Restaurant Review Royal Oak Inn, Chichester.

Finding an "inn" that looks, feels and smells like an inn – a small hotel offering ale, food and accommodation for the weary traveller and his knackered horse, on their way to the Lammas-Day fayre – is a pleasure to the soul. Somewhere that's more than a pub but hasn't turned completely into a restaurant, that has foodie ambitions but hasn't strayed too far from the pub favourites that used to bring in the locals, groaning with anticipation, on Friday nights.

The Royal Oak in Lavant is a paradigm of the species. It's 200 years old, and was dishing out tankards of mead before the battle of Waterloo. A sturdy building that combines the old inn, a converted barn and a flint cottage, it's all stripped-down simplicity: exposed brickwork, original beams, knapped-flint walls, acid-bathed tables, leather armchairs, cheerful log fire in the cast-iron grate. It's all very elegantly production-designed, like a country wench from a Henry Fielding novel who's been blow-dried and maquillaged and squeezed into a nice new Alice Temperley frock.

Visitors to nearby Goodwood Racetrack and its petrolhead associate, the annual Festival of Speed, book weeks in advance for the Oak's characterful cooking. You can see why from the menu. Fancy a pan-roasted breast of wood pigeon with individual apple tarte tatin, celeriac and truffle purée, lardons and a red-wine dressing? And that's a starter. Or crab done three ways, or pork offered "head to toe" (it's just confit belly and shoulder galette, in fact, rather than ears and trotters), or monkfish wrapped in seaweed and Parma ham with a fennel and saffron risotto? A lot of thought and experiment, and some eccentricity (seaweed and ham?) had gone into constructing these dishes.

Sophie had the special starter, beetroot tarte tatin with goat's cheese in a hazelnut sauce. The beetroot wasn't purple, but gold in colour. Neither of us had tasted golden beets before; they were subtle, or do I mean underwhelming, in flavour and curiously sweet, and benefited from the goatish accompaniment. Julian's leek and potato soup was given an intrusive wallop of truffle. Angie was in raptures about her three-way Selsey crab: a crunchy crab cake tickled by horseradish mayonnaise, a mousse of brown crabmeat on a slice of fried bread and finally a mouth-filling glass of white crab mixed with basil and surmounted by vermouth foam.

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