Bourton On The Water

Recently when our friends Gerard, Janine and Matthew were out visiting from Australia, we took a trip across to the Cotswolds, which is one of the nicest parts of England. We met them in Stow-on-the-Wold and then drove to Bourton-on-the-Water to have some lunch. It was a nice day, but extremely cold.

One of the unfortunate things about the UK is that a lot of the pubs are actually owned by the beer breweries… not that uncommon I know, but in true brewery style, every pub they purchase is converted to look like an ‘Authentic English Pub’, complete with low wooden beams (often just façades on plaster board) and pictures of past times and memorabilia screwed onto every square inch of wall, and sometimes ceilings also… if the low beams allow enough head room of course.

Don’t get me wrong, in the main most of these pubs are quite nice to go to for drinking and eating and most have an excellent spread of food available. The people and staff are good value also. The problem is that because the food is usually formula fayre, i.e. you can go to any of say, the Greene King pubs and get exactly the same type of food and quality, it is this formula that means that the food is usually the equivalent of a McDonald’s meal in the processing stakes.

At the pub we went to in Bourton-on-the-Water, it was just this type of food. I went for Sausages in Onion Sauce on ‘Creamy’ Mash Potatoes. (usually quite a nice dish) The mash potatoes were a huge lump of re-hydrated white slop that quite frankly could have been used for filling holes in concrete. The sausages as I had expected were full of the sort of rubbish you would expect in dog meat (although quite tasty, the sausages not the dog meat… and by dog meat I don’t actually mean dog meat, but meat used to feed dogs).

The only saving grace of the food was that they made damn good chips.