The New Inn

Good seasonal menu which is often changed. Friendly staff and a range of nice ales. Perfect for a Sunday roast or one of the hog roasts which happen ever now and then.

We had heard a lot about how good this pub is for food so decided to give it a go.
It is a largish pub in a very picturesque village, with a small brook-​side beer garden. It is said to be 13^th century and so it may be but a lot of what you can see appears to be more modern, ersatz antique rather than the genuine thing. The pub has some pretensions to being a gastropub in that there is a separate restaurant abutting the only bar and another room that is more bar-​like but still essentially a restaurant room.
When we were there the bar had been colonised by a group of elderly, well-​to-​do locals that made getting bar service a little difficult. There were three real ales on offer and my Doom Bar was especially well kept and eminently drinkable. Prices were on the high side of average.
The menu is not that extensive, roughly one choice of main meal for each type of meat and three vegetarian alternatives plus some lighter meals like ploughman’s platters. It is said to be made up almost exclusively of locally sourced food which may be the case, and is laudable, but you wouldn’t notice.
Two of us had starters which were okay but nothing special — dill mayonaisse served with my smoked fish seemed to be remarkably dillless, my daughter’s broccoli & stilton soup may have been homemade but was probably out of a carton — it looked and tasted no different to the Covent Garden Soup version she has at home.
My starter and my main course had side salads, identical in each case, which struck me as being a little unimaginative. My daughter and I had chips, which were more or less white and bog-​standard frozen. Other than these quibbles, everything was fine. Except for one thing, the price. While we did enjoy the meal it was no better or worse than we could have got elsewhere, without what amounted to a 50% mark up on average prices for pub food of similar quality elsewhere.