Cut to the chase

If it's gloriously meaty dishes you're after, head for the Ginger Fox. Jay Rayner is on the scent
The Ginger Fox
A pleasing space in which to feed ... Photograph: Sophia Evans

Ben McKellar likes animal fats. If he were a cardiologist, this would be a cause for concern. As it happens, he's a chef, so we can put it in the column headed Very Good Things. A few years ago I ate at his Brighton restaurant, the Gingerman at Drakes hotel, where he served a plate of cold rare roast beef with 'duck fat fried toast' - four words that were born to snuggle up next to one another. Since then his West Sussex empire has expanded and now includes a thatched pub near Hassocks called the Ginger Fox - McKellar is a redhead, and damned proud of it. This time the menu word that caught my eye was dripping, as in 'dripping chips'.

  1. The Ginger Fox
  2. Albourne ,
  3. Hassocks, West Sussex
  4. 01273 857888
  1. Meal for two, including drinks and service, £90

My companions, two middle-aged brothers who make much of the fact that they still have all their own teeth, looked at this word and nodded their sombre approval. Simon and Robin run the Dos Hermanos food blog and eat out more than can ever be reasonable without being paid for it, and are hard to please. Frankly they should be grateful for any invitations, but if they don't like a place it can be a drag. It's not that I feel the need to agree with them; they are entirely capable of being pugnaciously wrong. But a disliked meal can send them off into an adolescent strop, full of shrugging and sighing, and that demands intervention by me.

There was to be no need for the naughty step today. During our meal, and over both a well-priced bottle of St Emilion and a half carafe of white Rioja (from an accessible list with lots of options), we would attempt to draw some universal truths from this experience about the state of dining in Britain today. Anybody listening into that conversation would doubtless have ended up muttering the words 'get' and 'a life', for we were unbounded in our enthusiasm. Here we were in a place we had never before visited, in a pub we had never before heard of, surrounded by happy, happy people eating food which wasn't just fine or OK for West Sussex but, by the terms it had set for itself, very good indeed. The price, about £45 a head all in, was fair, the service efficient and engaged, the beige and oatmeal painted beams and walls of the old pub a pleasing space in which to feed. Clearly things are on the up in the British restaurant world.

A dense, piggy ham and leek terrine came with a dish of its own ballsy piccalilli, which was the kind of thing to get middle-aged men like us excited. A Hornby train-set sized breast and leg of confit quail came with the sort of cauliflower purée that would encourage sane people to run their finger round the plate, not least because of the light slick of balsamic that saved the dish from becoming cloying. A tuna tartare had a bright vinaigrette, but also a slightly warm, muggy taste, as if it had sat on the pass a little too long.

Main courses were big, bold plates of things which had lead happy lives: lamb served pink with salsa verde; a fillet of pork with, alongside it, a caramelised cake of pig's head; a sirloin steak with those dripping chips. Though we had loved the words on the menu we had viewed the plates passing by with suspicion. They were Gwyneth Paltrow pale, as if not allowed to bathe long enough in the fat. Perhaps they overheard us, for the ones we received were the right shade of autumn and gave beneath the teeth with an audible crunch. As a side dish we ordered the cheapest main, a mince and onion pie at £9.50.

You could argue that this was completely unnecessary, though only if you can somehow argue that the rest of lunch was imperative. We were still enthusiastic men, and our enthusiasm was rewarded: beneath a puff-pastry crust was an irregular jumble of ground beef that had the texture of something that had been minced on site, and the robust flavour of something that had been long braised.

We finished with some of their own ice creams, an iced honeycomb parfait surrounded by lime-dressed slices of fresh fig and a chocolate mousse topped with caramelised banana. But mostly we finished with the kind of warm glow that comes from having expectations exceeded, appetites satisfied. We were told it would take 45 minutes for a cab to fetch us back to the station. So we ordered another drink, took a seat in the bar, and decided we were right where we wanted to be.

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