the council could do something to discourage the presence of  horrible, tatty gift shops, like the one where Threshers used to be, that are an affront to people of good taste.

Mr Pernickety has yet to make a serious foray into reviewing the plethora of eating houses that line the streets of London Town, although he is required from time to time slip his head into one or other of the capital’s finer nose-bags. Last Sunday, for example, he enjoyed lunch in the dining-room at that last bastion of metropolitan Bohemia, the Chelsea Arts Club. Unfortunately, although an exciting new chef wields the skillet in the kitchen there and it was a fine meal, there is little point in Mr P reviewing what is, in effect, a restricted establishment, but if you’re lucky enough to be a member, you will enjoy it.
He was reminded on Tuesday evening of a more publicly accessible London eating house in the gloomy canyon of Battersea High Street – an exotic, faux Pay d’Oc brasserie, the Quecumbar.

The Quecumbar is an absolutely enjoyable place for aficionados of the sound of Le Hot Club (say: ‘ott clube) de France and Gypsy Jazz. For aficionados of cuisine occitane or, indeed, any other kind of cuisine, it is less obviously attractive. For a place that owes so much of its appearance and douce ambiance to the gypsy lands of Southern France, the food served there is quite distressingly awful.
Sited not far from those tidal reaches of the Thames, where low tides reveal acres of slimy, dirty green sludge, one could easily imagine core elements of some of their dishes had been found floundering as they expired of natural causes on those muddy margins. In two dinners eaten there, Mr P can aver that not a single dish would have been allowed to survive in the Pernickety household, whatever French names may have embellished it.

However, it is not for the cuisine that one visits the Quecumbar – it is for the music. This is a shrine to the genius of the late, digitally disadvantaged Django Reinhardt, his gypsy band and his fiddler supreme, Stephane Grappelli.
Members of the Django community from across the country and several seas make a point of dropping in to listen and, very often, to play (those in the know having eaten first.)
On Tuesday nights in particular there is a free for all jam session, when as many as fifteen ersatz Djangos can be on stage at one time, all strumming away with the vigour and intensity of a troop of masturbating monkeys. All play the special style of guitar favoured by the great gypsy, with the petite bouche, a cutaway on a slim acoustic body and a brass heel anchored to the base of the guitar to take the extra-taut stringing that gives the distinctive, ringing Django sound.
Some skilfully pick the unmistakable melodies – Nouages, Douce Ambiance – others strum the subtle chord changes. And occasionally, in a ratio of c.1 Stephane:17 Djangos, a violinist appears. That’s a tough call; Mr P is pretty picky about Grappelli imitators.

Which brings this rambling non-review back to last Tuesday and one of the Marches’ more charmingly bizarre musical venues.
At The Hatch near Tenbury, musician Ben Salmon (who also runs a studio there) puts on small gigs for lesser-known but always quite special performers in what is more or less the living room of his house, with overflow seating in the kitchen.
This week, an American Blue Grass 5-piece, Amy Gallatin and Stillwater were described as being from Alabama. This sounded authentic to Mr P, who likes authenticity – gastronomic or musical, and (more importantly) they were being supported by regional Djangoistes, the Remi Harris Trio and (this was new) virtuoso violinist, Ben Holder, of whom Mr P had never heard. A new Grappelli to inspect, so close to Ludlow, was worth a journey, so it was with some excitement that Mr P and the Lovely Companion headed east along the Teme Valley.
Mr P had previously heard Remi’s skilled mastery (with his advantage of a full complement of digits) of great Django arpeggios and plaintiff gypsy tremolo and had formed the view that this Herefordshire native could outplay any of the Quecumbar mob, any day of the week – in itself enough reason to roll out the guzzling rust-bucket.
On Tuesday evening, the audience (a very full house) didn’t hear as much of Remi as they might have liked, but they were treated to a magical performance by fiddler Ben Holder.
Ben is a classically trained violinist still in his early 20s who performs with the engaging charm of an Andrex puppy doing tricks. The dexterity and fluid sensitivity with which he plays his instrument are wonderful. The sweetness of tone and passion he extracted from for the Django classics and jazz greats were astonishing and truly exciting, even to a hoary-headed critic like Mr P.
In All the Things You Are, delivered as a tender bossa nova, an improvisation between fiddle and bass (Tom Moor) took a wander as if around the outer reaches of The Hatch’s bucolic purlieus, which was quite mesmerising, before returning to the melody. Ben Salmon, host and impresario for the night and a regular player with Remi, also provided a solid ’ott clube rhythm on his petite bouche. 

Mr P who’d had a great evening (and it was the LC’s birthday) left with only one cavil – that fiddler Ben was so high on his own performance he couldn’t come down enough to let his colleagues in on the act and, merited though it may have been by the sheer quality and exuberance of his playing, the set shouldn’t have become a Ben Holder Does Grappelli show.
If he were a puppy, he would need one of those lead harnesses that one sees on cheerful young Staffies, with straps across the torso and both sides of the front legs, so he could be curbed without being choked. But Mr P can’t wait to hear him and the Remi Harris Trio playing again – with a little more Remi next time, please?

On a gastro note, the lemon drizzle cake served up at The Hatch at half time was delicious.

Mr Pernickety is very chuffed to be able to use this blog thingy. He will try to keep his followers up-to-date with news of changes that have been made in establishments already reviewed – most especially those to which he has given a roasting, which have subsequently changed hands and improved. It is, after all, Mr P’s clear intent that his reviews should be the constant driver of improvement in the nation’s eating houses.

First up, then, is the Rose & Crown in Church Lane, Ludlow. 

Last time, Mr P described it thus….

“At least the essential fabric of this small, fascinating 14th century building and the potentially picturesque courtyard which it encompasses haven’t been too damaged, but it houses one of the most miserable, stale-fat-smelling, under-achieving boozers it has been Mr P’s misfortune to enter. The Pub-Co that owns it would surely do a service to themselves and the town by selling the freehold to a sympathetic, tasteful operator, so that this potential gem of a pub could enjoy a fulfilling existence.”

 Well, they haven’t sold the pub, but they obviously took on board Mr Pernickety’s comments when the former tenants chucked in their beer-sodden sponge. A new lease has been granted to Paul Kemp, a landlord who already has good relations with the Pub-Co, having operated their Bridge Inn in Ludlow for some years. There he runs a simple, genuine sort of a boozer which Mr P enjoys visiting from time to time to for the foot-tapping, hip-waggling performances of his favourite Rustic Rockers, the Sultana Brothers. (Oh yes, Mr P likes his rock’n’roll too.) Mr Kemp is also to be applauded as an active campaigner against unruly  drunks in the town’s pubs.

 Mr P hasn’t visited the Rose & Crown since the change, but it seems very likely the new landlord will do much to improve what was a terrible waste of lovely old pub. Mr P should be glad to hear the views of those who have visited the reopened R&C.