A spot of good Coaching

The Angel Coaching Inn's young head chef, Paul Kinsey, is cooking with "impressive, precocious skill and confidence"

I packed my white linen trousers and my sky-blue linen shirt but stupidly no sweater. My jaunt out of town to celebrate bluebells in the springtime tra-la was unseasonably - but I suppose not unpredictably - chilly.

But the countryside looked at its absolute best. Fields, leaves and hedgerows were in their first flush of enthusiasm and we drank in the sight, knowing that John Prescott has renewed authority to concrete it over. That'll teach them in the sissy South.

The Angel Coaching Inn is a 16th-century building - with gates still in place for horses and carriages - which has been stripped back and revamped to provide two comfortable bars plus a restaurant and terrace. Persian carpets on a stone-flagged floor and burning logs in an open fire were a welcoming sight and scent.

Executive chef is Antony Worrall Thompson, who has imported the admirable notion of hanging Scottish Castle Brae and local Pentsworth Farm beef in a cool maturing room for 35 days to supply the fillet, popeseye and rib-eye steaks as well as burgers made with the trimmings. Paul Kinsey, the chef on the premises, is a local lad who is cooking with impressive, precocious skill and confidence.

Salmon, smoked and cured inhouse, is used for a version of salade Niçoise. Tempura scallops with a coleslaw made of Cornish crab dressed with sesame oil were a triumph and one of the dishes of the day, gratin of crab, this time from Devon, with poached eggs, was also much admired.

Ravioli stuffed with ricotta and broad beans, served with sautéed artichokes and a pea coulis, had rather thick pasta casings. Apparently the pasta machine had jammed on number five. You'll understand what this means if you have ever rolled pasta by hand through that metal contraption that squeezes it ever thinner.

Rib-eye steak - 10oz for £15.95 - was excellent and the hand-cut chips (I saw the peelings in the cool room) were the sort that come under the heading irresistible, no matter how dedicated you are to a low-carb diet.

Other main courses, such as rack of English lamb served with the confit shoulder turned into a moussaka, and grilled lemon sole with brown shrimp and caper butter sauce and Jersey Royals, put up a good - and, in the case of some of our party, a successful - fight against the temptation of ordering steak. Paul Kinsey's wife had made the delicious coffee pannacotta with coffee ice cream that we chose for dessert.

Upstairs are eight bedrooms giving off narrow, creaky corridors. They are satisfactorily furnished but don't come here to fret about the thread count of the sheets. You come to walk in the Wylye Valley - with a woolly jumper to hand.

The Angel Coaching Inn
High Street, Heytesbury, Wiltshire

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