Great wight way
The screeching mina bird has gone, but the creaky, four-abreast staircase is still there. Twenty years ago Yarmouth's George Hotel used to let the sailing crowd use a spartan bathroom for 10 shillings per head. Now they sit at crisp linen-covered tables in the restaurant, dining on pan-fried fillet of turbot with a tarragon cappuccino. "One or two of them kicked up a fuss when I got rid of the bird," says proprietor Jeremy Willcock, "but it made such a racket, it had to go."
Willcock bought the George from receivers in May 1994 with co-owner John Illsley. But you won't find Illsley behind the front desk, he's a guitarist with Dire Straits. "He's a sleeping partner really," explains Willcock. "We did use his name in the PR bumph to get things going when we opened, but once we were up and running we didn't need to use it any more.
"When we took the hotel over, it was a wreck," Willcock remembers. "The roof was falling off and the top floor was condemned." He didn't think it would make a good investment solely as a pub - its principal sales until then had been liquor. So he and his wife Amy renovated the 17 bedrooms and built up a reputation for good food.
The location is unbeatable: one side fronts the well-preserved Georgian town square, the other faces out to sea with the white masts of Lymington Town Marina just visible in the distance. For £110 per room per night for a "superior" double, guests enjoy ocean views, stunning fabrics, a gun safe (for guests who shoot), an aromatherapy candle and a duck. The latter two items belong in the bathroom and, rather unfortunately, have a habit of checking out with the guests - but Willcock is generous about this.
Yarmouth is really a village - a genteel mix of townhouses and cottages inhabited by retired Home Counties folk who tend to their cruising yachts moored on the nearby River Yar. They make up a fair percentage of the George's eating and drinking customers too, and are quite used to menu terms such as "parfait" and "galantine". Many of the George's other customers take a two-hour drive down the M3 from London and a ferry two miles across the Solent, alighting a few steps away from the hotel's bay tree-flanked entrance.
Dining is divided. There is the smart-looking, but surprisingly relaxed, 25-seat restaurant with its heavy curtains, high-backed chairs, generously spaced tables and wood-panelled hush; and the 40-seat stripped pine brasserie, providing further seating in the summer months.
The set-up is culinary heaven for chef Kevin Mangeolles. In particular, he gets a buzz out of doing the fast service for the brasserie - something he couldn't do in his previous job. Mangeolles flew south from award-winning Grasmere restaurant Michael's Nook, where he had been cooking for six years, and from Halifax before that. Does he miss it? "You're joking, aren't you?"
"Seriously though, it's not important where I live, as long as I can cook what I want," he says. "Cooking revolves around the place you are at, what you can buy and what you feel." Mangeolles buys from Covent Garden and Smithfield markets three times a week: "It's only two hours and a ferry ride away."
Local suppliers include Phillips Fine Foods, just down the road, which smokes the George's popular haddock. Baked smoked haddock with hollandaise and poached egg (£8.75) is a permanent fixture on the brasserie menu because it's so well-liked. If you are staying over, it appears on the breakfast menu too, minus the hollandaise.
Mangeolles smokes his own salmon for one of his favourite dishes. A smoker, comprising a large baking tray filled with oak chips, sits on top of the stove. A filleted piece of salmon is buried inside the hot wood and left to cool for six hours. It's then sliced thinly, grilled for a minute-and-a-half and served on top of a ring of Ratte potatoes, with a blob of cräme fraîche and a large dollop of sevruga caviar.
The restaurant operates a set-price three-course menu, with plenty of choices, for £33.50. This includes nibbles with pre-dinner drinks "courtesy of the chef" and an amuse bouche - such as Mangeolles' version of Gordon Ramsay's famous white bean cappuccino made with locally-grown asparagus and "olive juice".
The food in the restaurant is constructed with great attention to detail on the plate: a thin sliver of tomato is dried to a delicate crisp in the oven overnight and sits on a cone-shaped tartare of crab wrapped in marinated salmon and served with a tomato and chive salad. The hazelnut chocolate ganache with crème fraîche and glazed bananas is a towering tribute, probably unconscious, to Jean-Christophe Novelli's crazed confections. Mangeolles has a kitchen brigade of nine in the summer months, five in the winter, and has just found his sous chef after some searching - Jason Boswell, formerly of Hintlesham Hall, Suffolk.
Nearest competitors are the Seaview Hotel in the eponymous village on the other side of the island. "Really, the menu is more in line with what is going on nationally," explains Mangeolles, "though getting pigs' trotters here is rather difficult," he laments. He can often be found dining at the latest London openings - his favourite at the moment is Maison Novelli.
He now has a middleman (The Fine Food Company, Wincanton, Somerset) to buy meat for him at Smithfield three times a week. "It does make it a little more expensive, but buying meat is a problem here."
The roast pigeon with ox tongue and celeriac is another favourite dish for Mangeolles. The celeriac is grated, not puréed, for added texture, sautéd in butter and finished with cream and a little French grain mustard. In the assembly, the celeriac sits on top of braised and pan-fried ox tongue.
On the celeriac goes the roasted, partly-boned wood pigeon, topped by a perfect round of more celeriac, deep-fried to a crisp. "It's a way of getting more texture," he says. The pigeon gravy is flavoured with balsamic vinegar. "A little bit of sharpness to cut through the richness," he says.
Fechoulette of lamb is a serious offal dish. Mangeolles got the idea from a dish he had eaten in France once, but this is a more refined version. The lamb neck is stuffed with trompette mushrooms, parsley and shallots, followed by braised lamb's liver and kidneys, sweetbreads and lamb tongue. These are all roasted off for serving, while the salsify is cooked à la grecque with garlic and coriander seeds. It is finished with a coating of truffle oil.
Mangeolles likes to stack his food. He admits that it is a nod towards the current trend for "big" food, "but sometimes it naturally progresses that way. I want the fechoulette to keep in the context of a stew. I want them to get a bit of everything on one fork.
"But most importantly, I believe in it. I love to eat that dish myself," he adds. "Every time I send one out I get a rush from it."
