Back in the Babington Triangle: Roth Bar & Grill reviewed

The Roth Bar & Grill exists on an art-farm called Durslade in Bruton, Somerset, which is also the country outpost of the Hauser & Wirth gallery, which is the silliest art gallery in Britain. It specialises in decapitated gnomes. It is only 13 miles from Babington House, Soho House’s monstrous country house with its playrooms for adults and giant fish-finger sandwiches. This is a world of electric Agas, black Range Rovers and pink wellington boots; and it is, almost by itself, the reason why country dwellers despise town dwellers. If people live in homage to what they read in Sunday newspaper supplements, they deserve to be despised.

When I visited it three years ago, it was both abuzz and the silliest restaurant I had ever seen. It was sillier than the Leaky Cauldron in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando Resort, Florida, in which the diner is invited to be a tiny wizard who, after an English breakfast, will battle both a larger wizard and the contents of its own stomach. This comparison is not ludicrous, although I liked the Leaky Cauldron better, and not because it was accessible by roller-coaster: both restaurants have the same crazed devotion to their theme. In Florida, you pretend to be a wizard. In Somerset — slumbering, soporific Somerset — you pretend to be a farmer who is very interested in conceptual art. They are equally mad.

The food was fine, but I could not forgive the collision of modern art and spurious rustic-themed idiocy. I hated the piggery that played a recording of animals, the monumental squashed egg in the garden, and the fact it called itself ‘a working farm’. I hated the customers, who were city children insulting their rural parents by showing them what evil they could summon given money and unlimited (though surely unacknowledged) snobbery and spite.