The Dog & Pickle

The Dog & Pickle is tucked away on Church Road in Moreton, a few miles outside Ongar, and the first thing you notice is that it does not behave like a village pub. Behind the flower wall and the neon sign the room is dark, warm and properly set for dinner, and the kitchen holds two AA Rosettes. The club drove out one Thursday evening in October and found a restaurant that is confident about what it is: a country dining room with pub manners and a fine-dining kitchen behind it.

The menu is broad for a country restaurant and the opening plates set the tone. Nocellara olives and homemade focaccia with whipped butter arrived first, followed by spiced nduja arancini with aged parmesan, and a hand-dived Scottish scallop served in its shell under a thermidor sauce and XO crust. For the main event the table took the beef Wellington — carved pink, with a proper pastry crust and a glossy jus — alongside a côte de bœuf aged in the restaurant’s own dry-ageing fridge and finished over charcoal. Sides of crispy potatoes with parmesan and chicken salt, nduja macaroni cheese and truffle and parmesan mash were, in truth, more than the table needed.

Service was warm, unhurried and genuinely informative about the menu, and the pricing — a proper country dining room rather than a cheap pub — felt fair for the amount of cooking involved. Where the evening lost a little ground was at the edges: a couple of plates arrived less hot than cooking this good deserves, and the room, comfortable as it is, does not quite match the ambition on the plate. Even so this is a very good restaurant by any measure, and a better one than its setting suggests. For a night out beyond the M25, it is worth the drive.