Until recently, a “mini-break” spent in a “hotel” was the answer to many of life’s woes: exhaustion, ennui, existential dismay. Nowadays, modern types favour the “restaurant with rooms” – the new buzz term for dinner with an overnight stay. Plain, snoozy, old, functional hotels, with an abundance of staff, room service, reception desk, trouser presses, tear-stained Gideon bibles and a terrine of wobbly breakfast buffet sausages, are over. They’re also massively expensive to run. “But I liked the congealed scrambled eggs, and housekeeping trying to clean my room,” you might say. Tough titty, the hospitality world replies.
The Pointer at Brill is one of these places: somewhere to eat, then rest your head. It’s a gorgeously restored country pub with a separate building over the road with four tasteful, country-chic, modern rooms in muted shades with exposed beams. The pub has a ye olde worlde butcher’s shop attached to it, selling its own bespoke charcuterie, and even a quaint delivery van outside. The Pointer is very much part of the future of British hospitality. One checks in by shouting one’s arrival across a crowded bar.
“This Pointer Farm charcuterie board,” I say as we begin dinner, pointing at the menu, “there are five meats on it, but could we possibly just order some of the longhorn beef cured in red wine and the venison salami?” The waiter blanches. “I mean,” I say rapidly, “obviously we’ll pay for those things. It’s just that we don’t want the other salami or the potted pork.” It’s not an enormous ask. We are the only overnight guests. We are eating at 8pm. We are their final table. I can hear the under-occupied chefs chatting. Our server disappears, anxiously. “No,” he says on his return, “you’ll need to buy the entire board, because it’s already portioned up.”
Ah, the tyranny of the rural pub chef. I have grown to know it so well. These men – always men – who have been told via rosettes and regional prizes that they are so brilliant and indispensable. Chef, in this case, cannot possibly plate up and flog some slices of their prized venison salami. I laugh, because sometimes that’s all you can do.
The rest of our order includes roast grouse for £38 and pan-fried hake for £24, which are punchy prices by Mayfair standards. We are seated in the main pub area, in the window overlooking the road. During my starter – two sardines, reportedly infused with elderflower, served with an invisible salsa – a massive lorry with an enormous excavator pulls up outside. “Thames Water seem to be digging a massive hole in the road,” I say. “How late can they possibly do that until? It’s already 9.30 now.”
As the banging and drilling begins, it feels clear that, at this restaurant with rooms, no one particularly is in charge of our stay. Confit salmon arrives with a pleasant, albeit sweet horseradish sorbet. The grouse is clearly an excellent piece of game, but is rather overdone. My hake, decently judged in its cooking, arrives on dry, unseasoned “fricasseé of potatoes”. An extra side of “farmhouse potatoes” turns out to be a bowl of apparently semi-raw new potatoes. To serve them in this state seems almost surreal. “These aren’t cooked,” I say, pointing at spuds so raw, you could dislodge an enemy’s wig with one. “Oh,” the server says before whisking them back to the chef. No further comment is made and they appear on the bill for £4.
Pudding is a deconstructed bakewell tart, which adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
After the restaurant, we retire to our room. It’s an unforgettable night. The earth moves for us, quite literally, until 5am. At daybreak, over breakfast and piped Alanis Morissette, I tackle the person setting out the pretty bircher muesli about the night-time chaos, but she claims no knowledge of the incident. She then presents me with a £245 bill for food and board, and by now I’m suspicious that I’m being filmed for a gotcha-style TV hidden camera prank set up by that cad Jay Rayner. It’s the only explanation. We pack up and hand back the room key, interrupting a staff meeting. The team were possibly puzzling over how to get the word out nationally about their charcuterie and exemplary customer service.
We drive to an actual hotel, have some sleep and order a caesar salad with chips on room service. I’ve never been so happy to see a Corby trouser press and UHT cartons in my life. It may feel sometimes that the British hotel scene is broken, but I’m not certain I like how we’re fixing it.
• The Pointer 27 Church Street, Brill, nr Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, 01844 238339. Open lunch and dinner Tues-Sun. About £42 a head à la carte; set weekday lunch £18 for two courses, £22.50 for three, all plus drinks and service.
Food 5/10
Atmosphere 2/10
Service 3/10
Grace’s Instafeed
• Grace Dent’s restaurant reviews appear in the award-winning food magazine Feast, along with recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi and more top cooks, with the Guardian every Saturday.
