Long Compton is in the Cotswolds, but to the east, where there are no boutique hotels or shops selling artisan candles to tourists. Banburyshire and its surrounds are actual countryside. Fields roll away in the manner Germans call Kulturlandschaft, meaning landscape shaped by centuries of human care. This is the sort of country that makes people write poetry about hedgerows and choral music about sheep: lovely to live in but, by long British tradition, a dismal place to dine out. Discovering a truly great restaurant in Long Compton – population 764 – feels like finding in rural Warwickshire one of those bucolic la France profonde dining experiences that seemed nostalgic fantasies even when M.F.K Fisher described them.
Yet this is where Oxheart, which seats 11 people across two small rooms and opens only on Friday and Saturday evenings, makes its unobtrusive but elegantly decorated home. There are nine courses with no choices, and the only time you can be seated is at 7 p.m. This is the kind of arrangement that would drive restaurateurs and business planners to therapy and despair. Mark Ramshaw, the proprietor, apparently never consulted any, which may explain why the place works. It’s also inspired me to eat here so many times I’ve lost count – but at my best guess my visits total around ten.
Ramshaw spent his week preparing for my last visit, which I know because he always spends his week preparing, each weekend’s food being his full-time work. He ate once at Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli – the restaurant that convinced the world dining could be performance art, and that the greatest part of performance was taste – and promptly quit his job in journalism to enrol in catering college. If I had the talent and ambition, eating at Oxheart would inspire me to do the same. As it is, and because the restaurant is so small that chatting to the chef is part of the meal, I have restricted myself to asking for tips on pickles.
Nodding to Mark’s northern heritage (northerners feel a duty to remind you where they’re from, although here he lets you sit down first), meals start with crisp bites of pease pudding. These have a serious fault, preaching that good food in Britain is simply a matter of returning to our roots. Their toppings of fig leaf oil and lardo – which we had the means to make, but never did – whisper the truth.
Cheese canelés arrive tangy and caramelised, tasting like someone figured out how to turn joy into finger food. Peas appear in a reconstructed pod that looks artificial but tastes more like peas than peas do. This is molecular gastronomy serving the higher cause of making you happy to be eating; edible magic tricks executed with benign and thoughtful precision.
The genius here is the calm mastery of making ingredients, presentation, techniques and the flow of the meal serve the pleasure of the diners. When the oysters arrive – poached sous vide and topped with fermented sea buckthorn and gooseberry dashi granita – they taste like the Platonic ideal an oyster might achieve had they been born with motivation. I say that as a confirmed lover of their raw mucoid slop, but I have witnessed these examples converting mollusc-haters who otherwise flinch at the texture of something you might have half-killed while scraping from a tidal rock.
If the food dazzles, it’s only by accident – it isn’t meant to dazzle, it’s meant to please
Vin jaune sauce – I’ve had it once with scallops, once with turbot – is here made with actual Jura vin jaune, an indulgence elsewhere long abandoned as economic insanity. ‘Cauli-flower’ was the vegetable turned into a pun-themed cheese-scented sculpture of itself, abundantly covered with shavings of truffle. At Christmas the turbot with lobster sauce, caviar and carrot was followed by a dish of pureed Jerusalem artichoke, onion soubise, coffee and black truffle. Sounding like a kitchen accident perpetrated by someone with expensive tastes and chaotic shelves, it was one of the finest things I have eaten.
Breathing space – for the chef – arrives as a mid-meal course of charcuterie and bread which, by itself, might justify relocating to Warwickshire. That gives Mark time for the meat course. Autumn yielded lamb loin with its slow-cooked shoulder and haggis, served with artichoke and an anchovy sauce. New year brought choucroute garnie with carlin pea miso broth and black pudding, which sounds like fusion cooking gone terribly wrong, but turned out to be fusion cooking gone magnificently right. In spring, milk-cured dairy-cow sirloin was barbecued in front of me with assured grace – making my own attempts with live flame reminiscent of SpaceX’s unpredictable explosions – then served with tongue and cheek pie, wild garlic and morels. At this point I should insert a minor quibble, for balance, and it is sadly true that one night the waiter – perhaps distracted by also being the chef, sommelier and plongeur – forgot my fork. One must be generous to real talent, and at the end of the meal I did not insist on the removal of quite all the service charge.
Cheese involves local varieties paired with unexpected but entirely logical companions: sheep’s milk Hidcote with parkin gingerbread, Rollright with malt loaf and prune armagnac, Yarlington oozing next to apple tarte tatin. If the food dazzles, it’s only by accident – it isn’t meant to dazzle, it’s meant to please.
The exceptions are the puddings, which are intended to do both. One – ‘The Beet’n Heart’ – appears around each Valentine’s Day like a romantic medical emergency. A heart (coronaries and aortic trunk all present) is presented on its own slab. The heart was once raspberries, the slab is white chocolate and chocolate mousse, and the whole creation is splattered scarlet with sweet beetroot blood. What looks like evidence from a fatal crime tastes like heaven with a sense of humour.
Another pudding, and thus far my favourite, is a giant strawberry of botanically perfect appearance, with an equally artful interior, on a bed of rice pudding and candied pumpkin seeds. Again, Mark’s rice pudding is not a reminder of how good British food always was; it’s a suggestion of how good it could have been if we’d had application, taste and ideally a mastery of gelling agents.
At £85 for nine courses of this calibre, accompanied by well-chosen and sometimes ludicrously well-priced wines (Gonon’s gloriously unmatched St Joseph is listed below its normal retail, which constitutes generosity or questionable business acumen), it isn’t clear what made Ramshaw disturb the arable of Warwickshire with his culinary Kulturlandschaft. As a business model, Oxheart is bemusing; as a restaurant it’s bewilderingly good. We should count our blessings and book our tables.
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