A Plough’s lunch for a man?

A recent lab group trip took us to the Plough at Coton for lunch. A short trip out to this little village just outside Cambridge took us to the only pub in the village – now a swanky gastropub.

The bar is well stocked, in terms of wine and champagnes, and the beers are well-kept and varied. I personally drank both Tim Taylor’s Landlord and Greene King Abbot Ale. For a gastropub, the service was not up to the standard I expected: food was slow to come, and the staff were terse and unhelpful. A personal disappointment was that the sautéed samphire was off the menu when we went.

That said, the food was broadly acceptable – I had chicken stuffed with a sweet potato and garlic puree with parmentier potatoes, along with the world’s smallest portion of vegetables. Dessert for me was white chocolate panacotta, served with spiced rhubarb. Whilst the food was edible, criticisms abound: the parmentier potatoes weren’t – they were balls of potato in a light cream sauce; the panacotta was overwhelmed by the rhubarb sauce, and the three inch-long stems of rhubarb had the consistency of rubber.

Overall, I left disappointed: the food was not as good as it could’ve been, and the staff detracted from the atmosphere. Given the price, I was very glad I wasn’t paying.