The Wellington Arms

General information

London Evening Standard
Published: 24 April 2013
JONATHAN PRYNN, CONSUMER BUSINESS EDITOR

The Wellington Arms is so annoyingly close to perfection that there is a perverse pleasure to be had in picking away at its few flaws. Look up in the bar and you can sneer at the surviving Artex swirls. Hah! The lock on the bathroom door was a bit fiddly. Caught you there.

And was it really necessary to be so close to the cartoonishly sinister Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston down the road? All right, it’s a bit pathetic. The truth is the Wellington Arms is simply one of the, well, for want of a better word, nicest, country escapes in its price bracket that I have ever stayed in.

The building itself is a fine late 18th-century former hunting lodge on the edge of the Duke of Wellington’s Stratfield Saye estate on the border between Hampshire and Berkshire about an hour’s drive from London. Owners Jason King and Simon Page picked it up in 2005, boarded up after an unhappy spell as an unloved local, then called the New Inn.

Now, the first impressions are good even before you open the handsome Farrow & Ball painted (“Lichen” in case you are wondering) front door. The entrance is surrounded by a defensive line of solid lead planters bursting with hellebores and miniature greengage trees.

Inside the buzzy bar and restaurant the floral theme continues, but with real flowers, not chintz. Dreamily fragrant hyacinths adorn every table, with lilies and tulips on the bar.

The night’s restaurant offerings are chalked on a board and there are no table menus. The theme is seasonal, British and local where possible. My wife Sonia — usually an enthusiastic carnivore — uncharacteristically went for a vegetarian cheese-themed double. She started with twice-baked Marksbury cheddar soufflé, judged to be slightly underpowered in the cheese department. A potato gnocchi main pan-fried with garlic, caramelised butternut, sage, walnuts and parmesan was a different story, with plenty of ooomph.

My cod was superb, as creamy as a Mr Whippy cone and as fresh as you can ever hope for this far inland. The restaurant is laden with charming details. Bread comes in a silver basket on a linen napkin and salt in tiny glass bowls with silver spoons.

There are just two rooms, “New” and the slightly smaller “Old” created from an old 17th-century hay store behind the main building in 2011. We stayed in New, in an Emperor bed so vast my wife and I were almost communicating by email.

Everything was a cut above the ordinary. The light fittings are classic British-made Original BTC and the coffee maker a Krups Nespresso machine. Homemade shortbread is left in a kilner jar and there is a Conran iPod dock. It is all effortlessly tasteful, even if the tea bag range — revive, harmony, calm and so on — perhaps slips the wrong side of twee.

There are no clumsy mugs just delicate vintage bone china cups.

The “designer” theme continues in the bathroom with classic ceramic and chrome Lefroy Brooks taps and impressive Grohe shower fittings. A ladder leads up to a library area in the old hayloft, which was not quite finished when we visited in March.

Despite all the interior class with Osborne & Little fabrics, it is the extensive gardens that are perhaps the crowning glory of the “Welly” as locals call it. Even after the roughest of winters they were immaculate. There is something of a “Good Life” theme with chickens, pigs, sheep and hives all providing produce.

The pub sign bears the coat of arms of the Dukes of Wellington, which caused a rare awkward moment when the current duke came for a dinner one night. Noticing the crest he asked Simon, a former music teacher, whether he had his permission to display the dynastic heraldry. “No, but perhaps this is as good a moment as any to ask, your grace,” was the quick-thinking reply. After a brief pause the Duke indicated his approval. Perhaps if the food had been less sublime it would have been a different story.
**End

An extract form The Gastropub Cookbook - Another Helping by Diana Henry. Published in Great Britain by Mitchell Beazley in 2008.

You get a real thrill walking into Baughurst’s Wellington Arms. It’s tiny – only twelve tables – and the busyness and passion emanating from the kitchen hits you immediately.

Owners Simon Page, who does front-of-house, and
Jason King, who cooks, are like a couple of kids who’ve found themselves running their own sweet shop.

They love what they do and their enthusiasm is infectious. They’re not amateurs, though – far from it. Jason is an Aussie who worked in the best places in Melbourne before meeting Simon in Hong Kong.

They decided to relocate here to Britain and ran a catering company before taking on the pub in 2005 on the sort of mad whim that marks some of the best dining pubs and makes them so truly individual. Opening a restaurant didn’t appeal. “We couldn’t have afforded it,” says Jason. “We had enough to buy a short lease from the brewery and that was all. But I didn’t want a restaurant anyway. That smacks of a glass-fronted box on a high street. We wanted a place where you could come in your wellingtons if you felt like it, where we could create the kind of space we wanted and cook the kind of food we liked without any rules.

The pub is so small and such a personal kind of place that we do sometimes feel as if we’ve opened up our living room to people,” he says with a grin. The table and chairs – all Edwardian and as carefully sourced as the food – make you feel as if you’re at your granny’s, except that granny never paid this much attention to detail: twinkling tealights of amber glass (lit even during the day in the colder months), linen blinds, perfect pats of butter and neat salt and pepper holders. As you read the blackboard menu you are cocooned in homeliness: jars of honey from the pub’s own bees, homemade jams and chutneys and teapots with cosies knitted by Simon’s mum line the bar, and there are boxes of eggs from their own chickens on the counter, all for sale.

The food is a mixture of British fare (despite being from Australia, Jason is a stickler for running an English venture and using local produce) with a few splashes of exotic colour and some original spins on better known dishes. You might find the potted local trout with homemade pickle and toast soldiers, venison and field mushrooms in red wine with rosemary dumplings, free-range pork with crabapple jelly, Moroccan chicken stew and candied quince and almond tart. Rural, homegrown and local is written all over it. This is honest food, beautifully executed.With their own chickens, bees, pigs, fruit trees and vegetables out at the back, Jason and Simon care doing what many people dream about but never pursue. Thank goodness they’re allowing us into their living room.