Marco Pierre White's Yew Tree: when the cat's away the Monday chef will play

I don’t normally go in for celebrity chef–branded restaurants, particularly ones where the proprietor has more books + restaurants combined than he (sadly never she) has fingers on his hands. However, a month-in-the-planning treat visit to the Yew Tree (proprietor Marco Pierre White) with two fantastic girlfriends was full of promise.

• Monday night, so an outside chance of NOT getting the table by the bogs TICK.
  
• Rural location so free of leather banquettes and Orla Kiely ripoff wallpaper TICK.
  
• Livestock and watercress countryside so good local ingredients TICK.
  

And to be fair, we had a really brilliant evening, although maybe not because of Mr Pierre White’s personal oversight of the establishment. Talking of which I am resisting asking google “Is Marco Pierre White’s surname ‘White’ or ‘Pierre White’? Why couldn’t he choose a middle name that is OBVIOUSLY a first name or surname?

Anyway so to keep it brief, we had some pleasant dishes in a lovely surrounding, with service that really did make our evening. But if someone were to challenge us to summarise our dishes in four words each it would go something like this:

· Mussels starter: pledge of no seasoning.

· Chicory, brie, red onion tart starter: Jus Roll, savoury jam

· Pheasant egg something starter: fair cop, very nice

· Steak and chips: crunchy chips fried 7x!!

· Fish stew: remember avoid fish Mondays

· Roast saddle and confit shoulder of lamb: inappropriately fussy, yet tasty

· Sticky toffee pudding: yum diabetes on plate

· Chocolate Chip muffin with mint choc chip ice cream: baked last Thursday perhaps?

The big controversy was the chocolate chip muffin. Strategy meeting: how should we overcome our Britishness and point out that £7.50 for a petrol station Galaxy muffin that had been left to solidify in the bottom of the Yew Tree aga for four days was Inaccurate Pricing?

My technique (not employed that often but important to resist being ripped off) is to turn it around (in a friendly way) to the person serving the table, for example “we’ve had a great meal but wondered if the bread might be a bad batch, only because we found this mouse head in it, what do you think?” or in extreme low quality-to-price ratio “tell me honestly, between you and me, if you had a pet dog, what would be running through your head just before feeding him this meal?”.

And, bless, our very diplomatic muffin-disgustingness question was met with “shall I bring some pouring cream for the muffin?” which was an excellent reply because it shut us up good and proper.

We have since heard that MPW himself has never actually visited the Yew Tree since he stopped living in the lovely 17^th century house in which the restaurant is run. In fact, rumour tells that he never cooks except when on TV, which is a shame. If his brand promise is fantastic cooking with great fresh ingredients, he has let the franchise-runners put money (£45 a head with not much booze!) above this promise, which will surely catch up with you in the end? Never mind, there is always the pouring cream to cover it all up.