Restaurant Spy

Welwyn should not be confused with Welwyn Garden City, which is larger, not as pretty and does not have that many pubs in it. Welwyn is a very picturesque village just off the A1 and boasts several fine pubs. The A1 used to be known as the Great North Rd and coaches would thunder up it, stopping at coaching inns on the way to change horses and have a swift half. The White Hart is one of those magnificent coaching inns and is very well preserved. It has an interesting history and its upper rooms were once used, among other things, as a courthouse.

Go in and you enter a well appointed bar. Descend some stairs and you're in the stone-flagged restaurant, featuring a huge fireplace - this area giving way to a further carpeted section beyond. Tables are well spaced with proper linen and the walls are in cream and (I was told by my companion) 'damask pink'. The lighting is discreet, including rather fetching little oil-fired candles on the tables, and the whole atmosphere is very pleasant and calm.

After being served with an interesting choice of locally baked bread I started with a tomato soup which was excellent and she had baked pear with bacon, walnuts and stilton, which she said was a little heavy on the mayonnaise. I tried a bit and thought it fine and a good balance of flavours - but she's always a bit twitchy about mayonnaise. Other starters of note were duck and blood orange pate; chicken liver, black pudding and apple salad and smoked salmon, spinach and poached egg. Prices average at about £5.

For mains I was delighted to see that a pie was on offer. Even better, it was a game pie. It turned out to be first rate - their meat is supplied by local butchers - and very well constructed. The only black mark was that they follow the trend of putting some pastry on top of a filling and calling the result a pie. A proper pie has a bottom and sides as well as a top but as 99% of all restaurants ignore this you can't really hold it against them here. The accompanying veg was excellent and it was all well presented, my mashed potato sporting a sprig of herbs, making it look like a mini desert island with palm tree. Nice touch, I thought. She had plaice with anchovy and caper butter which she thought worked very well, and she is fussy about fish as well as mayonnaise. We could also have had rib eye steak with salad, calves' liver, belly of pork with cider cream sauce, chicken with bacon Caesar salad, oat crumbed salmon goujons, milk poached haddock, beer battered cod and black bream with vanilla infused cream - among others. Prices are around the £11 mark, though my pie was only £8.95. I thought that was a bit of a bargain. There are vegetarian options and side dishes as well.

Our wine was a Merlot which cost about £13. There is also a substantial bar snack menu including some amazing sounding sandwiches. You could do a lot worse than spend some time in Welwyn and eat here. It's the sort of place you could either bring your maiden aunt or a 'special date' too - and you don't see that very often.