11 hours ago
Sculthorpe Mill review: ‘You could just charge people to stand here'
I am not a massive one for getting out of London to review restaurants, as you may have noticed. To be honest, as a restaurant critic, it just feels silly getting on a train to leave the place where all the restaurants are, to go to one of the places where they aren't. But I tell you what I am a massive one for getting out of London for: U12 cricket matches in which my son is playing.
I grew this boy specially, you see, and led him to the various wellsprings of cricketing beauty, to Lord's and the Oval, to my own back garden and to North London Cricket Club in Highgate, from the age of two or three onwards, and encouraged him to drink deeply, in order that he should grow into a leg spinner of great guile and cunning, so that I would have something to sit and watch with a pint in my old age, from the shade of a creaking oak tree.
Most of his cricket for school and club is played around north London, but he is also a regular for the London Schools Cricket Association under-12s, which plays against most of the counties within what is considered viable reach of London. When they played Northamptonshire a couple of Sundays ago, it was just about feasible to drive him there and back on the day. But last weekend they played Norfolk, right up by the coast, with a 10am meet time. That's two hours forty with a prevailing wind and no accidents. So the only option was to stay over the night before, ideally somewhere cute with a restaurant I could review, thereby clawing back some of the immense cost of doing my bit to safeguard the future of England's summer sport.
Sam and I have had good and bad luck in the past. He remembers very fondly the Artist Residence in Bristol where we stayed for the Gloucestershire match last year: beautiful room, huge bed, magnificent roll-top bath, epic cheeseburger, and his first uninterrupted eight-over spell the following morning (beating the bat repeatedly, for a creditable one for 22 during a brutal run chase). Less fondly a place called the Grim's Dyke Hotel, with its hot little room, creaking floorboards, janky service and evil 1970s Birds Eye-style beefburger. 'I'm never staying in a hotel with 'grim' in its name again, Dad. We should have known.'
But for the Norfolk game, I found a place right out of the wildest dreams of the city dweller. Or, rather, Esther did, thanks to a local friend. Because she had decided that she and Kitty might as well come with us. Not to the match, heaven forefend. But to Norfolk, to the gorgeous old pub with rooms, and then to Holkham Hall and Burnham Market and Blakeney Point to see the seals, while the menfolk did what menfolk do.
We picked up Sam from his school match on Saturday afternoon (in summer, he is never not playing cricket) and drove straight out from there, two and a half hours, no traffic dramas, and arrived in an Eden I had not anticipated.
Sculthorpe Mill comes upon you, gratifyingly, a few miles short of the heaving holiday zone of Cley and Wells and the Burnhams. You turn off the A148 down a narrow lane between seething hedgerows and after a few hundred yards hit the prettiest dead end you'll ever come across: a flint rubble and red-brick mill with a Norfolk pantile roof, which was built in 1757, turned into a pub in the 19th century and then taken over in 2021 by Siobhan and Caitriona Peyton, who reopened it this time last year after a redesign by Shaun Clarkson. (The sisters have got some previous, having opened the famous Atlantic Bar & Grill in London and a number of other places with their better known brother, Oliver.)
The easterly aspect at that point in the late afternoon was shady and cool, squeaky with history and flickering with bees. But out back a sunlit garden shone green as goblins and there was the sound of water lapping all around us. Inside, a handsome young lad called Joe checked us in from behind the low-beamed bar while pulling a punter's pint and then showed us to our rooms, which were high up in the mazy rafters. (I paid for these myself, don't worry; you'll only be billed for my supper, as usual.)
Room 1 had a huge double bed and sofa and could easily take a less fussy family of four, but we took room 4 as well: smaller bed, smaller everything, but cooler, and with a view down onto a lush lawn with the River Wensum running both sides of it, trimmed with willow, lined with picnic tables, children, people playing quoits …
'Drinks in the garden, now!' I cried, and down we went, and stayed for the next six hours. Barefoot with my toes in the grass, I drank delicious light, airy pints of Oaks amber bitter from the Barsham Brewery, with a sausage roll, Esther drank lager, the kids played Jenga and quoits and paddled and drank Sculthorpe's own 'Made at the Mill' lemonade, and our friends Adam and Gay from Cley (it doesn't rhyme, thank God, because Cley rhymes with 'eye'), who had pointed us towards this place, came to drink with us too.
Then we moved to a terrace with lovely iron furniture, orange tulips on marble-topped tables, honeysuckle climbing the pergola, and were served by eager young local girls and a super manager. We drank just a couple of glasses of light, dry Château Beaulieu rosé from Provence (a lot of cricket watching and driving to do the next day), with Marsh Pig coppa and curls of Norfolk Dapple, house pickles and truffled honey; salad of white Cromer crab, fresh bitter leaves from a local organic salad grower called Charlie, and little segments of grapefruit; and puffy warm flatbread with a reddish, cumin-scented hummus, shards of Granny Smith and walnuts.
There was a barbecue going on and the scent of local Dexter beefburgers charring on the fire was all around us, but they were not being served in the posh bit, where we were. There was a burger on the kids' menu, but that wasn't going to be big enough for Sam or Kitty, and when the manager said he could make it bigger for them, it's possible that was his way round bringing them the verboten barbecue burger, or maybe he just had a magic wand. But I'm so glad he did, for the burger was a historic one. 'The best I've ever had,' said Sam. For only the 700th time in his eight-year burger-eating career.
Can I pause here to remind you that we were sitting by a low stone wall, right by the roaring river, where it emerges from under the bar (where the mill wheel must have been) into verdant, flower-filled banks, looking across immaculate mature borders towards giant English deciduous trees, silhouetted by the sun going down over the 200-acre Sculthorpe Moor Nature Reserve of the Hawk and Owl Trust … I mean, you wouldn't have to serve such good food if you didn't want to. You could just charge people to stand here.
But it's more fun with a juicy pork rib eye and roasted peaches (sounds a bit suburban, a bit 1980s, but it works beautifully) with romesco and a sherry dressing; and a golden-edged fillet of halibut with a crisp potato confit, double-shelled broad beans and cherry tomatoes. And then a wonderfully rustic tarte tatin, perfectly made in what I'd call the 'Norfolk fashion' with chunky quarters of apple in deep, mouth-coating pastry rampant with burnt treacly flavours, not mimsy slices of fruit fanned out like a ladies knicker display, the way they do in France.
Sam and I shared the smaller, cooler room (if I sleep with Esther in a lovely place like this, I worry she'll come over all smoochy, so she goes in with Kitty), but before lights out he went to stand on the fire escape off the main corridor and look out across the nature reserve in the late dusk. 'It reminds me of Botswana,' he said. Which tells you not only how magically peaceful this place is, but that I might, just possibly, have spoilt my children.
Luckily, however, the Norfolk U12s served London Schools' arses to them on a plate the following day, so he came back to earth with a bump.
