Gastropubs: waving the flag of excellence

You hear an awful lot of nonsense about gastropubs. Some folk seem to want to expel them from the broader pub community for all manner of imagined infringements.

You know the sort of thing: the food is too expensive to qualify as pub food; there's not enough room at the bar for drinkers; you have to book a table; the wine list is too large; the snacks behind the bar are too posh.

It amounts to a kind of inverted snobbery, a wistful but regressive desire to preserve a very traditional kind of pub in aspic. When people dismiss the gastropub they're setting their face against change in a wholly positive direction. The rise of the gastropub is all about the evolution of the pub to meet the needs of the modern consumer. Bombarded by cookery shows on TV and enjoying ever-better quality restaurant food, large numbers of our customers are expecting pubs to keep up.

Offering top-quality food in pubs is playing to our strengths because most customers prefer to dine in an unfussy and unstarchy environment. Nothing short of ripping down a particular pub and building a PizzaExpress in its place will change what is a fundamentally pubbish environment.

The growing band of gastropubs represent a golden seam of excellence, a burgeoning carpet of flowers prospering in the fertile ground of increasing demand for a high-quality, pub-based dining experience. (In many remote pubs, a focus on good-quality food is the commercial bedrock of survival — it's the reason why many more villages retain their pub than might otherwise be the case.)

Eating out is a fast-moving sector, but countless pubs are punching above their weight by offering better quality and better value than the restaurant competition.

On Monday, the Morning Advertiser held a lunch at the Olde Bell in Hurley, Berkshire, for our top gastro-operators. We polled more than 700 industry experts to produce the Old Speckled Hen Top 50 Gastropubs list (see pages 41 to 72 for the full list).

The gastropubs on our list are flag-bearers for the wider industry, an advance guard of food excellence. And our list will, we think, provide another burst of positive publicity for the sector. In 10 short years, a small battalion of pubs have moved themselves up the food curve to garner Michelin stars and Bib Gourmands.

Many others offer food of a quality compelling enough to tempt punters out of their homes and into their cars. These pubs provide a training ground from which the industry will benefit as expertise ripples out. From them the next generation of young chefs and managers will spread out across the sector with their own pub sites.

It's called a virtuous circle and it's another area where doom and gloom are inappropriate. Not every pub is capable of mounting a commercially viable food offer, but this is a revolution far from played out.